| | | Good morning, Passengers. Hope you enjoyed your long weekend.
Today, we have a couple articles providing some background on Alberta’s new premier, a look at how elites in Canada are working behind the scenes to harm workers and a podcast episode exploring the lives of five revolutionary women from Eastern Europe.
Enjoy! | Like Passage Digest? Forward this issue to a friend so they can discover the best left opinion and analysis from around the world. Did someone forward you this? Subscribe today for free. Sign-up for free | | Stephen Magusiak | PressProgress | October 8 | Last week, the United Conservative Party held their election to determine the new leader of their party after Alberta Premier Jason Kenney stepped down following the last leadership election (which he won, but by a margin he felt wasn’t enough). The winner of said race would also become Alberta’s premier. On the sixth ballot, Danielle Smith won with about 53 per cent of the vote, or about 0.9 per cent of the population of Alberta. People across the province are rightfully worried about what’s next. PressProgress has put together an article to explain why.
Stephen Magusiak writes, “Lashing out at Ottawa is standard for Alberta conservatives, each of the leadership candidates did to varying degrees, but [Danielle] Smith’s Sovereignty Act took things much further than many of her UCP leadership rivals could stomach. Last month, four of her fellow leadership contenders denounced the Sovereignty Act in a joint press conference. Even Jason Kenney denounced Smith’s plan as ‘risky, dangerous and half-baked,’ predicting it would lead Alberta to become a ‘banana republic.’ So who is Smith, and how did she come to lead Alberta? Smith’s political career goes back to the 90s in Calgary. Along the way are a few highlights and surprise twists that could give you an idea of what to expect from Alberta’s controversial new Premier.” (5 minute read) | | | David J. Climenhaga | Rabble | October 6 | And here’s another article on Smith, this one from Rabble. David J. Climenhaga writes, “An advocate of quack COVID cures and disseminator of dangerous pandemic conspiracy theories during her tenure in right-wing talk radio, [Danielle] Smith also plans a quick attack on the leadership and structure of Alberta Health Services. Decentralization will be the buzzword. Privatization will be the goal. Chaos will be the result. Don’t plan on getting sick in Alberta during Smith’s unelected premiership. Pensions, Mounted Police, and public services will all be for the wood chipper too, by the sound of it. This is the program the UCP’s backers had hoped outgoing Premier Jason Kenney would deliver. But for all his flaws, he proved too traditional a politician to fully take that risk.” (3 minute read) | | | David Moscrop | Jacobin | October 8 | As thoroughly documented in our Class Struggle newsletter, recessions, or at the very least how they’re dealt with, are the result of policy choices. They can be manufactured, and the response to them can be geared to spare the rich and hurt the rest of us. Jacobin published an article last week arguing that that’s exactly what’s going on in Canada right now.
David Moscrop writes, “In July, columnist Linda McQuaig called interest-rate hikes ‘class war.’ Too many people in Canada have bought into the myth that class cleavages don’t exist in the peaceful, well-ordered north. Too many people have bought into the delusion that technocratic experts in the capital and financial centers of the country know what’s best and have the interests of Main Street at heart. That’s why so few are inclined to use the term ‘class,’ let alone ‘class war.’ As McQuaig argues, unemployment stemming from an engineered recession is a tactic and not an inevitability. ‘High unemployment disciplines workers,’ she writes. ‘A large pool of idle workers makes other workers insecure and reduces their leverage to demand higher wages. This tames inflation, even as it diminishes the overall bargaining power of labor, quietly advancing a class war.’” (4 minute read) | | | Rev Left Radio | Libsyn | October 10 | Socialist feminism is a strain of the ideology that we often don’t hear enough about. Here’s an episode from a Marxist podcast where the host chats with the author of a book about the lives of a few revolutionary women throughout history from Eastern Europe.
Here’s the episode description: “Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning Professor of Russian and East European Studies. She returns to Rev Left to discuss her newest book Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women.”
And here’s a description of the book: “Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. Through the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan, scientist, and global women’s activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of radicals. None of these women was a perfect leftist. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege. But they managed to fight for their own political projects with perseverance and dedication. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women’s issues seriously, these women pursued novel solutions with many lessons for those who might follow in their footsteps.” (83 minute read) | | | | Previous Digest Editions - October 7 | Doug Ford and the debt, recruiting for the Israeli army, His House - Read here
- October 6 | Ignoring murder, Mahsa Amini and Muslim women, the Quebec election - Read here
- October 5 | MPs and the housing crisis, Legault’s unearned majority, cancelled for criticizing Israel - Read here
- October 4 | Losing money to the ultra rich, nuclear war, the CAQ - Read here
- October 3 | Interspecies solidarity, undermining daycare, social solidarity for exclusion, a coup in Brazil? - Read here
- September 29 | Deleting Palestine, taking Canada to court, xenophobia and horror - Read here
- September 28 | The curse of renters, city councils and police budgets, the Labour files - Read here
- September 27 | Vacancy control, hurricanes, the far right in Italy - Read here
- September 26 | Dental care, fossil fuel execs, gentrification, teachers under attack - Read here
- September 23 | Poilievre and the central bank, hobbits and the far right, The Wailing - Read here
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