Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David Climenhaga writes that Canada needs a lot more of Jeremy Corbyn's critical analysis of an unfair economic system, and a lot less Justin Trudeau-style cheerleading for it. And Bill Curry reports on a new push to cut down on poverty at the national and provincial levels.

- Dave Kamper discusses how anti-union actors in the U.S. are focusing on draining organized labour of any ability to push for structural change. And Mindy Isser comments on the importance of deeper organizing to keep workers engaged while strengthening the union movement.

- David MacDonald, Cole Eisen and Chris Roberts study how private-sector defined benefit pension plans have been systematically underfunded, resulting in shareholders extracting deferred wages while endangering workers' pensions.

- Finally, Benjamin Fong writes that the excesses of capitalism are at the root of our climate crisis:

The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault.

As an increasing number of environmental groups are emphasizing, it’s systemic change or bust. From a political standpoint, something interesting has occurred here: Climate change has made anticapitalist struggle, for the first time in history, a non-class-based issue.

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When a company makes a decision that is destructive to the environment, for instance, it is not because there are bad or unintelligent people in charge: Directors typically have a fiduciary responsibility that makes the bottom line their only priority. They serve a function, and if they don’t, others can take their place. If something goes wrong — which is to say, if something endangers profit making — they can serve as convenient scapegoats, but any stupid or dangerous decisions they make result from being personifications of capital.

The claim here is not that unintelligent people do not do unintelligent things, but rather that the overwhelming unintelligence involved in keeping the engines of production roaring when they are making the planet increasingly uninhabitable cannot be pinned on specific people. It is the system as a whole that is at issue, and every time we pick out bumbling morons to lament or fresh-faced geniuses to praise is a missed opportunity to see plainly the necessity of structural change.