Carney Hosts ‘pollutocrats’ in Toronto

By Yves Engler

As their private jets descend on Toronto to promote a billionairist agenda, will environmentalists confront Carney’s ecocidal CEO summit? In a highly offensive article headlined “The 24 hours that could change Canada’s economic trajectory”, the Globe and Mail reported on the “heavy hitters soon to land their private jets in Toronto.” Saturday’s Report on Business should have described them as “heavy emitters”. The CEOs and investment fund managers coming to Toronto in mid-September represent those disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and overconsumption. According to Oxfam, the richest 0.1% exhausted their annual carbon budget – the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming – only three days into the year. The group labelled it ‘Pollutocrat Day’.

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Hunger is All About Billionaire Greed

By Gary Porter

Growing food insecurity is a cruel paradox in a world that produces enough food for nearly 10 billion people. The world population today is only 8.3 billion people. This crisis is driven not by a lack of food, but by private ownership of the food business and the drive for private profit. Fidel Castro’s address to the 1996 FAO World Food Summit in Rome on November 16, 1996, was a brief but searing critique of global economic inequality. Castro famously lambasted the summit’s goal of halving hunger as “shameful,” arguing that humanity should instead be focused on entirely eradicating starvation. “Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is born of the unequal distribution of wealth and of the world’s injustices. The rich do not know hunger. Colonialism was not alien to the poverty and underdevelopment afflicting today a large segment of mankind.

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Starving the Health Care Beast

By Chris Wanamaker & Alex Gagne

Recently, I waited in the emergency room in a Saint John, NB hospital with a close friend, a 65 year old man who was experiencing severe hypertension (very high blood pressure) which elevates the risk of heart attack or stroke. We arrived late in the evening. Only one doctor was available. We settled in for a long night’s stay that turned out to be 14 hours. My companion finally was seen by a doctor late the next morning. The experience set me wondering how it is that our medical system can be so unresponsive, especially to emergencies. I looked into the issue some more over the next few days. I found that a lot of people in my city have had a similar experience. Some have waited much longer. Not only that, but over the past five years especially, news stories have documented instances of long wait times across Canada for people with serious medical issues, including sepsis, heart attack, stroke, severe acute pain, and suicide risk that have sometimes led to the patients’ deaths.

read more

Imperialism is Not Invincible

By Barry Weisleder

The height of USA hegemony was in the 1950s. Globally, the rulers called it Pax Americana. Its first defeat was the Cuban Revolution in 1959, followed by the repulsion of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The second defeat was in Vietnam in April 1975, ending a brutal 20-year war. The third defeat was in Afghanistan, 2001-2021. The fourth major defeat for Washington is unfolding now in Iran and associated sites: Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. The NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine is faltering. Each defeat was the result of a combination of effective armed resistance and mass popular anti-imperialist movements – on a global scale. Today, the Palestinian people are in the vanguard of the resistance to imperial hegemony. And the capacity of mass political action is again being demonstrated. The context is a profound social polarization and the terminal crisis of late capitalism.

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Dimitri Lascaris Speaks in Toronto Despite Zionist Threats

By Socialist Action Canada

A vile Zionist smear campaign against Montreal-based lawyer, activist and “Reason2Resist” You Tube host Dimitri Lascaris failed miserably to derail an anti-imperialist public forum in Toronto. The August 18 gathering, organized by Socialist Action, featured Lascaris speaking on the topic “The Imminent Decline and Fall of the American Empire”. Only two days before the event, the location was shifted to Taco Taco, a restaurant in the Kensington Market, just a few meters from the originally booked venue on College Street. This followed a barrage of menacing threats by Zio-Nazis to impose a suffocating Jewish community boycott on The Free Times Cafe. In the end, over 140 people, on-line and in-person, participated in the re-located socialist forum. Lascaris, who recently reported directly from war ravaged Lebanon and Iran, as well as from Cypress and Greece, gave a 40 minute presentation on the failing hegemony of the western imperial powers, and answered questions for close to an hour.

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“We are Not Going to Establish Predatory Capitalism”

By Miguel Díaz-Canel / Translation: Walter Lippmann

Sisters and brothers from all corners of the world who honor us with their presence today in this rebellious capital: It is an honor to have celebrated this meeting in the context of Fidel’s Centenary, who summons us with his indisputable legacy to face the enormous challenges and difficulties of this turbulent and threatening present that we have had to live through. Cuba, island of dignity and historical resistance against empire, today also against fascism, welcomes you with open hearts and thanks you for your courage and determination to get here, amidst so much pressure, blackmail and lies. At the previous meeting in Havana in October 2022, representatives of communist and workers’ parties from more than 60 countries, who gathered at that time, agreed to warn about the dangerous situation facing humanity.

read more

As their private jets descend on Toronto to promote a billionairist agenda, will environmentalists confront Carney’s ecocidal CEO summit? In a highly offensive article headlined “The 24 hours that could change Canada’s economic trajectory”, the Globe and Mail reported on the “heavy hitters soon to land their private jets in Toronto.” Saturday’s Report on Business should have described them as “heavy emitters”.

The CEOs and investment fund managers coming to Toronto in mid-September represent those disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and overconsumption. According to Oxfam, the richest 0.1% exhausted their annual carbon budget – the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while staying within 1.5 degrees of warming – only three days into the year. The group labelled it ‘Pollutocrat Day’. “Since 1990,” noted an October Oxfam report, “the richest 0.1% have increased their share of total emissions by 32%, whilst the poorest half of humanity have actually seen their share fall by 3%.” Oxfam concludes, “to stay within the limits of the 1.5°C threshold, the richest 0.1% would need to cut their per capita emissions by 99% by 2030.”

Billions across the globe are being endangered by the GHG emissions of a small few.

An even more significant reason for the eco aware to oppose ‘Davos downtown’ is that the capitalists attending are the ones propelling an economic system based on constant profit maximization and growth. Despite the 2020s being the hottest years in 100,000, they are pushing to extract more fossil fuels. It’s not just the climate crisis. The search for corporate profits is driving mass species extinction, soil depletion, ozone layer thinning, loss of arable land, freshwater depletion and other ecological crises.

Representatives of financial institutions managing over $100 trillion will be descending on Toronto in part because Carney has openly dismissed greenhouse gas reduction targets and pushed more pipelines. One of Carney’s first moves as prime minister was to eliminate the carbon tax while boasting about Canada being an energy “superpower”. In the federal budget Carney chopped in half the government’s commitment to plant 2 billion trees and reneged on a promise to subsidize electric vehicles. The Public Transit Fund and Greener Homes Grant also face further cuts.

At the same as he has slashed billions of dollars from tree planting, home retrofits, transit and Environment and Climate Change Canada’s budget, Carney has drastically increased war spending. Carney’s unnecessary, ecologically damaging, new submarines are expected to cost $100 billion over their lifecycle, which would cover Environment and Climate Change Canada’s budget for 58 years!

Most egregiously, Carney is fast tracking a million barrel a day tar sands pipeline to the BC coast. He’s set to put $40 billion in public funding into enabling further expanding the extraction of heavy emitting oil that should have been shut down decades ago.

In Saturday’s Globe and Mail the business reporter asks, “With such a large contingent of heavy hitters soon to land their private jets in Toronto, a quiet question has circulated around Ottawa and the Bay Street financial hub: Are we prepared for this moment?”

The same question should be asked of environmentalists. Are we ready to rage against Carney and the “heavy emitters” he’s bringing to downtown Toronto?

Growing food insecurity is a cruel paradox in a world that produces enough food for nearly 10 billion people. The world population today is only 8.3 billion people. This crisis is driven not by a lack of food, but by private ownership of the food business and the drive for private profit.

Fidel Castro’s address to the 1996 FAO World Food Summit in Rome on November 16, 1996, was a brief but searing critique of global economic inequality. Castro famously lambasted the summit’s goal of halving hunger as “shameful,” arguing that humanity should instead be focused on entirely eradicating starvation.

“Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is born of the unequal distribution of wealth and of the world’s injustices. The rich do not know hunger. Colonialism was not alien to the poverty and underdevelopment afflicting today a large segment of mankind. Neither is the offensive opulence and the squandering by the consumer societies of the former metropolises which have subjected to exploitation a large number of countries on Earth. Millions of people around the world have perished in struggle against hunger and injustice.”

Hunger exists on a spectrum, from chronic undernourishment to acute, life-threatening emergencies. An estimated 673 to 720 million people (about 8.2% of the global population) face some level of hunger. Around 266 million people across 47 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025, meaning they struggled to access enough food and needed urgent assistance.

The World Food Program estimates that partly as a result of the El Nino impact on crops, 318 million people could face acute hunger in 2026—double pre-pandemic levels. Behind these numbers are people in dire situations, with the crisis reaching unprecedented levels. Two famines were confirmed simultaneously for the first time this century—in Gaza and parts of Sudan. Over 1.6 million people in Gaza were acutely food insecure in early 2026. 1.4 million people across six countries faced “Catastrophe” —the most severe level, indicating starvation and death.

Just 10 countries—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, DRC, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—account for two-thirds of the global acutely hungry. All of these countries are part of the Global South. Nearly 300 million people on the African continent are food insecure with nearly 3.4 million on the brink of famine. Over 36 million people are struggling to meet basic food needs in West Africa and the Sahel.

What about Canada?

Canada does not face the famine conditions seen in some parts of the world, yet hunger and severe food insecurity are significant and growing crises. In 2025, 24.0% of people in Canada (roughly 9.8 million, including 2.4 million children) lived in food-insecure households. This is a slight decline from 25.7% in 2024 but remains near historic highs.

In March 2025 alone, there were close to 2.2 million visits to food banks—double the number from 2019. One-third (33%) of food bank clients are children, and nearly 1 in 5 (19.4%) clients are employed.

Food insecurity varies significantly by province (2026 data) – Nunavut (56.4%), Alberta (28.4%), New Brunswick (28.2%), Manitoba (27.9%), and Saskatchewan (26.7%). Food Banks Canada gave the country a D+ grade on poverty in 2026.

The Difference between Hunger and Starvation

In the Canadian context, starvation is rare but can occur, typically representing the most extreme end of severe food insecurity, where people miss meals, reduce intake, or go entire days without eating. While not tracked as a stand-alone cause of death, severe malnutrition can be a contributing factor.

The primary driver behind this crisis isn’t a lack of food, but affordability. Soaring housing costs and inflation have eroded purchasing power, forcing millions to choose between paying rent and buying groceries.

The Future Outlook on a Global Basis

The future is bleak without massive intervention. The UN projects that by 2030; nearly 512 million people will still face chronic hunger, with 60% of them in Africa. The world remains far off track from achieving the “Zero Hunger” Sustainable Development Goal. The scale is immense, but these numbers represent real people.

The long-term hunger crisis in Gaza is causing devastating, multi-generational damage that will impact Palestinian society for decades. This is not a natural disaster but a racist Zionist genocidal crisis driven by a sustained blockade that has systematically destroyed the food system. The effects extend far beyond immediate mortality, creating enduring biological, cognitive, and societal scars.

Long-Term Health Consequences

The impact on children is devastating, scarring a generation. Beyond visible starvation, a “hidden hunger” of micronutrient deficiencies affects billions, weakening health, stunting growth, and perpetuating poverty. Children suffering from malnutrition face stunted growth, impaired brain development, and lasting deficits in memory, language, and learning. Even those who recover are at a much greater risk of mortality and infections. Survivors face a higher lifetime risk of heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, and paradoxically, a greater risk of obesity.

Malnutrition creates a vicious cycle, weakening the immune system and making people far more susceptible to fatal infections like diarrhea and pneumonia. The trauma of starvation—including the humiliation, loss of dignity, and the shattering of social bonds—causes deep psychological wounds that can lead to psychiatric disorders and lasting distress.

The crisis affects pregnant and breastfeeding women, with nearly half severely malnourished. This can lead to low birth weight and set the stage for health problems in the next generation. Starvation can cause “epigenetic switches” that alter how genes are expressed, meaning the biological damage can be passed down to children yet unborn.

Destruction of Social Fabric: Extreme hunger forces people into desperate acts for survival, breaking down trust and community bonds.

Long-Term Economic Devastation: Widespread malnutrition permanently reduces the population’s physical growth and socio-economic potential, leading to a diminished workforce and a future public health crisis.

The Primary Causes of Hunger World Wide

Conflict & Instability are the greatest drivers of global hunger. Nearly 70% of people facing acute hunger live in conflict-affected countries. Violence destroys farmland, displaces people, and blocks aid. The violence is almost entirely the product of imperialist predations. This includes suppression of local resistance to capitalist exploitation of resources and workers, inter-imperialist rivalry conducted in colonial territories and internecine struggles in the colonial world caused by imperialist cynical divide and rule policies.

Climate Change is a growing threat that destroys crops and livelihoods through droughts, floods, and heat waves. Climate shocks have become more frequent and severe, undermining farmers’ ability to produce food.

Economic Shocks & Poverty are the root causes for many, making food unaffordable. High food prices, supply chain disruptions, and economic downturns severely limit purchasing power. 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Systemic & Policy Failures: Food systems often prioritize profit over people’s needs. Poor public policy, inequality, and a heavy reliance on food imports in some nations exacerbate vulnerability. Africa spends up to USD 100 billion annually on food imports. Countries that were self-sufficient are coerced by imperialism to concentrate land use on highly marketable cash crops for export and to import food for their own people. The profits from the cash crops are seized by the imperialists and the starvation wages paid to colonial workers does not allow them to pay the high prices of imported food. So they face hunger, even starvation.

Key Solutions

Strengthen Social Protection: Direct income support, food vouchers, and programs like school meals are highly effective. These measures help families afford food, addressing the root cause of “access” rather than just “availability”.

The single biggest necessity is to rip land, seeds, fertilizer and transportation away from the billionaire distortion of agricultural production to maximize profit, socialize them and put them under the management of the producers with a mandate to feed the world.

Transform Food Systems: Reorienting the entire food system to be sustainable, resilient, and inclusive. This includes public investing in sustainable farming, reducing food loss and waste, and diversifying crops.

Build Climate Resilience: Helping farmers adapt with climate-resilient crops and practices, such as agroecology. Projects like the FAO’s Food Systems Integrated Program are working to restore millions of hectares of land.

Address Conflict and Build Peace: Mobilize workers and farmers into mass struggle to resist imperialist domination and seize the land back from the exploiters.

Promote Policy & Trade Reform: Governments can adopt policies to stabilize markets and reduce reliance on volatile imports. This can involve investing in local food production and improving market infrastructure.

Solving food insecurity is not nearly as complex as imperialist NGO bureaucrats insist. The solutions demand a shift from capitalist to socialist methods, a shift from short-term aid to long-term investment in resilient systems, social safety nets, and peace.

Recently, I waited in the emergency room in a Saint John, NB hospital with a close friend, a 65 year old man who was experiencing severe hypertension (very high blood pressure) which elevates the risk of heart attack or stroke. We arrived late in the evening. Only one doctor was available. We settled in for a long night’s stay that turned out to be 14 hours. My companion finally was seen by a doctor late the next morning.

The experience set me wondering how it is that our medical system can be so unresponsive, especially to emergencies. I looked into the issue some more over the next few days. I found that a lot of people in my city have had a similar experience. Some have waited much longer. Not only that, but over the past five years especially, news stories have documented instances of long wait times across Canada for people with serious medical issues, including sepsis, heart attack, stroke, severe acute pain, and suicide risk that have sometimes led to the patients’ deaths. I can see how this happens.

While my friend and I waited in our ER a teenager paced back and forth and looked like she might be in a high state of anxiety, possibly suicidal. A pregnant woman looked like she might be in labour and in need of urgent attention. They, too, had to wait.

When I returned home I explored the issue of health care for seniors. What I found on line helped to make sense of my experience:

• The health care system has been chronically underfunded in recent years.

• Lots of seniors are in hospital who no longer need hospital care but can’t be discharged because there’s no nursing home, special care home, or home care available.

• Doctor shortages: New Brunswick has vacancies for ∼50 specialists province-wide. There is a huge family doctor shortage.

• A lot of people can’t get doctors’ appointments soon enough so they end up going to the emergency ward.

• ERs are short nurses, doctors, and other staff.

• Seniors have the longest waits for surgery — cataract, hip, prostate — and when our care is delayed, our conditions worsen and we end up in ERs.

• Seniors disproportionately use health services and have more complex needs.

• Wait times for surgery, for nursing homes, for doctors and specialist appointments back up everything else and more people end up in ER.

At a recent Socialist Action Atlantic meeting another participant, Alex Gagne, informed us that almost 260,000 people in New Brunswick have not yet been assigned a family doctor. In my case, I waited eight years after moving back to the province in 2015. However, both the previous Conservative government and the present Liberal one have come up with a “solution” - transitioning to new community health centres. Partially municipally-funded, in these centres a nurse on staff and team of medical professionals serve a large clientele with a variety of medical needs. Gagne is concerned that this means one may not receive individualized service from a family physician. Instead, for example, one would see a nurse practitioner for minor issues. In addition, one might see a different nurse practitioner or doctor on each visit. “A nurse practitioner wouldn’t necessarily be worse at delivering services.” said Gagne. “Nurses punch above their weight when delivering care. But it would mean these professionals would be far less familiar with a patient’s history and day-to-day health, increasing the margin of failure within the system.”

Consistent treatment from the same medical staff has long been the core pillar of preventative care, he says. And having strong preventative care is one of the most important functions of the system to save costs and labour hours down the road.

“Giving a diabetic their insulin shots every once in a while, takes far fewer hours of labour compared to treating diabetic acidosis, a serious, life-threatening emergency,” said Gagne.

Collaborative clinics may increase access to the medical system in the short term, but quality of care may be sacrificed as a result. The increase would not be needed if the system had not been undermined over decades.

Gagne stated: “The idea of more collaborative care clinics is like someone offering a beautiful, polished, designed piece of silver jewelry in exchange for your grimy, worn, unmaintained gold necklace,” said Gagne. “The gold necklace is actually worth so much more, but you might feel it’s a worthwhile trade by looking at the two pieces.”

Essentially, the government uses tax cuts to reduce potential budgetary revenue, which compels the government to reduce overall spending on services and privatize them in order to remain solvent. The underfunding of these services leads to more systemic failures such as preventable ER deaths, says Gagne, who has tracked the system for years for the NB Media Co-op.

The underfunding leads to a lack of public confidence in the public system which leads to even more cuts, more privatization and then an even greater lack of public confidence. The process continues in a vicious circle.

“It’s a deeply innocuous process, but also devastating to everyday working people,” said Gagne. Right wing US political pundits in the era of President Regan called the process “starving the beast” (starving the government). The strategy aims to cut government spending by first cutting taxes and forcing the government to spend less, reducing the size of public institutions, federal agencies and social welfare services.

This deliberate starvation of public services by capitalist governments can only be stopped by fighting for a workers’ government.

The height of USA hegemony was in the 1950s. Globally, the rulers called it Pax Americana.

Its first defeat was the Cuban Revolution in 1959, followed by the repulsion of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The second defeat was in Vietnam in April 1975, ending a brutal 20-year war. The third defeat was in Afghanistan, 2001-2021. The fourth major defeat for Washington is unfolding now in Iran and associated sites: Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. The NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine is faltering.

Each defeat was the result of a combination of effective armed resistance and mass popular anti-imperialist movements – on a global scale.

Today, the Palestinian people are in the vanguard of the resistance to imperial hegemony. And the capacity of mass political action is again being demonstrated. The context is a profound social polarization and the terminal crisis of late capitalism. It is marked by radical inequality, tariff wars, hot forever-wars, and environmental catastrophe. To this must be added the totalitarian potential of Artificial Intelligence. Worst of all is the threat of nuclear war.

What is the only rational response to this multi-faceted existential emergency? The socialist transformation of society. Nothing less than socialist revolution! Revolution is a class-conscious process. It does not occur spontaneously. Leadership is required at every moment. Foremostly, it requires a revolutionary party.

The world is descending into barbarism. It involves the suppression of democratic rights, including free speech, the right to hold a public meeting such as this one tonight, and the disappearance of state accountability and transparency.

But barbarism is not inevitable. That’s why our slogan is “Socialism, not barbarism.”

If you feel moved to fight for the only realistic alternative to capitalism in its death agony, if you recognize that capitalism can’t be fixed, then you ought to join the socialist movement now.

Socialist Action is a leading proponent of unity in action and democracy from the bottom up. The united front is crucial, but it still requires the leadership of revolutionaries. So, get ready for September 14 and the Carnival Against Capitalism. Down with Mark Carney’s CEO Summit in Toronto!

Join Socialist Action. We have a world to win!

A vile Zionist smear campaign against Montreal-based lawyer, activist and “Reason2Resist” You Tube host Dimitri Lascaris failed miserably to derail an anti-imperialist public forum in Toronto. The August 18 gathering, organized by Socialist Action, featured Lascaris speaking on the topic “The Imminent Decline and Fall of the American Empire”.

Only two days before the event, the location was shifted to Taco Taco, a restaurant in the Kensington Market, just a few meters from the originally booked venue on College Street. This followed a barrage of menacing threats by Zio-Nazis to impose a suffocating Jewish community boycott on The Free Times Cafe.

In the end, over 140 people, on-line and in-person, participated in the re-located socialist forum. Lascaris, who recently reported directly from war ravaged Lebanon and Iran, as well as from Cypress and Greece, gave a 40 minute presentation on the failing hegemony of the western imperial powers, and answered questions for close to an hour.

Cowardly Zionists made no appearance at the venue on Augusta Avenue, which was well defended by volunteer marshals.

At the entrance, dozens of people signed the Socialist Action contact sheet. Donations and purchases at the SA literature display surpassed $270. Supporters of the Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed campaign to Confront PM Mark Carney’s CEO Summit on September 14 grabbed hundreds of leaflets, stickers and large colourful posters to distribute at upcoming events and to paste at busy street intersections in the coming days.

Sisters and brothers from all corners of the world who honor us with their presence today in this rebellious capital:

It is an honor to have celebrated this meeting in the context of Fidel’s Centenary, who summons us with his indisputable legacy to face the enormous challenges and difficulties of this turbulent and threatening present that we have had to live through.

Cuba, island of dignity and historical resistance against empire, today also against fascism, welcomes you with open hearts and thanks you for your courage and determination to get here, amidst so much pressure, blackmail and lies

At the previous meeting in Havana in October 2022, representatives of communist and workers’ parties from more than 60 countries, who gathered at that time, agreed to warn about the dangerous situation facing humanity. Almost four years later, we can reaffirm, without a doubt, that the world is going through one of its most uncertain and dangerous periods.

We are living through a period of extreme intensification of the contradictions of capitalism: excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, inequalities in its distribution, environmental destruction, and wars for markets, resources, and areas of influence.

Marxist and Leninist analysis remains fully valid in stating that these crises are not accidents, but rather the result of the laws of development of monopoly and imperialist capitalism.

Capitalism, consumed by its own contradictions, has unleashed a perfect storm: wars of aggression in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; open genocide in Gaza; a climate crisis that is no longer a warning, but a reality; structural hunger that devours millions; and an external debt that the peoples of the Global South will never be able to pay, because it was conceived to enslave us, not to develop us.

In this context, the resurgence of fascism sends us a stark warning. Fidel warned us about this years ago, about how it was changing its appearance but maintaining its essence. Today we denounce the reestablishment of fascist regimes around the world.

Nationalism, hegemony, supremacy and racial discrimination; xenophobia, displacement and population extermination; wars of conquest of territories and natural resources; punishments that fall on millions of human beings, and proscription of ideologies and civil liberties, are unequivocal features of this current fascism and of its Hitlerian predecessor.

Not content with the genocide in Gaza and its shameful public broadcast, they are trying to repeat it in Cuba, through an aggressive and criminal policy, which is said and denied, refuted and intensified without disguise.

The total suffocation to which we are subjected constitutes a collective punishment that seeks, through the deprivation of the most basic resources and services to survive, to promote weariness, discouragement and social fracture, with the objective of destroying the Cuban socialist project.

Those who sadistically devise an energy blockade against an entire nation, leaving a humanitarian toll of alarming proportions that deprives Cuban children of life at birth, reduces the life expectancy of cancer patients, and denies our people access to medicines, food, electricity, water, transportation, and many other resources for a full life, can be called nothing less than criminals and fascists.

I’m going to give you some data on the impacts of the blockade on Cuban society.

Particularly in the energy sector: in recent years, with enormous effort, we had recovered more than 1,400 megawatts of power for electricity generation in a group of distributed generation units. These plants are currently not generating power due to a lack of fuel; they run on diesel and fuel oil. If we had those 1,400 megawatts available every day, the troublesome blackouts in Cuba would only last three hours, not twenty or more as our people suffer today.

In health, such a sensitive issue and where you know all the potential of our universal and free health system, with opportunities for all, with things we know how to do: there are 98,500 patients on the surgical waiting list and, among them, there are 12,000 children, operations that we can do in Cuba, and we lack the resources, we lack the energy to power our operating rooms.

There are 34,000 pregnant women for whom we cannot perform enough prenatal ultrasounds during that stage of pregnancy. There are 67,000 children under one year old who have been born in these months without an updated immunization schedule, when vaccination in Cuba and our immunization system were always up to date. There are 117,000 adults and 1,200 children who are cancer patients who do not have adequate treatments, and we have to resort to secondary or tertiary formulas. There are 16,000 patients who have difficulty accessing the services they need for radiotherapy, 12,400 for chemotherapy, and 3,000 for hemodialysis. Only 30% of the basic list of medicines is available, even though we are capable of producing all of our medicines.

The technical availability rate of ambulances is only 22%. The healthcare transport system is overwhelmed. There is an inability to purchase cobalt-60 sources for cancer treatments, and there are delays in licenses to release medical goods in ports, also due to the refusal of international shipping companies that have been pressured by US imperialism not to bring the goods we need to Cuba. And as if this were not enough, we had always maintained infant mortality rates between 4 and 5, which are first world infant mortality rates, however, in recent years the rate has doubled and is currently over 9.8.

Wherever relief is glimpsed or sought from this meticulously calculated genocide, the guardians of this ignominious policy will be there, ready to tighten the noose of suffocation, if that were possible.

Their plans conceive of the Cuban people only as a tool, a dying society, to turn against the government and achieve their sinister goals of overthrowing the Revolution. This is not our own interpretation; it has been written and conceived this way for over sixty years by the State Department.

All of this that I have described constitutes flagrant violations of international norms and human rights, condemned by the vast majority of the international community, as recently occurred at the United Nations where 136 nations supported Cuba in its just denunciation.

However, the world based on laws and norms for peaceful and civilized coexistence between states has disappeared, giving way to the will of the strongest and most powerful, to the detriment of the poorest nations.

We are living through the most dangerous time since the October Crisis. Along with the economic war, Cuba is being subjected to a high-intensity unconventional war through digital subversion, the financing of internal mercenaries, media smear campaigns, and networks of influence that try to disguise what is blatant intervention as humanitarian aid.

In this regard, we are not at all surprised by the recent revelations in major US media outlets about an increase in CIA operations in Cuba aimed at subverting the internal order. These are not random leaks, as they are portrayed, but rather part of the US regime’s deliberate plan of psychological warfare against Cuba.

In an act of utter cynicism and perversity, the Secretary of State recently declared that U.S. sanctions against the Cuban regime will only be tightened. “What we’re trying to teach them,” he said, “is that there are no escape valves.”

It is an unreserved acknowledgment that Cuba faces a dire situation as a consequence of an unprecedented economic war. This assertion constitutes an open threat of extermination against an entire people if they do not submit to the dictates of the empire.

The United States government has intensified its military threats and updated its “regime change” doctrine, maintains Cuba on the spurious list of state sponsors of terrorism, and, to top it all off, has invented the ridiculous accusation of being a spying power or a hotbed of subversion of the so-called radical terrorist left, of which it seems all of us here are a part, a pathetic and fanciful name, only credible in their psychotic minds, but which they use to confuse, justify more punishments and legitimize their aggressions.

On this matter, United Nations experts stressed that the illegal unilateral coercive measures of the United States against Cuba contravene Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations and are part of a broader regime change strategy that encompasses decades of embargo against Cuba.

“The United States government must end all threats and hostile acts against the sovereignty of Cuba and revoke all measures it has imposed on the country that are contrary to international law,” the experts said.

They added: “The Security Council and the General Assembly must urgently address these threats as a matter of international peace and security.”

There can be no greater act of cynicism than for the perpetrator to try to pass himself off as the victim, when his misdeeds have been public and notorious for decades. The United States has no moral authority or right to point the finger at Cuba, which has arguably been the nation most spied on by them and with the largest budgets for economic and ideological subversion.

Cuba doesn’t have to indoctrinate anyone. It doesn’t have to export ideas. History teaches the lessons, showing the depths to which empires can descend to satisfy their insatiable appetite for domination and possession of the material and human resources of other nations.

In this meeting, and before you, we denounce the criminal policy of the United States against Cuba and also those who remain silent and tolerate the excesses of the emboldened American fascist far right, which lies, steals, kills and pretends to be the God of all destinies.

The US blockade only works because of the complicity of those who fear Washington’s power more than the judgment of history. The world cannot become complicit in another genocide.

Every time a part of the world remains silent in the face of aggression against Cuba, international law is weakened. Every time a government accepts illegitimate US sanctions, the principle of non-intervention is eroded. Every time a company is pressured to abandon its investments in Cuba, and others hesitate to invest for fear of reprisals, the economic dictatorship of a single power is strengthened.

Faced with this proven and undeniable reality, Cuba has defended itself, within its legitimate rights, as any country in the world would. The Cuban people have also benefited from the solidarity of men and women with a strong sense of justice and morality, aware that reason and truth are on our side, many of whom are now being persecuted or threatened for their solidarity activism.

The revival of McCarthyism in its worst version and with a transnational projection, which puts Cuba at the center of its irrational crusade, attempts not only to criminalize solidarity towards Cuba or create a new false pretext for its aggression, but also to try to silence dissenting voices against the world order they want to impose.

What common cause unites us on the left and progressive movements around the world? Undoubtedly, it is social justice; labor and children’s rights; the defense of feminist, gender, and racial causes; the care and preservation of the environment; popular participation; historical memory and respect for indigenous peoples; world peace and harmony among nations; international solidarity, among many others that are generally projected in terms of human dignity.

Can anyone with a rational mind believe that this makes the left or progressive forces a danger to humanity? The obvious answer is no.

Only fascism can see such a danger in the left, because it seeks to impose by force an ideology and system of values that are completely contrary; that is why in its current rise it desperately seeks to criminalize, neutralize and silence it.

The extermination of Palestinians in Gaza, the coup in Venezuela, and the collective punishment inflicted on the Cuban people are events serious enough not to remain inactive. Tomorrow, any nation could end up like Gaza or Cuba if fascism is not confronted. The key lies with the people, in their awareness, their mobilization, and their international unity.

Faced with this suffocation, Cuba has not given up. We have answers that prove it: the COVID-19 vaccines, the production of food using agroecological techniques amidst scarcity, the progress of clean energy, popular participation in the neighborhoods, and the defense of the entire territory with a people transformed into militias and ready to defend their self-determination, their independence, and their sovereignty.

Yes, we have many needs. We are burdened by blackouts, lack of water, inflation, and long lines. But no material shortage has extinguished the flame of solidarity, in which Fidel raised us, nor do we renounce Martí’s principle that “homeland is humanity” (Applause).

One fact that confirms this is that in these final days of the school year, tense and difficult like no other, 30,185 young professionals have graduated from Cuban universities, 735 of them from 62 countries who received their training in Cuba. And a statistic we are proud to share: 23 new Palestinian doctors and 5 American doctors (Applause).

The people’s response, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, has been firm and creative resistance, unity, the defense of their achievements, and the updating of their economic and social model, without ever renouncing the principles of socialism and without yielding to pressure or blackmail. This capacity to resist and transform has its roots, firmer than ever, in the thought and action of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz (Applause).

Fidel understood, like few others, the need to combine ideological firmness with tactical flexibility. He taught us that Marxism-Leninism is not a dead doctrine, not a catechism, but a method, a guide, an instrument for concretely solving life’s problems.

Cuba is working under this concept on the uncharted path of building socialism, as Army General Raúl Castro Ruz once stated. Not even the classics of Marxism could have ever imagined how to do so on a small island, threatened by the largest empire in the history of humankind and completely blockaded, its state cut off from all sources of resources, financing, and trade.

Faced with this dilemma, it is necessary to produce and generate wealth to redistribute it with all possible social justice and preserve historical and essential achievements of the Revolution in strategic areas such as health, education, culture, science, energy and communications.

Doing so will be everyone’s task, from state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises, along with other forms of economic management that together make up the Cuban business network, focused on a single goal: to build the prosperous and sustainable socialism that the heroic Cuban people deserve.

I know that the topic of economic and social transformations has been the subject of much reporting and debate. However, I want to emphasize some key concepts: this is a process to revitalize the economy, not to establish capitalism; there will be no rampant privatization, the fundamental means of production remain in the hands of the people, and above all, national sovereignty and independence are preserved.

For such a complex process, the Communist Party of Cuba, as the superior leading force of the State and society, stands as primarily responsible for its direction, coordination and control.

The Party will continue as a vigilant guardian of the interests of the people, the working class, the social gains, and the social justice that has driven the Revolution since its inception. It is not, nor will it ever be, a party of elites or lobbies. Its role as the sole party requires it to become ever more democratic and representative, as Raúl has called upon us to do on so many occasions, without ever losing sight of the people, the Revolution, and socialism. (Applause)

In a world where attempts are made to convince us that there are no alternatives, our common task is to demonstrate with facts that there are alternatives, that socialism remains the only realistic and humane way out of capitalist barbarism, as scientific Marxism taught.

Speech delivered to XXIV International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, at the Convention Palace, on August 8, 2026

Canada Out of NATO!

By Barry Weisleder

Ten days ago, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gathered in Ankara, Turkiye. Their Summit meeting revealed a festering conflict. On one hand, we see dramatically increasing military spending, along with more belligerence globally. On the other hand, there is growing internal division, along with more international resistance. Last year’s NATO Summit was unable to reach agreement on its basic mission. This year, divisions have deepened. Member states struggled to concur on support for Ukraine; they could not find common ground on Iran; and notably, Spain refused to commit to the 5% of GDP spending target. In response, US President Donald Trump lashed out. He branded Spain a “terrible partner” and ordered his Treasury Secretary to cut off trade with the European country, all while reviving his threat to annex Greenland — the territory of a fellow NATO member.

read more

The Case against Capitalist Data Centres

By Gary Porter

The global data center boom—driven overwhelmingly by the artificial intelligence revolution—is being touted as progress. But beneath the glossy promises of digital innovation lies a stark reality: data centers are extractive, resource-devouring machines that impose severe costs on the communities that host them, while delivering meager local benefits. The facts demand scrutiny. Marxists are not Luddites. We do not oppose new technology because we resist change or fear machines. Marxists advocate for massive productivity improvements that humanize and reduce labour, and increase the quality and abundance of goods and services that enrich the quality of human life for all, within the finite limits of the earth’s resources. We know that the critical obstacle blocking us from attaining this goal is the private ownership, by a tiny parasitic class of capitalists, of the means of production.

read more

Queer Liberation through Socialist Revolution

By Socialist Action

Warmest solidarity greetings from Socialist Action/ Ligue pour l’Action Socialiste for Pride 2026. We are happy again to congratulate The No Pride in Policing coalition and Queers4Palestine for organizing. Over the past year the continuing growth of the hard right, both internationally and in “Canada” makes the struggle to defend queer and trans rights ever more urgent. Ten years after the enshrining of inalienable rights for transgender people in Canada, cultural attacks continue to pose a threat. Conservative ideologues and grifters pushing the anti-trans “gender critical“ agenda have weaseled their way into every provincial parliament and the national Anti-Trans Legislative Risk index stands at “moderate with imminent risk”. The struggle for trans rights will be a long one.

read more

Resist Carney’s Pro Billionaire Agenda

By Yves Engler

A CEO summit in Toronto highlights Mark Carney’s corporate, wealth-concentrating policies. The September get to together of the “the world’s largest investors” should be protested. Last month the Liberals passed legislation granting cabinet the power to authorize the use of pesticides Health Canada has already deemed unsafe. In effect, Bill C-30 gives cabinet the ability to overrule science in the service of corporate profits. Also last month Carney announced that part of his plan to improve housing affordability was to bail out corporate condo developers unable to sell already built million-dollar units. Rather than build social housing, $1.5 billion of federal money will go to bailout capitalists who’ve sought to maximize profits.

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A Marxist Theory of Crisis in the Contemporary World

By Michael Roberts

What do you think is the core idea of Marxism? What’s the relationship between historical materialism and the critique of political economy? The core ideas of Marxism can be reduced to two key concepts: First, the history of human organisation since primitive times is the history of class struggle. The materialist conception of history is that change for better or worse is driven by the material interests of classes and, in particular, by the ruling class (feudal lords, capitalist companies) and the working class. While individuals can play key roles at moments in history (decisions and actions by kings or by revolutionary leaders), in the final analysis, change depends on economics and classes. As Marx said: “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

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The Shadow of Minneapolis: 2026 Labor Notes Conference

by Sou Mi

At the most overtly political Labor Notes Conference in recent years, the experience of the Twin Cities stretched over everything, and exposed a rift between a rank and file ready to fight and a leadership still looking to November. More than 4,000 workers, organizers, and self-described “troublemakers” braved brutal weather and travel changes to pack into a Chicago-area hotel this past weekend for the 2026 Labor Notes Conference, filling nearly 300 workshops, panels, and meetings over three days.By most measures, this was the largest and most explicitly political iteration of the biennial gathering in recent years. As always, it served as a barometer of what’s animating the labor movement’s most advanced sectors. If the 2022 conference was shaped by the wave of new organizing that gripped the country after the pandemic, from Amazon to Starbucks, and 2024 carried the experience of the UAW’s stand-up strikes and Shawn Fain’s call for a 2028 general strike,

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Strategic Debates in the Struggle for Quebec Independence

By Bernard Rioux

The Quebec sovereignty movement has never been a monolithic bloc. From its inception, it has been riddled with deep tensions that extend beyond electoral strategies, referendum timetables, and partisan alliances to a far more fundamental question: what kind of independence do we want, for whom, and by what means? How do the main actors position themselves in relation to this essential issue? What kind of consultation should be offered to the people of Quebec? How should we assess the current situation surrounding the prospect of fighting for independence?1. The federalist bloc: managing dependency and denying the self-determination of oppressed nations within the Canadian state. To answer these questions, we must begin with two essential observations. First, the Canadian state was built on national oppression—of the French-Canadian nation, of Indigenous and Inuit peoples, and of the Acadian people.

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Heavy showers abated as a crowd gathered across the street from the U.S. Consulate in Toronto on July 18. Despite smoky air fed by massive northern wild fires, folks came together to denounce the war-mad North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by Washington, Ottawa and their allies.

Nearly one hundred voices chanted “Canada Out of NATO. NATO Out of Canada”, “Defend Iran”, “Hands Off Lebanon”, and “Palestine Will Be Free, From the River to the Sea.”

The anti-war protest was sponsored by: Socialist Action, Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed, Hands Off Iran Community Toronto, Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-Canada, the Canadian-Cuban Friendship Association, and Code Pink Ontario.

The following speech was delivered by Barry Weisleder from Socialist Action. _________________________________________________________

Ten days ago, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gathered in Ankara, Turkiye.

Their Summit meeting revealed a festering conflict. On one hand, we see dramatically increasing military spending, along with more belligerence globally. On the other hand, there is growing internal division, along with more international resistance.

Last year’s NATO Summit was unable to reach agreement on its basic mission. This year, divisions have deepened. Member states struggled to concur on support for Ukraine; they could not find common ground on Iran; and notably, Spain refused to commit to the 5% of GDP spending target.

In response, US President Donald Trump lashed out. He branded Spain a “terrible partner” and ordered his Treasury Secretary to cut off trade with the European country, all while reviving his threat to annex Greenland — the territory of a fellow NATO member.

This year’s declaration shifted to implementation of the 5% spending goal. NATO’s European members and Canada are to increase their “investments in core defense requirements by more than $139 billion”. The focus on the European members and Canada — to the exclusion of the United States — was not incidental. The Trump administration has pushed aggressively for what generations of US leaders have advocated: getting Europe and other members of the trans-Atlantic alliance to bear more of the burden of maintaining the imperialist system.

To a degree, Washington’s strategy appears to have succeeded. As NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte emphasized in his praise of Donald Trump, spending is on the rise. It seems that Washington got Europe to love war again.

But escalating militarism carries profound dangers and comes at a great cost. The war against Iran has no end in sight. While NATO leaders met, Washington launched successive waves of strikes — more than eighty targets on the first night, some ninety the next — and reimposed the oil sanctions it had briefly suspended. Trump declared the truce is “over” from the summit floor, and crudely insulted Iran’s leadership.

Meanwhile, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, continues to escalate. Only a few years ago, countries like Germany were reluctant to send combat helmets to Ukraine for fear of escalation. NATO now operates as the strategic rearguard of the war effort. It has provided a full spectrum of advanced weaponry to Kiev. It has established drone production facilities around the bloc. And its intelligence actively engages in the targeting of Russia’s critical infrastructure.

Today, several NATO member states speak openly about the possibility of direct confrontation with Russia. Europe is marching towards war, and Washington helped to pave the way. Rutte himself recently admitted: “NATO is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage.” Diplomatically, that means exert imperialist rule.

The cost is borne, as always, by the working class. NATO’s rearmament spree has given European big capitalists a pretext to finally dismantle the remnants of the social democratic order that prevailed since World War 2. Militarization and austerity are two sides of the same coin. The effects are already being felt in budget cuts across the continent.

But here is where resistance to NATO’s militarist agenda is growing.

On 14 June, days before the European Council convened to negotiate its next seven-year budget, thousands of people marched through Brussels under the banner “Welfare, not Warfare”. The Brussels march was the centre of a week of actions across the continent, from Spain to Finland, Greece to Britain.

Resistance confronted the Summit in Turkiye itself. In the two weeks beforehand, anti-NATO demonstrations led by trade unions and anti-imperialist movements took place in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir against swelling military budgets and NATO expansion.

The Turkish authorities responded with repression: the Ankara governorship banned all rallies, marches, and leafleting across the province for the duration of the summit, while detaining hundreds of people. The alliance, that proclaims itself a community of “mature democracies”, met behind a wall of closed roads and prohibited assembly.

NATO’s march towards war is not a sign of its strength, but of its weakness. It reflects the panicked response of an imperialist system in an advanced state of decay, seeking to salvage its hegemony by brute force — killing working people abroad while impoverishing them at home.

The international anti-war movement should connect these fronts: to link the worker in Brussels defending her pension to the people of Iran under bombardment; to link the struggle against austerity to the struggle against war. That is our message: Build Homes, not Drones. Expropriate war industries under Workers’ Control. Abolish the billionaire class.

Unsurprisingly, the Canadian Prime Minister is not listening. Mark ‘Carnage’ just announced the purchase of a dozen German attack submarines. The 12 subs will cost about two billion dollars each and the contract will top $100 billion over their lifecycle.

At a geopolitical level, the purchase bolsters Canada’s anti-Russia partnership and prioritizes NATO inter-operability. The German firm TKMS provides 70% of NATO’s non-nuclear submarines. Such vessels excel at blowing up war ships and merchant vessels. They can also be used effectively to impose a blockade. Does the Gulf of Hormuz come to mind?

What use would these subs be in defending Canada against the only country that can realistically invade -- to make it the 51st state? Consider history. Did you know that two Canadian submarines and a dozen other vessels participated in the 1962 US blockade of Cuba, according to Royal Canadian Navy Lieutenant Bruce Fenton? Military historian Jack Granatstein labeled it “the single greatest breach of proper civil-military relations in Canadian history.” Remember that NATO was founded in 1949. The Warsaw Pact formed in 1955, six years later! America instigated this infernal business.

Once again Carney’s government has kowtowed to Trump and a capitalist war machine that is willing to destroy the planet to make more profit. So much for “elbows up”.

We say Capitalism Can’t be Fixed. It’s time to dump this rotten system, to overturn Canadian imperialism and the Canadian colonial settler state. Canada Out of NATO! NATO Out of Canada! From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!

The global data center boom—driven overwhelmingly by the artificial intelligence revolution—is being touted as progress. But beneath the glossy promises of digital innovation lies a stark reality: data centers are extractive, resource-devouring machines that impose severe costs on the communities that host them, while delivering meager local benefits. The facts demand scrutiny.

Marxists are not Luddites. We do not oppose new technology because we resist change or fear machines. Marxists advocate for massive productivity improvements that humanize and reduce labour, and increase the quality and abundance of goods and services that enrich the quality of human life for all, within the finite limits of the earth’s resources.

We know that the critical obstacle blocking us from attaining this goal is the private ownership, by a tiny parasitic class of capitalists, of the means of production. The parasites use these assets to accumulate capital and generate profit.  They are the ones who stand between us and our most basic needs for decent housing, healthy food, higher incomes and more free time -- for quality lives in a healthy environment.

Among the most voracious of the capitalists, perhaps surpassed only by the fossil fuel industry, are the tech billionaires.

Based on the books and articles they write, and the speeches they give, a prominent network of tech billionaires is actively advocating for and building the infrastructure of what critics call an authoritarian future. They are often described as the “Nerd Reich”—a group that includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Brian Armstrong, Balaji Srinivasan, and Sam Altman.

Here is a look at their ideologies and actions:

· Peter Thiel (Palantir): The ideological architect. He bankrolls projects to bypass democratic oversight, and has stated “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible”. By “freedom” he does not mean our freedom. He means his freedom to do whatever he likes, regardless the consequences for us.  His company, Palantir, now acts as the “operating system” for U.S. military and immigration enforcement.

· Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX/X): Champions “technocracy” over democracy. He has called elected leaders “tyrants”, and used X to support far-right figures.  His companies are now critical to U.S. military infrastructure.

· Marc Andreessen (Venture Capitalist): His “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” argues an unregulated tech industry, not democracy, is key. He has been accused of making “authoritarian demands”.

· David Sacks (Venture Capitalist): Trump’s “AI and crypto czar”, who compares Trump’s return to “Caesar entering Rome”. He has tried to kill state-level AI laws, seeking to become the gatekeeper of U.S. AI policy.

· Brian Armstrong (Coinbase): Described as a “cryptocurrency titan” within the “Nerd Reich”.

· Balaji Srinivasan (Investor): Advocates for Silicon Valley’s “ultimate exit” from the U.S. and has become “stridently authoritarian,” proposing tech-governed cities run by loyalists.

· Sam Altman (OpenAI): Accused of privately working to weaken safety regulations while publicly supporting them, with a reported “pattern of lying” to consolidate power.

This shift is often described as the “Authoritarian Stack”—a system where tech oligarchs are merging with the state to provide “privatized control” over everything from AI and cloud platforms to military drones and surveillance. Their vision promotes “tech feudalism”—fiefdoms run by tech corporations—and a belief that democracy is “too slow and messy” to be trusted.

They are backing this vision with enormous financial and political capital, including $450 million to help elect Trump and secure billions in government contracts (like Palantir’s $10 billion Pentagon deal).

The Energy Crisis Hidden in the Cloud

Data centers are among the most electricity-intensive facilities on Earth. In 2025, global data center electricity consumption stood at 447 terawatt-hours (TWh). By the end of 2026, that figure is projected to reach 565 TWh—a 26 per cent increase in a single year. By 2030, consumption is expected to exceed 1,200 TWh, roughly equivalent to the annual power demand of Japan.

This surge is almost entirely attributable to AI. While conventional server electricity consumption grew by less than 1 per cent in 2025, AI-optimized servers saw consumption climb by more than 83 per cent—and are forecast to grow by a further 84 per cent in 2026. By 2027, AI servers will consume more electricity than all conventional servers combined.

These numbers are not abstract. Gartner, the research firm, states plainly that grid supply will be insufficient to meet the demands of future data center construction. Data center power demand is expected to reach 132 gigawatts (GW) in 2026 and 290 GW by 2030. This is not sustainable growth—it is on a collision course with physical reality.

Water: The Invisible Drain

Less discussed, but even more alarming, is water consumption. Data centers require vast quantities of water for cooling. A single 1 MW data center can use up to 25.5 million litres of water annually—equivalent to the daily water consumption of approximately 300,000 people.

Amazon alone reports that its global data center operations will use approximately 9.5 billion litres of water in 2025. While Amazon claims efficiency improvements, its figures exclude partner locations and construction-related consumption. Google’s data centers, by contrast, consumed an estimated 1.15 litres per kilowatt-hour in 2024—nearly ten times Amazon’s reported rate. Microsoft reported 0.27 L/kWh in 2025.

These are not victimless statistics. Over 45 per cent of data centers are located in water-stressed regions. Communities are already facing drought watch as their potable water supplies are diverted to cool server farms. In Chile, activists have successfully suspended data center permits over water concerns; in Mexico, a proposed $4.8 billion campus faces fierce opposition in a drought-stricken region.

Carbon Emissions: A Growing Liability

In 2025, approximately 450 TWh of data centre power demand generated 0.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions—over 0.5 per cent of the world’s total. While this may seem modest relative to heavy industry, the growth trajectory is what matters. US data centers already operate at 548 kg CO₂ per MWh—48 per cent above the national grid average.

The proposed solution is often natural gas with carbon capture, but this raises costs by $15–$45 per MWh, bringing total power costs to approximately $115/MWh. These costs, of course, are passed on—either to ratepayers or through higher prices for digital services. Moreover, carbon capture is unproven at the scale required. In fact so far, carbon capture is a unicorn solution, a lie. In Alberta, a proposed $70-billion data center designed to run on 7.5 GW of gas-fired power could raise provincial greenhouse gas emissions to levels not seen since the coal era.

The Economic Shell Game

Perhaps the most deceptive claim made by data center proponents is that of job creation. The real numbers tell a different story.

A Business Insider analysis found that even the largest data centers generally employ fewer than 150 permanent workers, and some have as few as 25. Construction jobs are temporary—sometimes lasting less than a year—while tax breaks often last a decade or longer. The analysis found that tax breaks can amount to over $2 million for every permanent, full-time job created—roughly eight times the average per-job subsidy in other economic development deals.

According to fDi Markets, for every million dollars invested in US and Canadian data centers, a mere 0.15 jobs were created. This is a staggeringly inefficient use of public incentives.

Meanwhile, the costs to the public continue to mount. Data centers drive up electricity costs as utility operators invest billions in new grid infrastructure. In Virginia, households could see electricity bills rise by $37 per month by 2040 to pay for grid upgrades driven by data centers. Seventy per cent of electricity price increases across the US have occurred in locations near significant data center activity. Walmart has publicly stated that surging electricity bills are imperiling its expansion in states such as Ohio and Virginia.

The Human Toll

Beyond economics and the environment lies a deeper concern: quality of life and public health.

Communities near data centers report constant low-frequency vibration that residents say is ruining their health and homes. Lawsuits have been filed specifically about data center noise. Residents also raise concerns about heat generation, air quality, and impacts from backup generators.

The health costs are measurable. Research from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from air pollution associated with a single large data center facility. A recent model indicates that US data centers in 2030 could contribute to nearly 1,300 deaths annually, resulting in a public health burden of more than $20 billion. In the most affected counties, the estimated per-household health burden can reach seven times the national average.

A Movement in Motion

Communities are fighting back—and winning. Anti-data center groups more than doubled from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 across 49 US states by March 2026. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, grassroots opposition blocked or delayed 75 projects worth a combined $130 billion—matching the total for all of 2025.

In Canada, large mobilizations are pressuring Hamilton city council to enact a moratorium on data center development. In Spokane, Washington, a year-long moratorium was approved after a potential 500-megawatt data center—equal to half the combined power used by all residential and business customers in Spokane County—came to light.

Seventy per cent of Americans now oppose a data center being built near their home. The issue has shifted from local planning disputes to a broader political reckoning.

Socialist demands

Data centers are not benign infrastructure. They are voracious consumers of energy and water, significant emitters of carbon, poor creators of local employment, and genuine threats to community health and quality of life. The benefits—primarily to a handful of trillion-dollar technology corporations—are concentrated. The costs—higher electricity bills, depleted water supplies, degraded air quality, and diminished neighbourhoods—are borne by the communities that host them.

This is not a Luddite argument against technology. It is a demand for accountability, transparency, and fairness. If the AI revolution is to proceed, it must do so on terms that do not sacrifice the well-being of the communities upon which it depends. The facts are clear: the current model is unsustainable, inequitable, and deserves the fiercest opposition.

The management of power generation, water use, carbon pollution, and AI, is logically public. These resources must be socialized and managed by the workers and communities they purport to serve. Private ownership of these very social resources and problems makes no sense at all. In fact, the insanity of the existence of billionaires while the vast majority struggle to make ends meet demands a clear resolution.

AI data processors must become much more efficient in their power usage, maximizing the percentage of the electricity that goes directly to computing rather than cooling and other overheads. China is ahead of the west on power usage efficiency under strict state regulation. Vastly more efficient chips must be developed. Data facilities must be banned from using fresh water to cool inefficient processors. Only sea water should be used until operating efficiency no longer produces heat waste, and even sea water must be recirculated.

Avi Lewis has demanded a moratorium on the development of AI data centres until the vast global theft of human creators product is fully redressed and new additions to knowledge bases are performed only after agreement by the creator and reasonable compensation paid.

Workers and their unions must be able to veto new implementation of AI that costs jobs unless adequate provision is made to cut hours with no reduction in total pay or benefits (such as 28 hours work for 35 hours day). As Karl Marx once said, the beginning of freedom is the reduction of labour time.

Why not tax billionaires until their shoes fall off. Expropriate physical and financial assets, luxury yachts, homes and the private aircraft of the billionaires. They are arrogant, autocratic and completely useless. AI and Data centers are a symptom of authoritarian class rule by a small class of capitalist bloodsuckers. Join the rising movement against them.

Warmest solidarity greetings from Socialist Action/ Ligue pour l’Action Socialiste for Pride 2026. We are happy again to congratulate The No Pride in Policing coalition and Queers4Palestine for organizing. Over the past year the continuing growth of the hard right, both internationally and in “Canada” makes the struggle to defend queer and trans rights ever more urgent.

Ten years after the enshrining of inalienable rights for transgender people in Canada, cultural attacks continue to pose a threat. Conservative ideologues and grifters pushing the anti-trans “gender critical“ agenda have weaseled their way into every provincial parliament and the national Anti-Trans Legislative Risk index stands at “moderate with imminent risk”. The struggle for trans rights will be a long one.

Over the past year, attacks on queer people, Muslims, Blacks and Asians have increased again. Emboldened by unconditional support from the right wing yahoos at Queen’s Park, and the cave-in by Toronto’s ‘progressive’ mayor on cop funding, the police “Hate Crimes” unit in Toronto concentrates on targeting pro-Palestinian solidarity activists. This includes contrived charges and pre-dawn raids on people at home. To expect the cops to provide “protection” of our legal rights is a vanishing fantasy. Community self-protection is what we need..

Not all the news is bad. The unprecedented rapid growth of the pro-Palestinian global anti-war movement is impressive and encouraging. Queer and trans people are very much involved as we should be. The Palestinian struggle is our struggle! Still, the homelessness crisis is worsening, with no serious solutions offered by capitalist governments. The private sector has no solution, and no interest in finding one, as Frederick Engels wrote on the Housing Question in 1872.

Only massive public sector construction will do, as it did in post-war Britain under the first Labour government, and under the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela. Renters are faced with rising, obscenely high rates. Urgently needed is a universal rent freeze, a rent rollback, and rent control.

We demand that municipalities and provinces provide safe housing for all the homeless, especially street kids among whom queer and trans youth are heavily over- represented. Lives are at stake.

Health services are crucial. In Ontario privatization has now seen the government encourage private surgery clinics whose ‘costs’ are way above those of public hospitals. Just like the use of nurses by exploitative agencies. No respect for tax- payers here!

Queer members of SA/LAS participated in organizing the protest in February 2014 against Putin’s anti-gay law. Our speaker at the event noted that the early Soviet republic was the first on the planet to decriminalize homosexuality and abortion. Sadly, these gains were lost in the 1930s with the consolidation in power of the privileged, self-serving party-state bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin and his murderous security apparatus, of which Putin is the direct descendant. While acknowledging its repressive past violations against queer people, it is no accident that today revolutionary Cuba leads the way forward among “less developed” countries.

We need to consider what kind of society we want, and what we have. Queer rights will never be secure under capitalism. Divide and rule is the method of the tiny, obscenely rich minority who call the shots in the economy and the state. The huge inequality gap continues to grow. Carbon-fueled climate catastrophe is rapidly accelerating. These disasters cannot be reversed under the system which created them.

In a socialist society, housing, food, education and healthcare will be human rights, as they are today in Cuba, despite very limited resources and the murderous US blockade. Public ownership and workers‘ control of the commanding heights of the economy are essential for production to serve human needs, not private profit. We invite you to join us in the fight for a better world.

A CEO summit in Toronto highlights Mark Carney’s corporate, wealth-concentrating policies. The September get to together of the “the world’s largest investors” should be protested.

Last month the Liberals passed legislation granting cabinet the power to authorize the use of pesticides Health Canada has already deemed unsafe. In effect, Bill C-30 gives cabinet the ability to overrule science in the service of corporate profits.

Also last month Carney announced that part of his plan to improve housing affordability was to bail out corporate condo developers unable to sell already built million-dollar units. Rather than build social housing, $1.5 billion of federal money will go to bailout capitalists who’ve sought to maximize profits.

Immediately upon taking office the former Goldman Sachs banker and chair of Brookfield Assets cancelled a scheduled increase to the capital gains inclusion rate, allowing capitalists to continue paying tax on only half their gains. Those who make their income through labour still pay tax on 100% of their earnings.

In another early sop to wealth holders, Carney scrapped a small Digital Services Tax. As a result, the world’s largest internet giants will save a billion dollars annually.

Carney has instigated a slew of other measures that lower the tax burden on large enterprises. His government immediately deferred corporate income tax payments and GST/HST remittances and created the Productivity Super-Deduction and Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) incentive.

Carney’s radical militarist agenda is also driving an upwards concentration of wealth. Arms production is notoriously capital, not labour, intensive. Additionally, the flow of public resources to arms production has already led to reductions in federal funds for social programs that disproportionately benefit the working class and poor.

As a pillar of his wealth-concentrating economic policy, Carney has promoted privatization and public-private partnerships. He is seeking to privatize airports and established a $25-billion Canada Strong Fund to de-risk major industrial projects. The Sovereign Wealth Fund will subsidize the risk of major corporate ventures.

At the same time, Carney’s Major Projects Office tramples on Indigenous rights and weakens environmental oversight for large corporate projects in energy and critical minerals. It empowers the government to fast-track infrastructure projects, weakening the requirement for free, prior, and informed consent mandated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). In a sign of the capitalist, fossil fuel orientation of the legislation, Carney named the chair of the board of directors of Trans Mountain, Dawn Farrell, to be CEO of his government’s Major Projects Office.

Carney has turned to the corporate world for a slew of positions in his government such as the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Canada, Tim Hodgson, as energy minister and the CEO of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Michael Sabia as Clerk of Privy Council. He also reintroduced Stephen Harper’s practice of regularly holding informal meetings with Bay Street CEOs.

Carney’s pro-corporate measures are exacerbating an already spiralling inequality crisis. The top 1% of the tax bracket has a historically high proportion of income and Canada’s 86 billionaire families control more wealth than the country’s 6.2 million least wealthy families. One single Canadian, Changpeng Zhao, has $150 billion. It’s grotesque. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, nor should one hundred millionaires or even ten millionaires. Yet Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.

Carney has invited the world’s top 100 capitalists and investment firms to an Investment Summit in Toronto for mid-September. He is pitching the event as a way to stimulate a trillion dollars in investment, no doubt stimulating extraction of ecologically damaging resources and selling off assets at discount rates. The summit showcases and will consolidate Carney’s pro-corporate, militarist and anti-ecological agenda. At a time of unprecedented global heat waves, Carney is advancing new fossil fuel infrastructure.

The summit provides an opportunity for environmental, labour, Indigenous, housing, peace and social justice movements to come together against Mark Carney’s corporate agenda. The Capitalism Can’t be Fixed campaign is calling for a “Carnival Against Capitalism” in opposition to Mark Carney’s wealth concentrating, ecocidal policies.

The following article is abridged from an interview published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2025 in World Socialist Research.

What do you think is the core idea of Marxism? What’s the relationship between historical materialism and the critique of political economy?

The core ideas of Marxism can be reduced to two key concepts:

First, the history of human organisation since primitive times is the history of class struggle. The materialist conception of history is that change for better or worse is driven by the material interests of classes and, in particular, by the ruling class (feudal lords, capitalist companies) and the working class. While individuals can play key roles at moments in history (decisions and actions by kings or by revolutionary leaders), in the final analysis, change depends on economics and classes. As Marx said: “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

The second core idea is the law of value under capitalism. Capitalism is a system of production for the profit of the owners of the means of production, who exploit those who own nothing but their ability to work for the owners. Labour creates all the things and services that we use and need, but the value of that labour is appropriated by the owners of the means of production as ‘surplus value’ over and above what labour receives for its work. That surplus value is accumulated as capital. Our social needs then depend on the decisions of capitalists on whether it is profitable or not. This explanation of the workings of the modern economy is denied by the apologists for capitalism – but it is compellingly clear.

The theory of crisis is an important part of Marx’s critique of political economy. There have been many debates among Marxists on how to understand Marx’s theory of crisis. What do you think of Marx’s theory of crisis, and the relationship between overproduction, under consumption, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?

Yes, a theory of crises under capitalism is very important. The apologists for capitalism deny that there are any endemic crises in capitalist production – ie regular and recurring slumps in production, investment and employment. For them, such crises are either random events, one-offs or the result of bad decisions, speculations or negligence. The apologists deny that crises are inherent in the capitalist system of production for profit. But Marx’s law of value reveals why regular crises are endemic. Capitalist production only takes place if profits are made and Marx shows that a contradiction arises between the drive for more production and profitability of that production (ie profits relative to capital invested). Capitalists compete against each other to gain market share and a bigger cut in the profits appropriated from workers. In order to gain an advantage, they resort to using labour-saving technology to reduce costs and increase the productivity of labour. But Marx argued that profit only comes from labour going to work, so if investment is increasingly in machines etc relative to labour, productivity may rise but at the expense of a tendency for profitability to fall. Eventually, profitability may fall so much that it causes a fall in total profits. Then capitalists stop investing, close down production and lay off workers. Unemployment rises alongside unsold goods and services. This is a slump. It can only be rectified by getting profitability rising again and that requires removing unnecessary workers, weak companies and keeping wages down. Then the whole process can start again. Slumps are a necessary ‘cleansing’ process for capital to recover. Marx outlines his theory of crises most clearly in Capital Volume 3, Chapters 13-15.

However, many Marxists do not accept that the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall as explained in these chapters is relevant to crises in capitalism. Instead they consider two other main theories. The first is that there is ‘under consumption’. This is when workers cannot buy back all the goods and services produced by the capitalists because they do not have enough money. Both Marx and Engels disputed this under consumption theory, pointing out that workers will never have enough money to buy back all the output being sold, precisely because wages do not contain all the value created and realised as the capitalists have appropriated any surplus value (the difference between the value of commodities sold and wages going to the workers; in other words, profits). The point is that capitalists do not need to sell all their commodities to workers; much of sales is to other capitalists (eg steel is sold to auto manufacturers to make cars etc).

The other alternative theory is that of ‘overproduction’. Capitalists just keep producing to accumulate more profits without considering whether they can sell their production on the market. They overproduce relative to demand. The problem with this explanation of crises is that it does not explain when production becomes ‘too much production’. It may never happen, or it could happen at any moment. There is no logic to this theory. Put it this way, if supply is in line with demand, can there still be a crisis of investment and production in capitalism? Marx would say yes, because the profitability of what is being produced is what decides whether capitalists invest or not. Indeed, this is how crises unfold. Profitability falls, then total profits and then capitalists try to sell more to cover falling profits. But that means ‘overproduction’, forcing capitalists to lower prices and/or cut production. Overproduction is the result of the over accumulation of capital ie falling profitability of capital invested, not the other way round.

Some Marxists have bent Marx’s law of value into a theory of money ie. value is not created by labour in production, but instead is only realised in selling commodities produced on the market. So no sale, then no value. This was not Marx’s view. Value is the result of the effort of human labour in production; how much of that value is eventually realised depends on sale in the market. But there is no value at all without human labour production. Behind this revised theory is an attempt to replace profitability as the ultimate cause of crises with a theory of monetary or credit instability, similar to the view of mainstream economists like Keynes.

From your point of view, what are the main differences between Marxist political economy and other schools of economics (like neoclassical economics, Keynesianism, etc.)? Can we regard the theory of crisis as an important difference or even essential difference between Marxist political economy and mainstream Western economics?

The key difference above all is that other schools of economics, even the most radical ‘heterodox’ schools that do not accept that markets are perfect, do not agree with Marx’s law of value. They do not accept that the key contradiction of capitalist production is production for profit, not social need and that increased production eventually comes into conflict with increased profitability and that is what leads to booms and slumps, ie crises. The mainstream neoclassical school deny crises can happen in properly run markets or in markets that are not interfered with by governments, monopolies or trade unions. Heterodox economists deny the role of profit in crises and look to either a ‘lack of demand’ (Keynes); or financial instability (Minsky) or monopolies (Sweezy, Stiglitz) or bad regulation.

And this is a crucial difference, because all these schools are suggesting that capitalist production can be modified or corrected to make capitalism work better. Keynes said more government spending or monetary injections will do the trick; heterodox Minsky said: regulate the banks and financial institutions, then capitalism will be stable. These reformist approaches are theoretically and empirically wrong. Marx’s theory of crisis shows that capitalism cannot be reformed in that way. Crises are endemic to capitalism because ultimately they are caused by falling profitability. The only way to end crises is to replace capitalism with a planned economy under common ownership ie no capitalists.

In your research, what impacts does the financialization of capitalism have on the real economy and the working class?

One of the features of the last 50 years in modern economies in the Global North has been the rise of the financial sectors, not just banks but hedge funds, investment funds, insurance funds, private equity, cryptocurrencies etc. Increasingly, capitalists have switched their investment of accrued profits into financial assets and speculation rather than into investment into new technology and productive sectors. This is the phenomenon of ‘financialization’.

However, some Marxists and others have been so enamoured by this development that they have started to claim that capitalism has changed its spots. It is no longer a system of production for profit through the exploitation of labour in factories, offices etc, but now it is just a financial monetary system where money makes more money. This means that workers have lost their role as producers of value in capitalism. Now capitalists can get value just from monetary tricks. Capitalism has become finance capital, which rules over producer capital.

This is nonsense. Although financial profits in some economies like the US and the UK are large, say up to 25% of total profits, the vast majority of profits are still made by selling goods and services produced by workers. And that is especially the case in the so-called Global South where manufacturing has become predominant, not finance. Globally, the working class has never been larger and still most capitalist accumulation comes from the labour of working people in production. The leopard of capitalism has not changed its spots.

What do you think of the current crisis of capitalism in the global economic system, especially the financial crisis in recent years? What insights can Marxist political economy provide for us to understand the crisis of capitalism?

This is a big subject. In the 21st century we have had the two biggest slumps in the history of capitalism, 2008-9 and 2020. There is every reason to expect that another slump will take place before the end of this decade. That may be triggered by a new financial crash as in 2008. This time that crash may not start in the banks as such but be engendered by rising corporate debt and the cost of servicing that debt. Already, there are around 20% of companies in Europe, Japan and the US that are called ‘zombies’ ie they are like the living dead because they do not make enough profits to cover even the cost of servicing their existing debt and so must keep borrowing. These companies are in serious risk of going bust and bringing down even profitable companies in a ricochet effect.

You think that since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the major capitalist economies have been in a Long Depression. Is there any difference between the Long Depression and previous long depressions in the history of capitalism? What strategies should China adopt in response to the global impact of the Long Depression?

I define a depression as opposed to a recession or slump as a period where after a slump, the previous trend of growth in output, investment and above all profitability, is much lower than before the slump. And this lower trend can last for decades. In that sense, the Long Depression of the 2010s onwards that I have identified is similar to the depression of the late 19th century (1873-97) and the Great Depression of 1929-42. As of 2025, the current depression is continuing as the pandemic slump of 2020 did not lead to a significant rise in profitability and so investment growth and real GDP growth remain even weaker than in the 2010s.

China has avoided all these crises in capitalism. That’s because China has an economy dominated by a large state sector and planning by the government, so that any instability in its capitalist sector can be overcome and investment and production can carry on relatively uninterrupted. If the capitalist economies of the West head into another slump, then trade and investment into China will be hit, but China now has a massive domestic base and it has invested heavily into new technologies and continues to direct and plan that investment mainly through the state sector. China needs to expand the state sector and planning to reduce the instability in its capitalist sector, particularly exposed by its plunging real estate sector (mostly capitalist based).

Technofeudalism is a view that has emerged in recent years to describe the changes of society caused by cloud technology, that is, tech giants and large platform enterprises possess the data and power like feudal lords, while ordinary users serve these digital overlords as unpaid data producers like serfs, and the new form of rent replaces profit as the main form of accumulation. Do you agree with using technofeudalism to define the current stage of western society?

Technofeudalism as a concept suggests that capitalist production, ie production for a profit through the exploitation of labour, has been replaced by a feudalism where digital monopolies just extract rents. But where do these rents come from? Marx pointed out that rent, interest and profits all come from the same source: the surplus value appropriated from the value created by human labour power. It is just wrong to argue that companies selling cloud technology are not producing commodities for sale and profit just like any capitalist process. The bulk of Amazon’s profits come from distribution and transport of things; the bulk of Facebook’s profits come from advertising; the bulk of Google’s too. The bulk of Microsoft and Apple profits are from selling computer hardware and software. This is not feudalism but straightforward capitalism. Capitalism is not dead and to suggest that it is a dangerous idea for workers because it means labour may not see its enemy as capital as a whole, but just a small part of capital, so that there is no need to replace capitalism but just ‘feudal monopoly’ capitalism.

The labor theory of value is the core idea of Marxist economics. In time of automation and the digital economy, how to apply the labor theory of value to analyze modern economy? What do you think of data as a new factor of production?

Data or knowledge comes from human activity. So knowledge has value in the same way that physical things have value for society and for capital. Knowledge is material: it requires the energy of human labour; ie. mental labour, in the same way as physical labour. Both are material and create value. So capital can appropriate surplus value from knowledge workers that it employs and does so increasingly across industries and the world. Such surplus value is embodied in patents, intellectual property rights etc. Knowledge or mental labour is just as ‘material’ as physical labour. Mental activity takes place in the synapses of the human brain and is combined with physical labour using a computer etc. So mental labour creates value just as much as physical labour. And knowledge workers are just as much part of the proletariat as manual workers doing physical tasks.

Indeed, mental labourers are being exploited increasingly by capital to appropriate surplus value (profit) .So there is no need to invent a new term for the working class such as a ‘multitude’. This implies that the working class, those who only make a living by selling their labour power and own no means of production, no longer exist. This term hides the class struggle between labour and capital, thus confusing the need to replace capitalism.

At the most overtly political Labor Notes Conference in recent years, the experience of the Twin Cities stretched over everything, and exposed a rift between a rank and file ready to fight and a leadership still looking to November.

More than 4,000 workers, organizers, and self-described “troublemakers” braved brutal weather and travel changes to pack into a Chicago-area hotel this past weekend for the 2026 Labor Notes Conference, filling nearly 300 workshops, panels, and meetings over three days.

By most measures, this was the largest and most explicitly political iteration of the biennial gathering in recent years. As always, it served as a barometer of what’s animating the labor movement’s most advanced sectors. If the 2022 conference was shaped by the wave of new organizing that gripped the country after the pandemic, from Amazon to Starbucks, and 2024 carried the experience of the UAW’s stand-up strikes and Shawn Fain’s call for a 2028 general strike, this year’s was undoubtedly shaped by the second Trump administration, by the sharpening of class antagonism, and, above all, by the experience of Minneapolis, the fight against ICE, and the movement for immigrant rights.

The Long Shadow of Minneapolis

Last winter, amid its escalating attacks on immigrants, the Trump administration sent thousands of federal agents into the Twin Cities. Dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” the crackdown was brutal: agents grabbed immigrants from workplaces, outside schools, and off the streets, dragging them from stores and cars. Minnesotans responded with strength, building rapid-response and mutual aid networks to stop their neighbors and coworkers from being taken. The operation reached a fever pitch in January, when ICE agents killed Renée Nicole Good, a legal observer, and then Alex Pretti, a VA nurse likewise protecting his immigrant neighbors. Good’s murder laid bare the violence federal immigration forces were willing to use, and activists, organizations, and unions joined for a massive day of economic blackout on January 23, dubbed a day of “no work, no school, no shopping.”

Workers and unions weren’t incidental to that shutdown but were a crucial force that built it, leveraging their power to stop the gears of production. When federal agents murdered Pretti the next day, tens of thousands mobilized almost immediately, with calls for a general strike spreading through the streets. It was this experience that colored the conference — the idea that, beyond fighting for bread-and-butter demands, workers can mobilize to protect their own ranks and their communities against any and all attacks.

From Minnesotan workers being the recipients of the Troublemakers award, to the opening plenary — where rank-and-file workers joined speakers from the Twin Cities on stage — to the workshops drawing lessons from Minneapolis for organizing against ICE, to rank-and-file workers bringing their experiences from the floor in session after session, the experience of Minneapolis was everywhere this weekend.

During the opening plenary, SEIU Local 26’s Eva Lopez plainly stated that, in the run-up to January 23, rank-and-file workers were already on the move, mobilizing in their communities and were eager to act. It mattered, she emphasized, that unions joined the fight to help transform the largely individual initiatives of members into collective action. In an interview with Left Voice, CWA Local 7250’s Kieran Knutson described a similar situation within his own union: when ICE took two Laotian coworkers and the union began a campaign to fight for them, workers showed their whistles, showing how they were already mobilizing. It was essential for unions to join and organize the fight.

Mara Solis, a teacher from the Saint Paul Federation of Educators, further elaborated on this in her plenary speech, outlining how her union’s experience of organizing and preparing to strike had played a role in their fight against ICE, transforming the communication structures from previous strike campaigns into those that helped to organize school patrols, grocery runs, and rides to medical and immigration appointments once ICE descended on St. Paul. Repeating the refrain “No one is coming to save us / We keep us safe,” Solis emphasized how the long legacy of organizing at the heart of the labor movement must serve as a blueprint to fight back against every attack we face.

During the conference, it became clear that, in Minneapolis, Trump was forced to back down thanks to class struggle. Rank-and-file members showed how they organized from the bottom up, compelling even ossified union and social movement leaderships to take unified action. Minneapolis shed light on a labor movement increasingly aware that immigrants are the most vulnerable segment of our class; that workers cannot fight solely for our own livelihoods, but that we had to fight for the lives and dignity of all of us. This is an example also set by the labor movement fighting for Palestine since 2023.

Now, if the Minneapolis revolt did not spread and intensify, it was thanks to the coordinated action of Homeland Security and the local government to de-escalate the situation — and, of course, thanks to the intervention of the Democratic Party, which controls many of the state police departments collaborating with ICE — to channel discontent against Trump toward the November elections. For the Labor Notes conference this year, this strategic dilemma facing the labor movement in the United States was ever present: of whether to follow the recipe of relying and voting for Democrats, or to take the path of class struggle and the political organization of the working class on its own terms, with class independence.

A Growing Tension with the Democratic Party

Not far from this experience, indeed, sits the working class’s own contentious relationship with the Democratic Party. Trump’s return has exposed the deep crisis for the party. Simply positioning itself as the bulwark against the Right has not been enough, especially when it has offered no real answers to the working class’s structural crises. Not only has the Democratic party done little to stop the anti-immigrant offensive, it has backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and done little to defend even the most basic democratic rights under attack, such as trans rights, voting rights, and free speech. The party has been steadily hemorrhaging support: nearly 60 percent of Americans say they distrust both parties, and almost four in 10 wish there were an option beyond them entirely. It is inside that vacuum that sectors of the working class are beginning to imagine a political horizon that doesn’t run through the Democrats at all.

At Labor Notes, this expressed itself through the impatience with union leaderships proposing to organize around “stop the steal” come November. For rank-and-file workers, the fight against the Right couldn’t wait for an election timeline geared toward reviving a party that had nothing to offer working people. The attacks on democratic rights, including the right to vote, as many emphasized, were already underway.

But this dissatisfaction went further, extending to labor’s whole relationship to the Democratic Party — and to politics — as such. It’s no accident that beyond the question of Minneapolis, some of the best-attended sessions of the weekend were built to give space to this sentiment: on building independent political power, on running for office, on how to win back working-class people, and on how to even start talking politics with coworkers. Clearly, for a sector of rank-and-file workers, the question of labor’s power is intrinsically tied to its ability to intervene as a force of its own.

This is a debate that stretches well beyond Labor Notes. Over the last months, Jacobin alone has run a string of pieces arguing for Left, labor-backed candidates — even third-party or independent candidacies — as the way to rebuild a working-class presence in electoral politics. The debate played out at the conference with the same urgency. For much of the union leadership, despite plenty of rhetoric about extricating unions from the Democratic Party, the actual proposals on offer had little to do with class independence. Seth Ackerman’s “blueprint for a new party,” or party building by “hijacking” an existing ballot line, loomed large, alongside the case for independent political structures that, in practice, still end up electing Democrats. Far from class independence, they are both strategies to revive a Democratic Party in crisis.

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York is the clearest case in point. Despite the enthusiasm over his victory, he has so far done little to implement the program that energized the Left in the first place, and just as little to build independent working-class power. Mamdani, instead, has spent his early months in office negotiating with Governor Hochul and other sectors of the same Democratic Party machine his campaign was supposed to confront. His defenders, at the conference and beyond, seek to absolve him of any responsibility, insisting that’s an unfair standard since he’s “just a politician,” but that argument gets it backward. A working class coming back to political life, determined to fight not only against Trump and the Right but also for its own demands and program, deserves a political expression that is wholly its own — something more than a seat riding shotgun on political projects that aim to administer the capitalist state with a nicer face.

Notable exceptions stood out against that backdrop: members of the American Postal Workers Union, across sessions, pointed to the fight inside their own union to sever its relationship with the Democratic Party and explore the possibilities of independent political representation. Among those raising similar questions was Les Leopold, whose recent book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own, was made available for free to attendees, in the hopes of bringing the fight for an independent political force to this sector of the labor movement on the move.

Leopold’s own research underscored the point: a YouGov survey of 3,000 Rust Belt voters, which he brought into conversations across the weekend, found 57 percent in favor of a new organization (posed in the survey as the Independent Workers Political Association) to run working-class candidates independent of both parties. It is but a snapshot of a shift that is underway, but one that can’t be left in the tactical realm, hemmed in by just the questions of electoral viability or the undemocratic structures of the ballot line. Instead, it is a force that has to be unleashed to reshape the future of the working class, one that doesn’t just aspire to manage the affairs of the capitalist state from the left, but can actually organize our class to fight for its interests with every tool at its disposal.

Which Way Forward?

Labor Notes 2026 highlighted the vitality of the left wing of the labor movement and the strategic tasks and challenges ahead. Federal workers, many of whom got their start organizing at previous Labor Notes conferences, described an administration that has stripped more than 1 million workers of their collective bargaining rights through executive orders alone. Paul Osadebe of the Federal Unionists Network — formed at the 2022 conference when federal workers from different agencies first organized together — described how the rank and file are fighting back through whistleblower networks that document Trump’s attacks in real time. “The attack on federal workers is an attack on all working people,” he stressed. “They’re doing it to us so that they can get to all of you.”

Sessions on militarism carried the same charge. Panels on dismantling the war machine and fighting imperialism from the shop floor directly linked Trump’s foreign policy — from the current war in Iran to his attacks against Venezuela and the U.S.’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine — to broader imperialist practices. These discussions drew inspiration from global labor movements that have played a role in stopping arms shipments and mobilizing for Palestine, such as the general strike in Italy.

Alongside the rejection of Trump’s policies, discussions focused on the ongoing attacks by the bosses who continue to make workers pay for the crises they create. A central debate revolved around AI and how employers are spearheading this “technological revolution” to reshape warehouses, hospitals, and newsrooms. Workshops on data centers, the semiconductor supply chain, and algorithmic surveillance raised questions about how capital is deploying AI to control and shape the pace of work and our commons.

Towards a fighting labor movement, Minneapolis has shown us the way: when faced with ICE’s presence, workers and their communities came together in assemblies to discuss and decide, together, on the way forward to fight back. Knutson, of CWA, directly addressed the significance of that experience: “We don’t want a labor movement where the big decisions are just being made by a few leaders who are separated off from the rest of the rank and file,” he said. “I think we want a movement just like we want a society that’s controlled by regular working-class people. The movements that we build for have to be that way too.”

Indeed, Minneapolis is further proof that the future of the labor movement is inextricably linked to organizing the fight against every attack. The same political mobilizations that came out in solidarity with immigrants, culminating in the January 23 shutdown, injected new organizing energy straight into the shop floor in its aftermath. In the Twin Cities, for example, the experience of organizing for the day of action directly fueled unionization efforts in previously unorganized Starbucks stores.

In her opening remarks at Friday’s plenary, Labor Notes’ Barbara Madeloni noted that the conference exists to help build “the world that bosses and capital try to deny us” — one where working people are finally free to run their own affairs. Taken seriously, that vision means building a labor movement willing to act independently of the Democratic Party, not only defending against Trump’s attacks but fighting for a program and a party of its own.

It means, immediately, using labor’s full strength to fight the federal charges against the 15 Minneapolis activists, including several teachers, charged for their part in the anti-ICE mobilizations. It means fighting every attack on democratic rights, including the right to vote, which disproportionately affects Black working-class people, and tying that fight to full rights and citizenship for the millions of immigrants who live, work, and pay taxes in this country without ever having a political voice in it. It means standing in solidarity with working people across the world to bring the imperialist war machine to a halt, sending oil to Cuba, and cutting off aid to Israel’s continuing genocide of the Palestinian people. And it means setting labor’s political horizon higher than choosing the next set of managers for the capitalist state. It means using our power to build, instead, a party of combat capable of organizing our class here and now, and for the battles still to come.

Reprinted from Left Voice, June 2026.

The Quebec sovereignty movement has never been a monolithic bloc. From its inception, it has been riddled with deep tensions that extend beyond electoral strategies, referendum timetables, and partisan alliances to a far more fundamental question: what kind of independence do we want, for whom, and by what means? How do the main actors position themselves in relation to this essential issue? What kind of consultation should be offered to the people of Quebec? How should we assess the current situation surrounding the prospect of fighting for independence?

1. The federalist bloc: managing dependency and denying the self-determination of oppressed nations within the Canadian state

To answer these questions, we must begin with two essential observations. First, the Canadian state was built on national oppression—of the French-Canadian nation, of Indigenous and Inuit peoples, and of the Acadian people. Any questioning of this state will necessarily involve challenging these colonial relationships. Second, Quebec independence implies questioning the integrity of one of the most important imperialist states, an ally of the United States of America. Canadian imperialism will fiercely resist any attempt at Quebec’s separation or the recognition of the self-determination of oppressed nations, not simply because of any particular political figure, but because of the very foundations of this state and its role in the North American imperialist system. The end of this domination can only come about under the pressure of a vast popular movement capable of building active solidarities between the people of Quebec and the labour movement of the rest of Canada and with the Indigenous nations — the latter constituting today forces of resistance to the extractivist and petroleum course of the federal state.

Since the 1995 referendum defeat, the Canadian state has equipped itself with legal instruments to frame and neutralize any desire for Quebec self-determination. Chief among these is the Clarity Act, which grants the federal Parliament the power to determine the very validity of a referendum question and the majority required to recognize its legitimacy. The Carney government continues this tradition: rejecting the 50%+1 principle , unconditionally defending Canadian unity, and demonstrating a clear intention to prioritize fossil fuel and strategic materials development projects over the rights of Quebec and First Nations —thus revealing the profoundly extractivist nature of the federal state.

At the provincial level, the federalist bloc takes two forms. The CAQ claims to defend Quebec’s autonomy within the framework of Canadian federalism, while refusing to confront federal control over key economic levers: currency, major communication channels, immigration policy, international policy, and trade agreements. The Quebec Liberal Party goes even further, advocating for full federalism and mobilizing fear around immediate issues—healthcare, cost of living, housing—to stifle the national question, a tactic proven effective in the two previous referendums. This party is preparing a new campaign designed to attribute Quebec’s economic difficulties to the instability of a potential referendum, thereby consolidating the power dynamics that independence specifically aims to challenge.

2. The Parti Québécois bloc or mitigated sovereignty

On the national stage, the Parti Québécois consistently sought a compromise with Canadian imperialism. The sovereignty-association proposal aimed to strengthen Quebec’s political prerogatives (Quebec’s sovereign power over all its laws and treaties) while maintaining an association with the rest of Canada. This search for accommodation even went through a phase of “beautiful risk” after the 1980 referendum defeat, which consisted of establishing a new mode of Quebec’s integration into the Canadian whole based on relatively minimal demands. The 1995 referendum was held on the basis of sovereignty-partnership, which maintained common confederal institutions .

Since 1995, the Parti Québécois (PQ) has been characterized by a constant postponement of the referendum deadline. Bouchard, Landry, Boisclair, Marois, Lisée—all have balked at holding a referendum, citing the absence of “winning conditions.” This stance has gradually stripped the PQ’s sovereignty project of its urgency and demobilized its base. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon attempted to break with this logic by committing to hold a referendum during his first term. But this commitment runs up against some difficult realities: support for sovereignty has plateaued at just over a third of the population in recent polls, and nearly two-thirds oppose holding a referendum. St-Pierre Plamondon himself has not ruled out waiting until the end of Donald Trump’s term—fueling accusations of backpedaling that are undermining his credibility.

On social issues, the Parti Québécois (PQ) embodies the inherent ambiguity of a tradition that has always oscillated between a progressive popular nationalism and a bourgeois management of Quebec state affairs. Its reformist legacy is real: legislation on the financing of political parties, anti-strikebreaking legislation, automobile insurance and protection of agricultural zoning; pay equity; five-dollar daycare and drug coverage. This legacy long allowed the PQ to link the national project to a concrete improvement in the living conditions of the majority of the population. But it has always coexisted with structural compromises: Lévesque imposed decrees against public sector unions in 1981; Bouchard negotiated a “zero deficit” by cutting public services. Marois’s Charter of Values, presented as a defense of secularism, in practice targeted racialized people and weakened the link between the national movement and immigrant communities.

With PSPP, this oscillation seems to have resolved itself in favor of an identity-based nationalism centered on denouncing the importance of immigration and demanding cultural conformity under the pretext of defending secularism. By systematically linking the housing crisis, difficulties accessing healthcare, and the decline of French to immigration presented as “uncontrolled,” the Parti Québécois leader recycles rhetoric that makes migrants the scapegoats for the contradictions of Quebec capitalism .

The report by OUI Québec , based on consultations with fifty organizations, assesses the damage: 64% of the groups consulted believe that Quebec has regressed on living together with immigrants, 77% call for a comprehensive societal project, and 71% express a strong sense of powerlessness. The document’s most striking statement sums up the issue: “we have replaced pride with isolationism .” Former pillars of the party publicly acknowledge that this discourse is hindering the broadening of the independence movement’s social base, while the most radical identity-based wing, embodied by Mathieu Bock-Côté, responds by labeling these critics “useful idiots of federalism”—thus revealing the depth of the internal divide.

A strategy that marginalizes immigrant workers — who represent a growing share of Quebec’s wage earners, particularly in the health, service and precarious work sectors in agriculture or in the restaurant industry — deprives the national movement of essential social forces and objectively serves the interests of the dominant classes, who have every interest in keeping the working classes divided on the issue of independence.

On the issue of First Nations, the Parti Québécois (PQ) approaches the relationship with calculated caution . Its “Blue Book” on independence includes a chapter on First Nations, while specifying that their consent, although “highly desirable” from a political and moral standpoint, is not legally required. This formulation reveals a conception of Quebec sovereignty that remains centered on the colonial nation-state, seeking Indigenous support without granting a genuine right to self-determination.

3. A left-wing bloc: independence must carry a project of social and national emancipation

Faced with the federalist bloc and the conservative nationalism of the Parti Québécois, Québec Solidaire and the entire independentist social left defend a radically different conception of independence—not as the mere creation of a new state, but as the collective reconquest of power by the popular majority over its resources, its institutions, and its destiny. This conception implies the democratic nationalization (socialization) of strategic sectors of the economy, the ecological planning of production, distribution, and exchange, the guarantee of rights to health, education, and housing, and the enshrining of genuine equality between women and men in the Constitution of an independent Quebec.

On the issue of inclusion, Québec solidaire and the social left explicitly defend an independence project that considers newcomers to Quebec as subjects of the national project and not as a threat to be contained. Ruba Ghazal points out that young people from immigrant backgrounds support an inclusive independence project, but that they too often hear a discourse that gives them “the impression that everything is their fault.”

On Indigenous issues, Québec solidaire proposed Bill 698, co-developed with First Nations, aimed at obtaining their free, prior, and informed consent before any new legislation affecting their communities. This approach was developed through ongoing collaboration with First Nations, demonstrating that it is possible to work as equals. This position stems from a fundamental break with the colonial framework: Quebec independence cannot be built on the denial of the rights and territories of Indigenous peoples, lest it reproduce, on a different scale, the very colonial logic it claims to transcend.

4. The strategic choice: national majority or popular majority?

Two main approaches are vying to build a majority in favor of independence. The first focuses on broad-based unity. This would involve bringing together left- and right-wing pro-independence supporters around the minimal objective of sovereignty, postponing the debate on the societal project until after independence so as not to hinder the formation of a “Yes” camp. The second approach focuses on building a popular majority around an egalitarian, feminist, and anti-racist societal project, making independence the vehicle for profound social transformation.

The first strategy has a long history within the sovereigntist movement: it underlies the logic of convergence that has periodically led left-wing forces to subordinate themselves to the Parti Québécois (PQ) in the name of referendum unity. But it is riddled with contradictions that it cannot resolve. There is no such thing as socially neutral independence. All the concrete questions—what currency, what relations with Ottawa, what labour laws, what place for Indigenous nations, what immigration policy, what wealth distribution, what ecological transition, and so on—immediately reveal profound divergences between the sovereigntist right and left. To try to gloss over these differences is either to produce a project so vague that it fails to mobilize anyone, or to allow one side to silently impose its content on the other. This is, in fact, what has always happened: when the sovereigntist left has converged behind the PQ, it is the PQ’s social and economic platform—and not that of the left—that has defined the project presented to the public.

The demands for social transformation, workers’ rights, and feminist and anti-racist demands should, according to this strategy, be postponed until after independence, which in no way guarantees their realization. Furthermore, a coalition that brings together business leaders hostile to union rights and precarious workers, identity nationalists and newly arrived Quebecers from immigrant backgrounds, does not constitute a social bloc: it is a temporary amalgamation of groups with conflicting interests, which will fall apart as soon as the referendum campaign forces a clarification of the project. Finally, by postponing the debate on the societal project, this strategy deprives independence of what could make it a mobilizing force for the majority of the population: why would a healthcare worker, a tenant crushed by the cost of housing, or a young racialized woman fight for an independence whose social content remains deliberately undefined?

The second strategy starts from the opposite premise: a majority will not be built by stripping independence of its social content, but by giving it a sufficiently strong content so that the popular majority recognizes its own aspirations within it. If support for sovereignty has stagnated for the last thirty years, it is partly because the project has too often been presented as that of a culturally homogeneous nation, managed by a Francophone elite, without the majority of working people, who struggle to find housing, clearly seeing its benefits. Building a popular majority for independence means reversing this logic: showing that independence is an instrument at the service of those who live and work here—whatever their origin—and that national emancipation is inseparable from social emancipation. This fusion of the national and the social was at the heart of the most enduring national liberation movements of the 20th century. In concrete terms, it means linking independence to the right to housing, the defense and expansion of public services, the ecological transition, genuine equality between women and men, and the fight against systemic racism. This program is not a left-wing agenda superimposed on the national question. It is the embodiment of what it truly means to break with the structures of domination perpetuated by the federal order.

This approach is the only one capable of producing a truly broad social bloc—a coalition not of partisan machines but of organized social forces, rooted in real communities and capable of sustained mobilization: the labour movement, feminist organizations, environmental groups, immigrant associations, and Indigenous nations. All these forces have objective reasons to support an independence that clearly promises social transformation in their favour. None has any reason to mobilize for an independence whose social content would remain contingent on a future agreement between political elites with divergent interests. The pro-independence majority that Quebec needs will not emerge from a pact between parties, but from the convergence of social struggles and the national question—through the demonstration, in the daily practice of the movement, that independence is not the project of an ethnic faction or a managerial elite, but rather that of the majority of those who live, work, and fight here.

Québec Solidaire and the entire radical left have an irreplaceable role to play here: not simply to criticize the shortcomings of the PQ from the outside, but to actively build convergences between the national movement, the union movement, Indigenous communities and immigrant communities around a common project — an independent, ecological, social and decolonial Quebec.

5. The referendum must follow the constituent process

Quebec’s referendum history raises a question that the independence movement has never truly resolved: why were two intense campaigns, led by generations of activists, insufficient to convince a majority of the population to vote? The common answer—lack of leadership, unfavorable circumstances, economic fears skillfully cultivated by the federalist camp—is not wrong, but it is inadequate. It overlooks a deeper structural limitation, inherent in the very form of the referendum process as it has been practiced thus far.

The Quebec referendum model, as governed by the Act respecting popular consultations, is based on a fundamentally top-down approach. An elected government alone decides the timing, the question, and the framework of the vote. The population is then called upon to decide, in a few weeks of campaigning, a question formulated without its input and concerning a societal project on which it has not collectively deliberated. This process places the popular majority in the position of passive recipient rather than active participant: it is asked to approve or reject a project it did not help to create.

But political awareness—that is, the profound transformation of a people’s relationship with its own capacity to govern itself—doesn’t happen in a few weeks of televised debates. It requires time, real spaces for deliberation, and a collective experience of power and its possibilities. A referendum campaign can mobilize pre-existing convictions; it cannot, on its own, create new ones. In 1995, the near-victory of the Yes side rested on a surge of emotion in the final weeks of the campaign—a surge that expressed a deep desire for emancipation, but which was shattered by the absence of a sufficiently developed and grassroots-owned social project to withstand the pressure from the No side. The mobilization was real; the grassroots support, insufficient.

The central issue is not simply whether Quebec should be independent, but what kind of independent Quebec we want to build—what institutions will govern it, according to what values, in service of what interests, with what rights guaranteed for which communities. This question cannot be decided by any political party, even a sovereigntist or progressive one. It belongs to the people as a whole and can only be resolved through a long, open, and truly constituent deliberative process.

A constituent assembly is not simply a committee of experts tasked with drafting a constitution. It is a democratic space for collective construction, where elected ordinary citizens—representative of the true diversity of society—debate, negotiate, and decide on the foundations of living together. This process is in itself an act of political emancipation: people cease to see themselves as subjects governed by the decisions of a parliamentary elite and begin to see themselves as the legitimate authors of their own political order. It also creates the space in which progressive social forces can incorporate their demands into the founding project, thus overcoming the recurring dilemma of the sovereignist left—forced to choose between supporting an independence project whose social content remains vague or distancing itself from it at the risk of weakening the Yes camp.

This is also the only way to build a truly new relationship with Indigenous nations. The Indigenous question cannot be resolved after independence, nor can it be left to the goodwill of a sovereignist government. It must be at the heart of the constituent process itself, with the full and complete participation of First Nations in defining the legal and institutional foundations of the new Quebec. A referendum held without this preliminary work would, regardless of its outcome, reproduce the colonial logic of the Canadian state—simply transposed under the Quebec flag.

The sequence is therefore self-evident: the constituent process must precede the referendum. Only once the people of Quebec—in all their diversity—have had the opportunity to debate and collectively build the societal project that will accompany independence will the referendum question regain its full mobilizing power. The vote will then no longer be an abstract answer to a question formulated by a political party; it will be the democratic ratification of a project that the people themselves have developed. The legitimacy of the Yes side will be of a completely different nature—no longer that of an arithmetic majority wrested from the ashes of an emotional campaign, but that of a people who have collectively and deliberately exercised their sovereignty.

The independence movement didn’t lose in 1995 for lack of boldness or mobilization. It lost because the question of the Quebec it wanted to build after the Yes vote remained too vague, too detached from the concrete aspirations of the majority of the people. Learning this lesson means understanding that the next winning referendum won’t be the one held the fastest, but the one that is best prepared—by first letting the people take ownership of the issue themselves.

These strategic directions were largely developed in debates within Québec Solidaire that defined the party’s unique position on the national question. They deserve to be defended against strategies that have not yielded the expected results.

Reprinted from Presse-toi à gauche!, June 2026.

No War on Cuba!

By Barry Weisleder

The Canadian Network on Cuba held its 12th biennial convention in Toronto, June 5-7. Some forty delegates, representing over 20 organizations, gathered at the downtown Steelworkers’ Hall to hear reports from officials of revolutionary Cuba and to adopt an Action Plan. The aim of the CNC, in concert with solidarity movements across North America and around the world, is nothing less than to prevent a U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island nation -- which leading activists warn could occur at any moment. The gravity of the situation prompted the CNC convention to unanimously call for monthly mass demonstrations, and emergency actions as may be necessary, united by the demand “No War on Cuba!” A week of education and solidarity actions occurred from June 28-July 4.

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A Marxist Analysis of War Against Iran

By Gary Porter

The ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran—whether conducted through overt air strikes, covert assassinations, cyber warfare, or economic strangulation—is not a response to Iran’s nuclear program, not a defense of Israeli security, and not a mission to liberate the Iranian people. It is, rather, the latest expression of imperialism, a violent attempt to restructure the Middle East in the interests of global capital, to secure strategic energy corridors, and to arrest the decline of US hegemony in a world increasingly defined by inter-imperialist rivalry.

read more

Stop the AI Data Centers! Bring AI & Big Tech Into Public Control, Make Billionaires Pay!

By Kshama Sawant

Data centers have existed since the World Wide Web took off in the mid-1990s. But in the last five years, what are mainly being built are absolutely massive “hyperscale” data centers for AI, used for AI training and inference at unprecedented scale. There are nearly 4,500 data centers in the United States, accounting for about 45 percent of all facilities globally. Standard data centers may have a few thousand servers. These new hyperscale facilities exceed 5,000 servers and can go up to hundreds of thousands of servers and can occupy millions of square feet. One hyperscale data-center campus can demand anywhere from 200 to more than 500 megawatts of electricity—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. There are approximately 600 to 650 operational hyperscale data centers in the United States, 54 percent of the total worldwide number.

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Open the Books! Stop Stonewalling! Support OPSEU!

By Julius Arscott and Barry Weisleder

Socialist Action members in Toronto have been walking with Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO Local 540) picketers at Sistering, a community center. The strikers are among 4,000 social workers engaged in an unprecedented sectoral strike at 24 sites, across many agencies and employers in community, health and social services throughout Ontario -- for six weeks so far. The strikers demand funding to ensure the continuation of the care and support they provide to many of the most vulnerable people in the community, along with a pay increase denied to the workers due to Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s unconstitutional Bill 124 over the past two years. Wait lists are growing and people are falling through the cracks. Many of the workers involved in the strike provide essential services to people with disabilities, children and youth in crisis, people experiencing homelessness, women fleeing violence, and individuals with mental health and addiction challenges.

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Intimate Partner Violence Pathology

By Rubina Chowdhury

Politicians are arguing about this matter across Canada, especially in the Ontario Legislature. Globally, 1 out of 3 women experiences Intimate Partner Violence. The World Health Organization identifies IPV as “a major global public health concern, as it affects millions of people and can result in immediate and long-lasting health, social and economic consequences. IPV impacts people of all genders, ages and socioeconomic statuses. It affects people of all racial, educational, ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds. However, women experience this form of gender-based violence at much higher rates, most often perpetrated by men. IPV can occur in both public and private spaces, as well as online. When children are exposed to IPV, it is considered a form of child maltreatment.”

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Crisis of Capitalism – Crisis of Labour Leadership Summary of the 2026 Socialist Action / Ligue pour Action Socialist Annual Convention

By John Wilson

Socialist Action held its annual convention June 20 in-person in Toronto and on-line. The convention is supreme in SA, reflecting its democratic centralist frame-work. Officers and central bodies were elected and we received fraternal greetings from Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action USA and Kshama Sawant of Workers Strike Back USA. We had local area reports and the Treasurer’s Report. Barry Weisleder, outgoing Federal Secretary, presented the Political Resolution (PR) around which there was the predominant discussion of the meeting. The PR analyzes the national and international situations and proposes tasks and perspectives for the coming year. The world situation is alarming, which is demonstrated by the following quote on the environment: “The deterioration of our planet is approaching a catastrophic crisis, due to an economic system that puts private profit above all else.

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The Canadian Network on Cuba held its 12th biennial convention in Toronto, June 5-7, 2026. Some forty delegates, representing over 20 organizations, gathered at the downtown Steelworkers’ Hall to hear reports from officials of revolutionary Cuba and to adopt an Action Plan. The aim of the CNC, in concert with solidarity movements across North America and around the world, is nothing less than to prevent a U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island nation -- which leading activists warn could occur at any moment.

The gravity of the situation prompted the CNC convention to unanimously call for monthly mass demonstrations, and emergency actions as may be necessary, united by the demand “No War on Cuba!” A week of education and solidarity actions occurred from June 28-July 4.

Washington’s decades-long economic war against the socialist republic has sharpened under Donald Trump and Marco Rubio into a policy of siege and collective punishment designed to strangle the Cuban economy and inflict maximum hardship on 13 million people. The hegemon and its imperialist allies are set on a course of starvation to force political capitulation, leading to the liquidation of Cuba’s widely admired social achievements.

As Isaac Saney wrote in his article published in the June 23, 2026 edition of Canadian Dimension:

“Against this backdrop, Cuba’s struggle remains what it has always been: the effort to preserve national sovereignty and social justice under extraordinarily hostile conditions. The current measures should therefore be understood neither as a capitulation nor as an abandonment of socialist aspirations. They are better understood as an attempt—whether ultimately successful or not—to navigate a perilous moment in defence of a revolutionary project that continues to face the concentrated hostility of the most powerful empire in history.

The debate over the reforms will continue. It should. But the first question must never be forgotten: what would happen if Cuba did nothing? The Revolution was never confronted with a choice between an ideal socialism and imperfect reforms. It was confronted with the challenge of defending socialist sovereignty amid economic siege.”

Cuba’s revolutionary leadership is grappling with severe scarcities. Like the Bolsheviks’ and their NEP in 1921, it deserves support, not socialist sabotage. Cuba is beleaguered but unbowed. It remains a state where the working class is in power.

As I presented in my report to the CNC Convention,

“For Socialist Action / Ligue pour l’Action Socialiste, everything that we do is profoundly influenced by the example of the Cuban revolution and by the Fidelista current that has led the country for over 67 years….. We call out the hypocrisy of the Mark Carney Liberal government. Ottawa falsely claims it is a friend of Cuba, yet it fails to denounce Washington’s economic warfare and multiple U.S. threats to seize control of the island nation. Carney even refuses to insist that Air Canada and West Jet resume flights to Havana and opt to re-fuel in Mexico and neighbor Caribbean countries….

“Why is the Canadian ruling class content to be an accomplice of an unprovoked economic war? Unfortunately, the answer is all too clear. It reveals the desperation and weakness of the capitalist rulers, the fallibility of imperialist domination of the global south. The example of revolutionary Cuba is a moral threat to the global system of exploitation and oppression. Cuba has demonstrated, especially before the present heightened and intensified blockade, that a better world is possible. Cuba’s internationalism, its egalitarian example, its very sovereignty poses a moral and political danger to a system that is choking humanity and nature. The Cuban revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Vilma Espin and Che Guevara, led millions of workers and farmers to power. They expropriated the capitalists, as Che said, “right down to the nails in their boots….

“The Cubans sent teachers across Latin America and the Caribbean. They sent aid and engineers to earthquake victims in Pakistan. They sent soldiers to defeat the armies of Apartheid in Angola, asking nothing in return. Is Cuba a dictatorship? Yes. It is a dictatorship of the proletariat, an economic democracy. We defend it as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.”

Imperialist Hands Off Cuba! Abajo el Bloceo! Viva la revolucion socialista! Viva Cuba! Venceremos!

The ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran—whether conducted through overt air strikes, covert assassinations, cyber warfare, or economic strangulation—is not a response to Iran’s nuclear program, not a defense of Israeli security, and not a mission to liberate the Iranian people. It is, rather, the latest expression of imperialism, a violent attempt to restructure the Middle East in the interests of global capital, to secure strategic energy corridors, and to arrest the decline of US hegemony in a world increasingly defined by inter-imperialist rivalry.

Imperialism and the Crisis of US Hegemony

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism argued that as capitalist economies enter their financialized monopoly phase, they are driven to export capital and seize foreign territories to resolve the crisis of over-accumulation and declining rate of profit. Applying this framework to the current conflict, the war on Iran must be understood as a response to the deepening contradictions of US capitalism: stagnant wages, soaring inequality, ballooning debt, and declining manufacturing capacity. In previous eras, these contradictions might have been managed through domestic reforms. Today, with the social safety net gutted and the working class demobilized, the ruling class turns to foreign war as a mechanism of crisis management.

The timing is significant. The war on Iran intensifies precisely as US global dominance faces its most serious challenge since the Soviet Union. China’s rise, Russia’s resurgence, and the spread of de-dollarization threaten the material foundations of US power. From a Marxist standpoint, the war is not a sign of strength but of weakness—a desperate gambit by a weakening hegemon to smash an independent state that has resisted imperial domination for four decades.

The war aims are not merely to change the regime in Tehran, but to send a message to Beijing and Moscow that the United States retains the capacity and will to reshape the global order by force. Iran is the target; China is the real adversary.

Oil, Choke Points, and the Material Basis

While mainstream commentary treats oil as one factor among many, Marxists place it at the center. Approximately 20 percent of the world’s petroleum passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran partially controls. Any disruption would trigger a global economic crisis. For US imperialism, controlling Iranian oil infrastructure is not merely desirable but structurally necessary.

But the material logic runs deeper. Seventy-five percent of Middle Eastern oil now flows eastward to fuel China’s industrial machine. From Washington’s perspective, allowing Iran to remain independent means allowing Beijing to secure energy supplies without US interference. A war that cripples Iranian production or installs a compliant regime would choke Chinese access while stabilizing the petrodollar system that underpins US financial hegemony.

The economic warfare already waged against Iran—sanctions that have blocked access to global banking, frozen assets, and prevented food and medicine imports—demonstrates the logic of capitalist war in its pure form. These sanctions have killed indirectly what bombs kill directly. Marxists refuse the distinction: both are instruments of imperial domination.

Israel as Sub-Imperialism

A distinctive contribution of Marxist analysis is the concept of sub-imperialism—a regional power that, while subordinate to the global hegemon, exercises its own imperial ambitions within its sphere of influence. Israel fits this category precisely.

Israel does not act as a mere proxy. It has its own material interests: control of water resources in the Golan Heights and West Bank, access to natural gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the suppression of Palestinian resistance that Iran supports. But these interests objectively serve the broader US strategy of containing and destabilizing Tehran.

The relationship is hierarchical yet symbiotic. The United States provides diplomatic cover, logistical support, and the vast majority of weaponry. In return, Israel executes high-risk operations—assassinations of nuclear scientists, political and military leaders and sabotage of enrichment facilities, strikes on Iranian assets in Syria—that the US cannot openly claim. When Israeli bombs fall on Iranian soil, US capital benefits.

Marxists reject the liberal framing that distinguishes “aggressive Israel” from “moderate US leadership.” Both are imperialist states. Their alliance is an alliance of capitals, not of values.

The Gulf Monarchies: Comprador Complicity

No analysis of the war on Iran is complete without examining the Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar—as active accomplices rather than neutral bystanders. These rentier states are not victims of Iranian expansionism. Their ruling families are comprador bourgeoisies whose wealth depends on subordination to Western capital.

The class character of these regimes is unambiguous. They survive through brutal repression at home—no unions, no political parties, no democratic rights—and submission abroad. Their billions are parked in Western banks. Their militaries are armed by the Pentagon. Their sovereignty is conditional on US approval.

In the war on Iran, this complicity takes concrete form. US Central Command (CentCom) operates from Al Udeid in Qatar and Al Dhafra in the UAE. Saudi Arabia has provided intelligence and reportedly allowed overflight rights for strikes. The Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and several Gulf states not as a peace process but as the construction of an anti-Iran military alliance.

The betrayal is most visible on Palestine. Despite the ongoing genocide in Gaza, not a single Gulf monarchy has broken diplomatic relations with Israel. This is not pragmatism. It is class alliance—Gulf capital standing with Israeli capital against the Axis of Resistance, the only forces in the region that have ever meaningfully challenged Western domination.

Marxists name this betrayal openly. The Gulf monarchies are not “moderates” or “peacemakers.” They are the regional enforcers of imperialism, paid in petrodollars to keep their populations docile while US and Israeli bombs fall.

Ideology and Mystification

As with the Iraq War, the official justifications for war on Iran—nuclear weapons, human rights, regime change—are understood by Marxists as ideology in the precise sense: representations that obscure material realities while serving capitalist class interests.

The nuclear threat is manufactured. US intelligence agencies have repeatedly confirmed that Iran has no active weapons program. The human rights critique, while reflecting the brutality of the Iranian theocracy, is weaponized cynically—the United States supports far more brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Regime change is openly discussed, with the Trump administration reportedly exploring installing the exiled Pahlavi family as a neocolonial client.

What makes the ideology effective is its partial truth. Iran’s government is repressive although recent protests in Iran were clearly part of a CIA funded and organized effort to destabilize Iran and to provide political cover for the looming US and Israeli attacks. Such propaganda is deployed to justify a war whose real purpose is control over oil, containment of China, and the maintenance of US hegemony. The working class in the imperialist countries is told to support the war for “democracy” while democracy at home is gutted by the same ruling class.

The Anti-War Imperative

The appropriate response to the war on Iran is not reformist tinkering or liberal hand-wringing. It is militant, uncompromising opposition rooted in working-class internationalism.

The tasks are clear. First, expose the material drivers of the war—oil, China, and the crisis of US capitalism—against the fog of humanitarian and security rhetoric. Second, break the popular front illusion that any faction of the US ruling class, or indeed of any western imperialist regime, represents a “lesser evil” on Iran. Both parties in the US support the war. In Canada both Carney and Poilievre support the war. Third, refuse anti-imperialist apologetics for the Iranian regime. Opposing US bombs does not require defending theocratic repression. The slogan remains: Self-determination for Iran. End the US Israeli war. End the sanctions against Iran. No more arms to Israel. US out of West Asia.

Finally, build the only force capable of stopping imperial war: the organized working class. Mass marches are important for building support independent of the ruling class. But only strikes, occupations, and the refusal to produce or transport war materiel can impose material costs on the war machine. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote a century ago, “Bourgeois peace is merely the preparation for another war. The only peace that lasts is the peace of a classless society”.

Against endless imperialist war, the ultimate solution is working class internationalism and Socialist revolution.

Data centers have existed since the World Wide Web took off in the mid-1990s. But in the last five years, absolutely massive “hyperscale” data centers for AI training and inference are being built at an unprecedented scale. There are nearly 4,500 data centers in the United States, some 600-650 of which are hyperscale, accounting for about 54 percent of all such facilities globally.

Standard data centers may have a few thousand servers. These new hyperscale facilities can exceed 5,000 or even hundreds of thousands and can occupy millions of square feet. One data-center campus can demand anywhere from 200 to more than 500 megawatts of electricity—as much as hundreds of thousands of American homes. These hyperscale data centers are already dramatically pushing up electricity bills for working people. Data Centers not only use up insane amounts of electricity, they also distort the flow of electricity to homes, increasing the risk of electrical fires and blackouts. Hyperscale data centers can also consume millions of gallons of water daily, sometimes leaving surrounding residences with dry taps. They cause air pollution, water pollution, and sound pollution, which have huge negative impacts on working people nearby and which come at a time when the climate crisis is already at a breaking point.

No wonder that seven out of ten Americans oppose the data centers and are in massive opposition to the proliferation of AI. Protests by working people have shut down the plans for about 48 of these data centers, equating roughly $68 billion worth of projects. But there are over 670 more hyper scale data centers in the pipeline. And countless more mass layoffs.

Overall, an expected $3 to $7 trillion is expected to be spent just on AI hyperscale data centers in the next five years. The super-rich are determined to ram through the data centers because of the trillions in dollars of profits that are at stake. AI is now a central component of genocide and imperialist war, ICE terror, mass layoffs, the surveillance state, and climate crisis because AI is the new frontier for super-profits for the super-rich.

The capitalist class will do anything they need to in order to keep expanding and profiting from AI. Institutions like the police, the courts, the U.S. Congress, State Legislatures, City Councils will intimidate, threaten, and try to crush the growing movement against data centers. They have begun accusing opponents of AI data centers of “anti-tech extremism” with ensuing arrests and lawsuits against those who dare to fight back.

The ruling class will absolutely not stop the AI and data center juggernaut unless threatened by a powerful nationwide mass movement. A working class leadership with a backbone to go up against billionaires and with a proven strategy to win will be necessary.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are owned by the billionaire class and neither provides a path forward for working people. My main opponent, 29-year genocidal incumbent Democrat Adam Smith, is the top Democrat being funded by Palantir and Anduril, which profit from war and surveillance AI.

My campaign for US Congress is fighting to end all AI data centers and ban all tax incentives for the super-rich in tech and real estate. I am fighting for a ban on the use of AI in wars. I am calling for a national ban on algorithmic rental price-fixing software. My campaign is the only one calling for Big Tech and Big Energy corporations to be taken into democratic public ownership by workers. This is the only way that technology can be harnessed for the good of working people and all living species, because we cannot control what we do not own.

With the billionaires playing for trillions of dollars of wealth from AI, they are gambling with the lives of billions of working people. Wall Street and the super-rich must pay for the coming economic recession, not working people.

The data center and mass layoff onslaught is not a ‘machines versus humans’ war — it is class war by the wealthy against billions of working and poor people. That’s why ending it will require an organized class war back against the bosses.

Kshama Sawant is a revolutionary socialist and a founding member of Workers Strike Back, who during her 10 years a Seattle City Council member, led the movement to win the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing. Kshama is now running for the U.S. Congress as an independent antiwar socialist. https://www.kshamasawant.org

Editor’s Note:

Canadian Prime Minister Carney has just announced “Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy” — allocating 2 billion dollars towards AI infrastructure, including the construction of large-scale data centres. More than 90 facilities are either being proposed or are under construction — in addition to the five that have already been built. The public is already skeptical of this strategy, with many communities across Canada uniting to push back against the rollout of AI data centres in their cities. In the face of large demonstrations, massive petitioning and council delegations, the City of Hamilton, Ontario has voted for a moratorium on data centres to allow for public consultation and a robust environmental assessment.

Socialist Action members in Toronto have been walking with Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO Local 540) picketers at Sistering, a community center. The strikers are among 4,000 social workers engaged in an unprecedented sectoral strike at 24 sites, across many agencies and employers in community, health and social services throughout Ontario -- for six weeks so far.

The strikers demand funding to ensure the continuation of the care and support they provide to many of the most vulnerable people in the community, along with a pay increase denied to the workers due to Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s unconstitutional Bill 124 over the past two years. Wait lists are growing and people are falling through the cracks. Many of the workers involved in the strike provide essential services to people with disabilities, children and youth in crisis, people experiencing homelessness, women fleeing violence, and individuals with mental health and addiction challenges.

J.P Hornick, president of OPSEU/SEFPO, stated “Ford needs to stop passing the buck by suggesting this dispute is between managers and union members. Employers are telling us clearly that funding is not there – with some even signing joint letters calling on urgent funding to end the strike. Compared to the billions of dollars flowing through private companies instead of going to the front lines, doing what’s right to make these workers whole amounts to pocket change.”

A report from OPSEU shows the province has funneled more than $1 billion through three private corporations administering public programs currently operating with limited transparency. Data from the Financial Accountability Office shows that funding for social services is not keeping up with demand and necessary service levels. There’s no money to address poverty-level wages, staffing shortages and deteriorating services. But there’s plenty of cash for well-connected corporations.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reports that the outcome of low and falling wages is that a large share of workers providing social and community services are living in poverty themselves. Women are grossly overrepresented in this work. They make up 87 per cent of Ontario’s social service workforce, one-third of whom are racialized.

OPSEU’s ‘Worth Fighting For” campaign is calling on the government to stop the service cuts and lay-offs—and to provide adequate and stable funding to the agencies and workers holding communities together. “Essential social services cannot operate on low wages, goodwill and a smile.”

In a powerful show of solidarity, more than 850 striking workers descended on the annual “Ford Fest” at a park in Scarborough on June 25, to send a clear message to Premier Ford: Do the right thing: fund our services, deliver stolen wages, and end the strike!

When Ford looked out from his stage, he was met by a sea of striking workers in purple shirts who turned their backs on him in a spontaneous and symbolic act of protest. Fed up with being ignored by this government, members raised their voices calling for wage justice and funding for community and social services. The Premier swiftly left the stage and the event, citing security concerns.

Workers are uniting behind this historic strike to make their case. They’ve had enough. They deserve our fullest support.