• Magazine

    COVID capitalism

    Tithi Bhattacharya, Nora Loreto, and Naomi Klein on the impact of COVID-19 neoliberalism and working through pandemic-era isolation to build a better world.

  • The cover of the March/April 2023 issue of Briarpatch magazine is on a maroon background. The cover features the WiFi connectivity symbol in the center of a blue circle. The semicircular bars of the WiFi symbol are an aerial view of cul-de-sacs from above with the last 'bar' of houses fading out. Below the cul-de-sacs/bars are the symbols of an anonymous video conferencing participant with a red muted microphone.
    Magazine

    A principle and a place

    While the state abandons people it deems disposable, many of the articles in this issue highlight and strategize how to better organize and include people in the margins in our movements.

  • Magazine

    A Marxist reader for disorienting times

    A reading list to help leftists face the conditions within which we organize without consolation or despair. 

  • A photo taken from bird's-eye view. In the center, copies of an alt-weekly newspaper called The Grind are fanned out. The cover of The Grind shows a person standing in a subway station and the words
    Magazine

    The case for large-scale workers’ media in Canada

    Unions, union members, and people with access to wealth need to think big about shifting the media landscape in Canada.

  • A vase holding many long stems sits on top of a decorative pedestal. Some stems have bright green inked leaves at their ends while others have hot pink inked anti-depressants at their ends. The anti-depressants are printed with the letters “VX” to represent their name, Venlafaxine.
    Magazine

    The pressure to be cured

    Both professional and popular psychology are focused on “curing” individuals of distress. But without looking at a person’s social and political context, the pursuit of a cure can do more harm than good.

  • Magazine

    A reading list for building transformative movements in so-called Canada

    Designing and building cohesive, disciplined, and transformative mass movements isn’t easy. This reading list is an offering to anyone committed to that effort.

  • Magazine

    To save the bees, we must confront capitalist agriculture

    Honeybees pollinate millions of acres of monocultured crops and produce vast amounts of honey for sale. They have become workers in the landscapes of capitalist agriculture. But they’re dying at a terrifying pace, plagued by mites, pesticides, and poor nutrition.

  • Magazine

    The debt engine

    Canada’s predatory lending crisis is no accident.

  • Magazine

    On creativity and commerce

    How do we avoid a world in which human creativity and knowledge becomes just another occasion for commerce?

  • Magazine

    Police and property

    The theme of property – and the vision of a world no longer organized by its logic – is one that is threaded through most of the stories in this issue.

  • Magazine

    Against a culture of paid activism

    As the logic of capitalism infiltrates our social movements, we must choose between being paid for our activism and building a strong culture of social struggle.

  • Magazine

    Fed up with being locked down

    Prisons cause irreparable harm to the people inside them. Destroy the system before it can destroy more lives.

  • Magazine

    China, the Canadian left, and countering state capitalist apologia

    Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Chinese governments, a troubling campist discourse has been growing in the Canadian left. Socialists should side with neither the American nor the Chinese state – instead, we need to build internationalism from below.

  • Online-only

    WE is actually we

    How WE Charity helps cleanse white Canada of white guilt

  • Sask Dispatch

    Business in Wascana violates Master Plan and threatens the park’s future

    A Master Plan was put in place to ensure the integrity of Regina’s iconic park, but over the past few years, the plan has been undermined and business has begun to encroach on public space.

  • Online-only

    As millions suffer from the pandemic, who’s getting rich?

    Who’s making bank off COVID-19, and who’s fighting back? A summary of Resource Movement and Briarpatch’s webinar, “Pandemic Profiteers & the Movements Trying to Stop Them”

  • Online-only

    Collective action is essential

    From socially-distanced protests to virtual union drives, five vital signs of worker organizing during COVID-19

  • Magazine

    Great Manitoba

    The massive fraud at The Pas is a modest entry in the annals of Canadian racial capitalism. In light of the town’s history of Cree and Métis political action, it could be said that a quarter-billion dollars were stolen out of the mouths of children, from over the heads of families, from people seeking meaningful work in the prime of life.

  • Magazine

    Will it help us fight?

    Briarpatch began 49 years ago as a four-page newsletter produced by and for low-income earners, welfare recipients, and the unemployed. Today, as so many of my friends lose their jobs or have their shifts halved during the COVID-19 pandemic, I can see clearly the thread that connects Briarpatch to its origins half a century ago.

  • Online-only

    TD Scholars ask TD to cut ties with Coastal GasLink pipeline

    In this open letter, 33 recipients of TD’s Scholarship for Community Leadership ask that TD withdraw its support for the pipeline, which violates Wet’suwet’en sovereignty