The Red Review

The Red Review | Issue #37 (October 2026)

The Red Review — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:15:40 GMT

Canada’s Narrowing Space for Dissent: Speech, Assembly, and the Right to Strike

By Gary Porter

Canada has long positioned itself internationally as a rights-respecting democracy, its Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing expression, peaceful assembly, association, and — through judicial interpretation — the right to strike. But over the past two years, a pattern has emerged across federal, provincial, and municipal governments: a steady tightening of the legal space in which Canadians can protest, speak, organize, and withhold their labour. Despite some push back from the courts, the legislative and enforcement direction points toward contraction rather than expansion of these freedoms.

By MSA & CCBF

Across Ontario, workers, small business owners, and entire communities are being squeezed by rising costs, precarious work, and the devastating consequences of climate catastrophe. Doug Ford’s unapologetic corporate agenda of austerity and privatization is only accelerating the surging crises. Rather than equipping municipalities to meet growing needs, his government has cut their funding and stripped their ability to deliver the public services on which communities rely. Public services — from mass transit to libraries— are defunded and left to decline while the private sector waits to fill the gap at a price.

By Scarlett Gillespie

I am deeply honoured to receive the endorsement of the Municipal Socialist Alliance in my campaign to become the next Mayor of Hamilton. This endorsement means a great deal to me because there is real common ground between the MSA’s vision for municipal politics and the reasons I entered this race in the first place. Hamilton is a working-class city. Yet too many working people are being priced out of housing, struggling with the cost of living, watching public infrastructure deteriorate, and feeling increasingly disconnected from the institutions that are supposed to represent them. The MSA’s platform calls for housing justice, stronger tenant protections, more public, non-profit and co-operative housing, investment in public services, and a municipal government that puts working people and communities before private profit.

By Fernando Scolnik

Tens of thousands took to the streets in more than 70 cities across Argentina in Saturday’s March of Anger (Marcha de la Bronca). The demonstrations were a long-awaited breath of fresh air in the face of right-wing austerity and repression, as well as “opposition” from political and union leaderships that call for passivity, even in the face of the government’s weakening. Saturday’s protests are not the first time in recent months that thousands have shown a will to fight, defying the passivity of these union bureaucracies. On August 6, thousands protested against the “Inviolability of Private Property” bill that sought to attract foreign investment by streamlining evictions and making it harder to take public ownership over private lands.

By Alan Freeman

It is a commonplace idea in Western Left Liberalism, including too many Marxists, that Marx had no conception of imperialism and had nothing to say about it. This ridiculous idea can be sustained only because the Left Liberals do not understand that Imperialism is nothing but an extension of Colonialism. This, in turn, arises because the western Left thinks, frankly, that Capitalist Imperialism is a modern invention. This is a very unfortunate misreading of Lenin’s famous description of Imperialism as a ‘final stage’ of capitalism. It would be truer to say that capitalism is the final stage of imperialism. This is because capitalism was born out of colonialism, of which modern imperialism is merely the most developed form.

By Bianca Mugyenyi

Months of organizing brought movements together and carried an unapologetically anti-capitalist message across the country. The September 14 demonstration against Mark Carney’s CEO summit was a big boost for the Left. Some 2,000 people participated in the Confront Carney’s CEO Summit protest in Toronto, which included a “Carnival Against Capitalism” targeting the largest gathering of capitalists in Canadian history. The biggest explicitly anti-capitalist protest in Canada in many years received widespread mainstream media coverage. CBC’s The National went live to the march at the top of its broadcast that night, while international outlets including Reuters, Al Jazeera and the New York Times reported on the protest.

Canada's Narrowing Space for Dissent: Speech, Assembly, and the Right to Strike

The Red Review — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:54:00 GMT

Canadians who protest Zionist violence, starvation and murder of Palestinians face a constant drumbeat of police harassment, arrests and legal hassles in continuing reaction to the slightest complaint by Zionist provocateurs. Zionists, however, violate Canada’s laws by recruiting Canadians to join Israel’s army and participate in the disgusting genocide against Palestinians as part of a foreign military. In addition Zionists persistently organize fake charities so that rich donors get tax deductions for their support of the Israeli state. But response to these illegal acts is minimal and slow.

The Legal Architecture behind the Squeeze

Section 2 of the Charter protects freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association. Crucially, though, all Charter rights are qualified by Section 1, which allows government to impose limits that are “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” Since the Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling in R. v. Oakes, courts have applied a proportionality test: government needs a pressing objective, and its chosen means must impair the right no more than necessary. This means Canadian rights have never functioned as absolutes. As governments increasingly invoke rationales for public safety, national security, and anti-hate, the room to justify restrictions expands similarly. Critics argue this is precisely what’s happening now: legitimate-sounding objectives are being used to include broad categories of peaceful, lawful activity.

Assembly and Protest: A Patchwork of New Restrictions

The clearest evidence of contraction of freedom is at the municipal and provincial level. Since 2024, waves of Ontario municipalities have adopted so-called “bubble zone” bylaws that restrict protest activity near designated gathering spaces. Vaughan’s version, currently being challenged in court by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), can impose fines as high as $100,000 on people found to have participated in a protest deemed offensive or disruptive to nearby institutions — a standard that civil liberties advocates say is dangerously subjective. Winnipeg has floated a similar anti-protest bylaw, and in early 2026 Ontario’s premier sought a court injunction to block the long-running annual Al Quds rally in Toronto.

Quebec has moved further still. Bill 9 and Bill 13, both advancing through the National Assembly, have drawn condemnation from the CCLA and the Ligue des droits et libertés, who argue the legislation unjustifiably curtails expression, assembly, and association under the banner of public safety and secularism. More than 220 civil society groups signed on to warnings about Bill 13 specifically.

At the federal level, Bill C-9 — officially “An Act to amend the Criminal Code (hate propaganda, hate crime and access to religious or cultural places),” introduced in September 2025 — has become the most contested piece of legislation in this space. The bill creates a new offence for publicly displaying symbols associated with listed terrorist entities and expands protections around religious and cultural sites by criminalizing intimidation and obstruction near them. The CCLA and more than three dozen other organizations warn that the bill’s vague thresholds — particularly around hate symbol display and the government’s discretion over which groups are “listed entities” — could sweep in demonstrators who never intended to incite hatred. Specific concern has centred on solidarity protests connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including demonstrations outside synagogues and community centres hosting events unrelated to worship, which critics say could now trigger criminal liability regardless of protesters’ actual intent. The bill was pushed through committee on an accelerated timeline in early 2026, with critics arguing that the abbreviated process weakened, rather than improved, its safeguards.

There have been judicial checks on this trend, however. In a case with major implications for protest rights, the Federal Court ruled in January 2024 — and the Federal Court of Appeal upheld in January 2026 — that the 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act against the “Freedom Convoy” blockades was unlawful and unconstitutional. The appellate court specifically warned that treating infrastructure blockades as national-security emergencies risked chilling a wide range of legitimate protest activity, from pipeline demonstrations to rail blockades. That ruling stands as a counterweight to the broader legislative trend, showing courts remain willing to check executive overreach even when it targets disruptive rather than peaceful protest.

The Right to Strike: Protected in Principle, Constrained in Practice

Labour rights present a more genuinely mixed picture. Since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, the right to strike has been recognized as constitutionally protected under Section 2(d) of the Charter, as an essential component of meaningful collective bargaining. That principle has been reaffirmed and, in some instances, strengthened: an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled that legislation barring Toronto Transit Commission workers from striking was unconstitutional, finding the government had failed to prove transit service met the legal threshold of an “essential service” whose disruption would endanger public health or safety.

Yet government intervention in strikes has continued and, arguably, intensified. Canada Post workers have faced repeated federal intervention across recent labour disputes — including a December 2024 order under Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code directing the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to end a strike and impose arbitration. The postal workers’ union challenged that order as unconstitutional; the CIRB rejected the challenge, concluding the right to strike, while “essential,” is “not absolute,” and that Section 107 did not violate the Charter. A separate, closely watched Ontario Court of Appeal decision in February 2026 examined the 2018 back-to-work legislation that ended a Canada Post strike, ruling that while such legislation does infringe workers’ associational rights, it can be justified under Section 1 when paired with a genuinely neutral, fair arbitration process that approximates what free bargaining would have produced. In effect, the courts have created a functional workaround: governments can still end strikes by legislative fiat, provided they substitute a credible arbitration mechanism.

In May 2026, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion confirming that International Labour Organization Convention No. 87 protects a right to strike — a decision with potential implications for the 158 signatory countries, including Canada — though the court deliberately avoided defining the precise scope or permissible limits of that right, leaving the matter for the ILO’s Governing Body to revisit later in 2026.

On September 21, 2026, the Carney government tabled an omnibus Bill C-39 “Building Canada Strong Act”, which will amend several pieces of legislation that could delay priority projects. The bill amends the Canada Labour Code to expand the use of the problematic Section 107, despite Labour groups calling for its elimination. Unions have expressed outrage, saying these amendments violate workers’ constitutional right to withdraw their labour and entrench government interference in labour disputes.

A Pattern, Not a Uniform Crackdown

What emerges is not a simple story of authoritarian drift, but a genuine tightening across multiple, overlapping fronts. Municipalities are restricting where protest can occur; provinces are passing broader public-order and secularism legislation; the federal government is expanding criminal liability around hate symbols and religious sites; and labour boards continue to bless government intervention in strikes provided procedural substitutes are offered. Countervailing court decisions — on the Emergencies Act, on TTC strikes, on back-to-work legislation’s constitutional limits — demonstrate that Canada’s judiciary remains an active check on these trends, not a rubber stamp. But the direction of travel, driven by legislatures rather than courts, points toward a narrower, more conditional understanding of speech, assembly, and strike rights than existed even five years ago.

Fight for a Working Class City Hall!

The Red Review — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:48:59 GMT

Municipal Socialist Alliance and Capitalism Can’t be Fixed release Policy Platform

These conditions are not unique to Ontario. Provinces, territories and municipalities across Canada face the same conditions because they operate within the same political-economic order: capitalism– a global system controlled by capitalists that operates in their interests. The pursuit of private profit over public good pollutes the planet and neglects basic needs, blocking human, economic and ecological potential. The province-wide Municipal Socialist Alliance (MSA), together with Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed, is challenging this arrangement. Our mission is to expose the injustices of capitalism, hold its administrators and beneficiaries accountable, and propose a genuine socialist alternative in City Hall that puts working people, communities, and the environment first.

Our policies aim to improve the lives of workers and strengthen communities immediately. We fight for more public housing, expanded public transit, and insist that no one goes hungry in one of the richest and most developed countries in the world. While pursuing gains within the liberal capitalist system does not tackle problems at their roots and can only, at best, provide relief, socialists fight for every improvement that strengthens the working class and our communities. The MSA considers the attainment of elected office at city hall not as an end in itself, but as a platform on which to agitate for material gains, to organize and support popular movements, and to raise political class consciousness by exposing the inherent limitations of capitalism.

The comprehensive 12 page platform includes 34 policy areas grouped under 5 themes: Housing for All, Expand Public Services, Solve Social Problems through Social Services, Defend Democracy, Justice and Activism in Local Committees and We Can Afford a Better Future.

Why I Welcome Endorsement of Municipal Socialist Alliance

The Red Review — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:41:58 GMT

Hamilton is a working-class city. Yet too many working people are being priced out of housing, struggling with the cost of living, watching public infrastructure deteriorate, and feeling increasingly disconnected from the institutions that are supposed to represent them.

The MSA’s platform calls for housing justice, stronger tenant protections, more public, non-profit and co-operative housing, investment in public services, and a municipal government that puts working people and communities before private profit. Those principles intersect powerfully with my own platform.

I am fighting to expand RGI, co-operative and non-profit housing; protect tenants; properly maintain the public housing we already own; invest in prevention instead of endlessly paying for crises after they happen; strengthen the services people depend on; and make City Hall more accountable to the people who actually live and work here.

We may not agree on every individual policy (and no endorsement requires that!) but I believe strongly in building coalitions around the things that materially improve people’s lives.

Politics should be about more than managing decline. It should give ordinary people hope that their government can actually make their lives better.

I entered this race because working-class people deserve more than being spoken about during elections. We deserve political power. We deserve a seat at the table. And we deserve a Hamilton where prosperity is shared rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.

Thank you to the Municipal Socialist Alliance for your confidence in me and for standing alongside this campaign. Together, we keep organizing.

Vote Scarlett Gillespie for Mayor of Hamilton

https://scarlettformayor.ca/

https://www.instagram.com/scarlett4mayor/?hl=en Scarlett4Mayor

Argentina: Tens of Thousands Take to Streets in March of Anger

The Red Review — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:37:24 GMT

Saturday’s protests are not the first time in recent months that thousands have shown a will to fight, defying the passivity of these union bureaucracies. On August 6, thousands protested against the “Inviolability of Private Property” bill that sought to attract foreign investment by streamlining evictions and making it harder to take public ownership over private lands.

Revolutionary socialist congresswoman Myriam Bregman, member of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), floated the idea of organizing the “March of Rage.” Across the entire country, over 350 organizations of workers, students, and leaders from cultural, human rights, and political spheres planned grassroots rallies. The event gained so much traction that every media outlet in Argentina had to cover it. The committees for a party of the new working class also played a key role, spreading the word far and wide, and ultimately forming the largest contingents in the March of Anger.

The Roots of the Anger

Saturday’s march reflected crises that had been building for years. A telling scene in Berazategui, in the Buenos Aires suburbs, had gone viral. More than 1,500 people stood in a line several blocks long to land a job at a local steakhouse, for wages of approximately 800,000 pesos (US$530).

The scene was symbolic of an Argentina whose economic and social crisis is deepening, confirmed by recent economic figures. The country’s economy contracted by 0.6 percent in the second quarter of 2026 while unemployment rose to 7.9 percent. Even more significantly, job insecurity is on the rise: the informal sector accounted for 45 percent of employment over the past year.

There is anger because wages aren’t enough. Because jobs are being lost. Because companies are closing. Because pensions, disability benefits, healthcare, and education funding are being cut. Because more and more ordinary people are going into debt just to put food on the table or buy medicine. Because of the systematic attacks on women, oppressed people, and diversity.

In the face of growing discontent and Saturday’s massive mobilizations, an increasingly weakened and unpopular Milei has reaffirmed that he is staying the course. He did so in front of his own supporters, when he gathered them at the Casa Rosada to confirm his path before ministers, deputies, and senators from La Libertad Avanza, the president’s right-wing coalition.

But Milei also did so outwardly by submitting his 2027 Budget, with its fantastical economic projections and the austerity that will be required to sustain them. In the meantime, he’s trying to shift the political agenda by attempting to appropriate the Malvinas issue for his own purposes. Yet widespread public discontent limits his ability to use the issue opportunistically, while his rhetoric cannot conceal the reality of his alignment with and subservience to Donald Trump

Union and Opposition Passivity

However, in his calculations, Milei is counting on one key factor: social unrest is immense, but the bureaucracies of the country’s two largest trade union federations, the CGT and the CTA, are helping him through their absolute passivity. Just as they did by letting the reactionary labor reform law pass, by accepting the various austerity measures, or by betraying every struggle.

But it’s not just the union bureaucracy — it’s also a large part of the opposition leadership, which not only displays absolute moderation and lets everything slide but now explicitly says there is no choice but to put up with it.

This very Saturday, Axel Kicillof, the center-left Peronist governor of the province of Buenos Aires, was explicit at his campaign kickoff event: “We have to hang in there, because we’re getting closer to ending this nightmare.” In addition to these calls for passivity, he’s bringing fascists into his electoral coalition, such as Santiago Cúneo, who this week insulted Bregman and Nicolás del Caño.

Another center-left coalition — like Frente de Todos, which governed Argentina from 2019 to 2023 — is on the horizon, if figures like Kicillof manage to strike a deal with the rest of Peronism, such as the wing led by former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and former Economy Minister Sergio Massa. Peronism has also just voted unanimously to appoint judges who will ensure Milei’s impunity, and greenlight the Lago Escondido project, which keeps public lands in the hands of private foreign investors. We’ve seen this story before.

Organize the Anger

But on Saturday, tens of thousands broke with these union bureaucracies and passive opposition leaderships. There is anger and a desire to fight; that’s why Bregman’s proposal for the “March of Anger” resonated so strongly, and why hundreds of organizations and public figures joined the cause.

Throughout this journey, the Committees for a New Working-Class Party, alongside Bregman, have played a fundamental role. They have been organizing for months and now number around 200 across the country, bringing together thousands of people who meet, debate, and offer a vision for building a new historical perspective after years of failures by capitalist governments of various political stripes.

On Saturday, the committees, together with the PTS, formed the largest contingents in the March of Anger, both in the City of Buenos Aires and throughout the country. Something new is emerging. The fact that Bregman has been the political leader with the best public image in the country for so many months reflects her consistency and coherence: she confronted Milei from the very beginning, refused to give him a single vote in the National Congress, took to the streets, and gave voice to the women’s movement’s struggle against such a misogynistic government. With her as their standard-bearer, thousands upon thousands are organizing.

Those who packed Plaza de Mayo and those who took to the streets across the country demonstrated that social unrest and the will to fight are very much alive. It was a grassroots mobilization of unprecedented strength that completely laid bare the betrayal of the union bureaucracies and showed that it is possible to break through passivity.

That enormous force now faces new challenges: not to let this remain an isolated march, but to ensure that, from now on, every struggle is supported by thousands so it can succeed; to establish coordinating committees in every region among workers, students, human rights organizations, social organizations, and neighborhood groups; to build the strength not only to support every struggle and reclaim the organizations from the bureaucracies, but also to pave the way for a general strike to defeat Milei, his plan, and his accomplices.

Originally published in Spanish on September 19, 2026 in La Izquierda Diario. Translated and adapted by Otto Fors.

What Is Imperialism?

The Red Review — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:35:07 GMT

This article re-printed from Alan Freeman’s substack is a speech given on 10^th July 2026 at an international summer school organised by Fudan University in Shanghai

This, in turn, arises because the western Left thinks, frankly, that Capitalist Imperialism is a modern invention. This is a very unfortunate misreading of Lenin’s famous description of Imperialism as a ‘final stage’ of capitalism. It would be truer to say that capitalism is the final stage of imperialism. This is because capitalism was born out of colonialism, of which modern imperialism is merely the most developed form.

Once we understand the real question to be the nature of colonialism, Marx’s perspicacity becomes completely clear. From his earliest days his ideas are very forthright, being expressed most clearly in his frank analysis of slavery, the founding economic institution of the United States of America.

An entire chapter of Capital Volume I (27) is devoted to explaining the process by which colonialism gave birth to capitalism. It contains many of Marx’s most famous remarks which are, however, almost always quoted out of context as if they were a kind of afterthought or side issue. Consider thus the following:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of the Opium Wars against China, etc.

From the earliest days of the First International, Marx insisted on these points, and in his address to its founding conference he remarked:

If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure?...
[Such conflicts] have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws or morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations. The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes.

These lessons were poorly absorbed by the successor to the Workingmen’s International, the Second International, and the origin of Europe’s mass socialist parties. It should again be stressed that the postwar ‘Second International’ was not in any way a continuation of this body, refuting the persistent lie, articulated in particular by Tony Blair, that the Communist International arose from a ‘split’ in the international.

The Second international fell apart in the Great War and was dissolved. It briefly tried to re-form in 1923 as an alliance of its anti-Comintern remnants, but without success. The present international was created in 1952 at the height of the Cold War and was, not to fine a point on it, a simple instrument of US anti-Communism.

Its defining characteristic was the notion of a ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism, which it opposed to the revolutionary methods of Communism, not least in China. The essence of this Faustian pact is that the parties of the Social Democracy, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Imperialist heartlands, agreed as a matter of principle to leave their imperialist states intact.

Actually, the issue at stake is not that of violence – these parties have no hesitation in supporting the most extreme violence of their own governments against the workers of the rest of the world. The key difference between the genuine Left and this liberal fakery is purely and simply this: that genuine Left workers’ organisations in the imperialist countries are those that resist, by all means at their disposal, the military and economic pillage of other countries by their own governments. This can mean such a simple act as voting against it in parliament – which the parties of the European Social Democracy notoriously failed to do. Or it can mean mobilising to protest against war and demand peace – which the West’s ‘Left’ parties also signally fail to do.

As Marx’s speech to the First International, cited above, states that the workers should respond to the ‘criminal designs’ of their governments in order to:

counteract them, if necessary by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws or morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.

The idea that the response of the Left should be to make a revolution at home, as explained in part 2 of this article, is almost invariably the basis for an ultraleft abstention from the duty of solidarity with those under attack. The fundamental point is that the current actions of those workers’ organisations that present themselves as ‘Left’ fall short even of vindicating the ‘simple laws of morals or justice…as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations’.

The Third International was founded, for this reason, precisely out of the centrality of opposing imperialist war. It adopted stringent conditions for admission for this very reason. Its 1920 congress adopted Lenin’s conditions for admission of which point 8 reads:

Parties in countries whose bourgeoisie possess colonies and oppress other nations must pursue a most well-defined and clear-cut policy in respect of colonies and oppressed nations. Any party wishing to join the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists of its “own” country, must support-in deed, not merely in word-every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot imperialists from the colonies, inculcate in the hearts of the workers of its own country an attitude of true brotherhood with the working population of the colonies and the oppressed nations, and conduct systematic agitation among the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples..

The Comintern declaration was never dropped and never featured in the many other disputes of the Communist movement. It is an indispensable and primary statement not merely of the responsibility of the mass workers’ organisations, but of any within this general movement who seek the mantle of ‘socialism’ to justify their moral stance.

However, the analysis and definition of imperialism itself is the subject of enormous dispute and confusion in the left. It is dominated, frankly, by the urge to find isolated quotes from Lenin which justify calling Russia and China imperialist.

It is worth therefore noting that the 1921 conference adopted what amounts to a definition of imperialism, which integrated and, crucially, superseded the early positions of Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin and the other participants in the debate around the causes of the First World War. These were provided by the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, whose ‘Theses on the Eastern Question’ were adopted by this conference.

The essence of Roy’s definition is that the imperialist countries were those that had achieved a world monopoly in the exploitation of foreign labour. And this is the key defining feature of the imperialist countries today. It is not altered by the transition to neocolonialism, because it is an economic characteristic of imperialism, in which force is simply an ancillary means to accomplish it.

Its key is the division of the world into two great parts; a minority of countries with a monopoly of the production of advanced technology, and a majority which is forced, by both economic and political means, to specialise in the production of primary goods, agricultural goods, and generally in the products of cheap labour. As a result of this division, the imperialists are able to exploit foreign labour at between ten and twenty times the rate at which it can exploit its own workers.

Now, that doesn’t mean that any country which has industries abroad is imperialist. The key point is the characteristics of the whole nation, which is defined by the dominant faction among the classes that control the state, not by the actions of individual parts of those classes. In the imperialist countries, power is in the hands of that section of the capitalist class which is devoted to foreign exploitation — the colonial magnates which still rule England today, the rapacious kitchen cabinet of Donald J. Trump, the Bismarckian krypto-fascist heirs of Prussian military industrialism, the Napoleonic dreamers of the French elites, and the Empire-building revanchists who repeatedly climb back into the seats of power in Japan.

This gives rise to two things. The first is a special type of state that characterises imperialist countries and is not found anywhere else. The common feature of all states of this nature is that it is dedicated to preserving this monopoly, which is why they are invariably warlike by nature.

The second feature is that these states form a distinct bloc, organised and until recently completely dominated by the USA. This bloc, which Lenin’s comrades described as the ‘Robber Barons’ of the world, is an exclusive club. Since 1918 nobody has joined it except South Korea and Singapore – tiny populations in relative terms which were grudgingly allowed into the club to serve as buffer states to prevent them going Communist. It characteristics are perfectly described by NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, Churchill’s chief military advisor and a former general in Britain’s army of occupation in India who said of NATO that its purpose was to ‘Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’.

Indeed, the very fact that this bloc is a club is a further nail in the coffin of the outrageous claim that Russia, or China, or for that matter Turkey, South Africa, India or Brazil are now, or can become, imperialist powers. This is a ridiculous idea for the simple reason that it is economically impossible for a monopoly to be shared.

This is why politically none of these countries, even to the extent that they may wish to become imperialist, will be allowed to become imperialist.

And this brings me to the current state of the world.

This system is now falling apart. This is not simply because of the resistance of the South, though this has played no small role; it is because, due to the falling rate of profit in the North, they have been snared in a prolonged decline which is entirely of their own making. The only response they can make is to intensify, at one and the same time, their assaults on the workers of the South, and of their own countries.

For this reason I question the hypothesis that seems to lie behind the concept of ‘hyperimperialism’ which suggests that this new aggressive phase is a product of the strength, and unity, of the imperialist countries. I think to the contrary it is the product of their weakness, which has now reached the point where they openly attack not just workers, but each other. Of course they have always competed with each other, but not in ways such as the destruction of the NordStream pipleline, which is simply an act of war by the USA against Germany – no other description fits what is now coming to light.

What we see is, in this sense, a return to the conditions that led up to world war I, in which the conflicts between the Great Powers are combining with the conflicts between the imperialists as a whole, and the working class as a whole. The key difference is that in World War I, the Great Powers fought each other; now, they are lining up against the whole of the non-imperialist world. Their problem is that to do so, they also have to line up with each other, and it was their failure to do so in World War II that led to the victory of the USSR and the Chinese revolution. It follows that if any imperialist country merely refrains from taking part in the military madness of the others, it already strikes a blow for the world working class.

This does not make the imperialists any less dangerous; there is actually no beast more violent than a cornered one. As a result, it is rapidly returning to its essential, primal forms in which naked repression and military force come to the fore, displacing all pretence at liberal virtue.

What this condition of the world does demand is that the workers organise to become a worldwide force capable of halting the beast in its tracks. The rise of fascism, in new forms, proves that this task is an urgent one.

It is also, however, a task that can be accomplished. Roy’s positions on fighting imperialism – and those of the 21^st Congress – are completely clear. It is that the consequence of imperialism has brought a new mass force into existence; the poor peasants and artisans of the colonised countries.

By converting the peasants and artisans of the subject countries into an agricultural and industrial proletariat, imperialism brought into existence another force which is destined to contribute to its destruction. This being the case, the overthrow of the capitalist order in Europe, which to a great extent rests on its imperial extension, will be achieved not alone by the advanced proletariat of Europe, but with the conscious cooperation of the workers and other revolutionary elements in those colonial and subject countries. M. N. Roy

Under today’s modern conditions we must only add the following: in the intervening years, the size of this ‘other force’ has increased by a factor of ten or twenty times. It now clearly outnumbers the size of the working class in the heartlands. The terms of Roy’s equation are therefore reversed. It is not the colonial and subject countries who must ‘cooperate’ with the workers of the imperialist countries. It is the workers of the imperialist countries who must cooperate with their sisters and brothers who are actually at the forefront of the battle which their own governments are waging against the workers of the world.

Did the Comintern’s addition of colonial liberation to the demands of the workers’ movement change the ideals of the founders, as claimed by critics who see the anti-imperialist struggle as extraneous or indeed, counterposed, to class struggle? Actually, far from negating world working class unity, the Comintern extended it.

These declarations therefore do not contradict the First International. They incarnate Marx’s principle that ‘no nation that enslaves another can ever itself be free’. They concretise the Manifesto’s view that ‘the Communists have no special interests of their own, other than that they represent the most general interest of all workers’, in the context of the fratricidal war of 1914.

Workers, the Comintern says, can only act worldwide if the workers in the imperialist countries side with the far larger proletarian army of the colonies. The Comintern, an explicitly anti-imperialist alliance, remained a Left alliance because, like its predecessors, it wanted to represent the interests of the propertyless against those of the propertied on a world scale.

Any world anti-imperialist movement should therefore rest on a clear concept of what imperialism is: a world economic system of differential exploitation imposed on four-fifths of the world by one-fifth. This has two consequences.

It first follows that the social democratic parties will not challenge the actions of the imperialist states. They are already crumbling for this very reason and the task of the hour is to create genuine Left replacements for them in the heartlands.

The reason bears repeating: since the chief income of the imperialist states comes from the exploitation of labour abroad, it follows — as night follows day — that these parties will support everything their governments do to maintain their domination over workers abroad, including everything we’ve seen: barbaric wars, coercive and punitive sanctions, regime change, and all of that.

So, the reason for that is that the super-profits that can be earned by the imperialists in exploiting foreign labour are much, much higher than the profits that can be obtained by exploiting their own labour. On the details of this I have shared with you, via the organisers, a paper on the persistent inequality of nations, which demonstrates that not only has the income of the imperialist countries in money terms relative to that of the countries of the Global South grown persistently since the end of the Second World War, and particularly under neoliberalism, but that its magnitude is of the order of 10 or 20 times bigger, which vastly exceeds what it could get by concentrating or exploiting its own workforce.

If you can get by exploiting 20 Indian workers the amount of labour that you can get out of one English worker, of course you’re going to focus on exploiting the Indians. If an American monopolist miner can get the work of 10 labourers to extract oil cheap food, or textiles from Latin America, from India, from Indonesia, or wherever in the world he goes, then of course he’s going to do that, rather than focus on concentrating his own workers.

This is the true origin of the disintegrating ‘welfare state’. The states that emerged from the last war, and the revolutionary upsurge that followed it, simply found it cheaper to buy off a big section of its own working class, bribing and corrupting its organizations, rather than risk a big fight with them that could lead to Communism.

But this bears no relation to the objectives of the First, Second, or Third International. It’s not a left policy. It’s an imperialist policy. That is why new, genuinely Left and therefore genuinely anti-imperialist mass parties are required throughout the nations of the Collective West.

But that, in turn, requires us to redefine what the task of these parties are. It’s not simply to rise up and make revolution. The primary thing is — comes right back to our definition of the left. It’s not to make compromises. It’s to not give up. It’s to say: what is happening to the Palestinian people is unacceptable, and we’re not going to put up with it.

And it’s the imperialists themselves who recognize this. This is why in Britain, horrendous jail sentences are being doled out against people who simply express their disagreement with their government’s policies.

The law of my country threatens even voicing an opinion about these actions. What this has to do with ‘freedom of speech’ or even freedom of thought is a matter for which the Labour Party’s leadership will answer to history. I do not think their grandchildren will have any reason to take pride in them.

What I will say is this: the very fact that the state treats such mild acts of civil disobedience as a crime comparable to the genocide of the Palestinian people conclusively tells you what the nature of that state is, and just how degenerate it has become. These people have lost all right to tell any other country what to do.

I will also say this: resoluteness in opposing the imperialism of one’s own government doesn’t take the form of rising up with arms in hand. Quite the contrary, it’s not a terrorist activity, which is one of the important defences that has to be entered against the repression of the imperialists at home. It actually doesn’t involve violence at all. It simply involves saying: No.

There’s a wonderful phrase by one of my favourite German writers called Kurt Tucholsky, in which he said that nothing is more difficult, and nothing requires more moral conscience, than to stand up against the common sense of one’s time and clearly say: No.

Rosa Luxemburg has said, nothing is more revolutionary than the truth. So even telling the truth is in and of itself a revolutionary act. If one defines a revolutionary act as simply not compromising with the state — that, it seems to me, creates a workable definition for the basis on which the left organizations of the future within the imperialist countries and the anti-imperialist organizations of the whole of the world can come together on a common basis.

That finally, however, leads us to ask the question: what does this concept of anti-imperialism mean in the Global South? Is it an invitation to compromise with the bourgeoisie of these countries? If we say that we’re making common cause against the imperialist aggressors, and we don’t clearly make a condition of socialism or even the economic advancement of those countries — are we throwing away something that the workers really need?

Well, this is why I advanced the idea, in part one of this talk, that the Left should be a minority within an anti-imperialist international. This has a specific meaning: it should be an organised minority, just as the Communists were in the struggle to liberate China from Japanese imperialism. In the neocolonial circumstances of today, the decisive issue dividing the Left from the general anti-imperialists of the global south is not confined to the military question: at the core of what has to be achieved is economic sovereignty.

And indeed, this is the ultimate guarantee of security. The notion that the task of the workers is to ‘develop the forces of production’ is an acquisition of Marx and of the Communists, which has acquired a new and vital meaning for those countries whose economies have been devastated and whose peoples have been ruined by imperialist predation.

However, a cautionary point has to be made, on which I will include. The way that one should judge the progress being made in any country towards that possibility does not rest on the strength of its economy but on the consciousness and resolution of its working class, expressed in the quality of its political leadership. And the encouragement of that political development is in fact the key task of any new international organisation.

This is why I have to close on second comradely critique of the concept of hyper-imperialism, which makes a detailed categorisation of the countries of the world based – as I read it - on the aspiration, or achievement, of their governments, as regards economic sovereignty. But I don’t think that the Palestinians have reached any level of striving for economic sovereignty; yet they are leading the world in the example they have set on resisting what the imperialists are trying to do, simply by standing up to it and saying: we exist.

So, I think that one should look where Marx looked, where he says the key feature, as regards the prospects for socialism or communism in any country, is the state of consciousness of its working masses. That’s why a new workers’ international is needed, that’s why its first priority must be to solidarize with everyone under attack by the imperialist club – whether that attack is military or economic – and finally, why the Left must be part of it.

Building the Confront Carney’s CEO Summit Protest

The Red Review — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:45:48 GMT

Months of organizing brought movements together and carried an unapologetically anti-capitalist message across the country

The September 14 demonstration against Mark Carney’s CEO summit was a big boost for the Left. Some 2,000 people participated in the Confront Carney’s CEO Summit protest in Toronto, which included a “Carnival Against Capitalism” targeting the largest gathering of capitalists in Canadian history.

The biggest explicitly anti-capitalist protest in Canada in many years received widespread mainstream media coverage. CBC’s The National went live to the march at the top of its broadcast that night, while international outlets including Reuters, Al Jazeera and the New York Times reported on the protest.

The carnival also made the protest unusually visually compelling. Costumes, giant puppets, a marching band, stilt walkers, handmade signs and street theatre meant images from the demonstration were splashed across social media, websites and television. While the far right Rebel News predictably mocked the protest in “Anti-Capitalist Mob Descends on Carney’s Canada Investment Summit”, some of the corporate coverage was quite sympathetic. City News, for instance, did a terrific three-minute clip on protesters’ opposition to a wealth-concentrating, ecocidal economic system Carney’s CEO summit was designed to entrench.

The idea of organizing a Carnival Against Capitalism to protest Carney’s CEO Summit was first raised at the founding conference of Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed (CCBF) in May. As is usually the case with a successful demonstration, the mobilization leading up to the march was a central part of the political action. The aim was to expose Carney as an agent of the global rich and organize opposition to an agenda transferring wealth and power to the billionaire class.

Over the following months, CCBF released a widely endorsed public letter to “Confront Carney’s CEO Summit” and published articles, memes and videos about Carney’s agenda. Organizers held webinars, built art and digital teams and reached out to activists and organizations across Toronto and beyond.

On the ground, Toronto activists put up more than 12,000 “Confront Carney’s CEO Summit” stickers and 2,500 posters advertising the Carnival Against Capitalism. Thousands of informational leaflets were distributed. Artists and volunteers produced puppets, props, placards and costumes that would eventually fill the streets.

By pushing forward with a demonstration before it was clear how much public interest or institutional support it would attract, CCBF created a platform for a wide range of groups to express their rage at Carney’s militarist, pro-billionaire agenda. As momentum grew, the mobilization became a vehicle for a much broader convergence of organizations and movements. The Many vs. the Money coalition, led by the Council of Canadians, World BEYOND War and 8th Fire Rising, organized a weekend counter-summit, and joined the effort to help broaden institutional participation. Ultimately, the Carnival Against Capitalism march included contingents from the Revolutionary Communist Party, Acorn, Unifor, Socialist Action, Greenpeace, 350 and dozens of other organizations.

8th Fire Rising facilitated Indigenous leaders to come to Toronto to challenge Carney’s policies. Hereditary Chief Na’Moks, Kanahus Manuel and Kakeká ThunderSky spoke at the rally and joined the Indigenous contingent that led the spirited march from Nathan Phillips Square to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where Carney was hosting the CEOs.

Despite a heavy police presence on foot and horseback, the march reached the AGO and made itself heard outside the summit. Several attendees had to walk past protesters as they left the gala dinner.

What Carney announced at the summit the following morning underscored the political stakes of the protest.

The government announced plans to effectively privatize the operation of Canada’s four largest airports through long-term concessions to private investors, while retaining public ownership of the underlying land and assets. In response, Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed coordinator Jasmine Peardon stated: “Selling off public assets is part of Carney’s pro-billionaire agenda that thousands protested Monday. He’s doubling down on the same economic policies that got us here in the first place– but more of the same will only deepen the crisis.”

Carney’s other big announcement at the summit was a massive new corporate tax incentive. The Prime Minister announced a “Productivity Mega Deduction” that the government estimates will cost $36 billion over the next five years and slash the marginal effective tax rate on new business investment from 13 per cent to 6.4 per cent. Carney boasted to the billionaire crowd that Canada would now have the lowest rate in the G7 — and he wasn’t lying. Canada’s rate will be well below the U.S. rate of 16.9 per cent and the OECD average of 19 per cent.

Even before the summit, Carney’s government had introduced several measures to lower the tax burden on corporations and encourage private investment. It created the Productivity Super-Deduction and expanded the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax incentive. Even more significantly, Carney cancelled a planned increase in the capital gains inclusion rate and scrapped the digital services tax.

Changes to the tax code are but one of many pro-corporate measures Carney’s government has pursued.

For protesters outside the summit, the announcements reinforced the central argument of the mobilization: that the former Goldman Sachs banker is reorganizing Canadian economic policy around the interests and demands of capital.

Even the National Post recognized the significance of the convergence. In a column headlined “The left is itching for class warfare,” Tasha Kheiriddin began “for a movement supposedly wandering the political wilderness, the Canadian left made a lot of noise in downtown Toronto Monday night. Hundreds of protesters gathered at Nathan Phillips Square before marching to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where Prime Minister Mark Carney was hosting some of the world’s wealthiest investors. The demonstration reunited an old-school coalition of labour unions, Indigenous activists, environmentalists, housing advocates and anti-war groups.”

The demonstration showed that there is an audience for an unapologetic challenge to concentrated wealth and corporate power — and an appetite for collective action across movements and political traditions.

It also demonstrated the importance of organizing before the outcome is certain. What began in May as an ambitious proposal grew through months of postering, leafleting, art-making, media work, outreach and coalition building into something far larger than any one organization.

The September 14 demonstration was the visible result: thousands in the streets, an anti-capitalist message carried across the country, and movements that do not always work together marching side by side.

If we want to challenge Mark Carney’s ecocidal, wealth concentrating agenda we need to build up a fighting socialist movement.

The Red Review | Issue #36 (September 2026)

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:08:30 GMT

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carney Hosts ‘pollutocrats’ in Toronto

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:53:19 GMT

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?

Hunger is All About Billionaire Greed

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:50:05 GMT

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.

Starving the Health Care Beast

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:44:59 GMT

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.

Imperialism is Not Invincible

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:34:39 GMT

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!

Dimitri Lascaris Speaks in Toronto Despite Zionist Threats

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:31:39 GMT

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.

“We are Not Going to Establish Predatory Capitalism”

The Red Review — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:27:21 GMT

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

The Red Review | Issue #35 (August 2026)

The Red Review — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:32:43 GMT

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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,

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.

Canada Out of NATO!

The Red Review — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:44:07 GMT

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 Case against Capitalist Data Centres

The Red Review — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:38:49 GMT

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.

Queer Liberation through Socialist Revolution

The Red Review — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:13:34 GMT

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.

Resist Carney’s Pro Billionaire Agenda

The Red Review — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:10:36 GMT

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.

A Marxist Theory of Crisis in the Contemporary World

The Red Review — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:07:56 GMT

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.

The Red Review

The Red Review | Issue #37 (October 2026)

Canada’s Narrowing Space for Dissent: Speech, Assembly, and the Right to Strike

By Gary Porter

Fight for a Working Class City Hall!

By MSA & CCBF

Why I Welcome Endorsement of Municipal Socialist Alliance

By Scarlett Gillespie

Argentina: Tens of Thousands Take to Streets in March of Anger

By Fernando Scolnik

What Is Imperialism?

By Alan Freeman

Building the Confront Carney’s CEO Summit Protest

By Bianca Mugyenyi

Canada's Narrowing Space for Dissent: Speech, Assembly, and the Right to Strike

Fight for a Working Class City Hall!

Why I Welcome Endorsement of Municipal Socialist Alliance

Argentina: Tens of Thousands Take to Streets in March of Anger

What Is Imperialism?

Building the Confront Carney’s CEO Summit Protest

The Red Review | Issue #36 (September 2026)

Carney Hosts ‘pollutocrats’ in Toronto

By Yves Engler

Hunger is All About Billionaire Greed

By Gary Porter

Starving the Health Care Beast

By Chris Wanamaker & Alex Gagne

Imperialism is Not Invincible

By Barry Weisleder

Dimitri Lascaris Speaks in Toronto Despite Zionist Threats

By Socialist Action Canada

“We are Not Going to Establish Predatory Capitalism”

By Miguel Díaz-Canel / Translation: Walter Lippmann

Carney Hosts ‘pollutocrats’ in Toronto

Hunger is All About Billionaire Greed

Starving the Health Care Beast

Imperialism is Not Invincible

Dimitri Lascaris Speaks in Toronto Despite Zionist Threats

“We are Not Going to Establish Predatory Capitalism”

The Red Review | Issue #35 (August 2026)

Canada Out of NATO!

By Barry Weisleder

The Case against Capitalist Data Centres

By Gary Porter

Queer Liberation through Socialist Revolution

By Socialist Action

Resist Carney’s Pro Billionaire Agenda

By Yves Engler

A Marxist Theory of Crisis in the Contemporary World

By Michael Roberts

The Shadow of Minneapolis: 2026 Labor Notes Conference

by Sou Mi

Strategic Debates in the Struggle for Quebec Independence

By Bernard Rioux

Canada Out of NATO!

The Case against Capitalist Data Centres

Queer Liberation through Socialist Revolution

Resist Carney’s Pro Billionaire Agenda

A Marxist Theory of Crisis in the Contemporary World