2023 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture ft Armine Yalnizyan - Progress vs 2023: A Guide to the Fight Ahead
The 2023 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was held on Tuesday, May 23rd at an event in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left's foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above.
The Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Professor Wood’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology.
Each year’s recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture.
The 2023 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was delivered by economist Armine Yalnizyan-a leading voice on Canada’s economic scene.
Her lecture, entitled Progress vs. 2023: A Guide to the Fight Ahead, presented her sweeping vision of what it means to be a progressive in 2023, taking us on a tour of the evolution of progressive ideas, and its constancy.
She showed how context has shaped strategy, and lay out the push and the pull of the moment: the challenges facing the progressive agenda and the momentum building for it.
You are invited to listen to an energizing take on what and who is at stake in this fight for our collective wellbeing.
Introduction by Jen Hassum, Broadbent Institute, Executive Director 00:00
Remarks by Pamela Sugiman, Dean of Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University 03:02
Introduction by Clement Nocos, Broadbent Institute, Director of Policy 09:45
Lecture Start by Armine Yalnizyan 12:35
Пікірлер: 2
Loved this speech. When she talked about expectations that flies in the face of the Trilateralists who met in 1973 and concluded that people were too well educated and there was an excess of democracy. That caused expectations to be too high in their view. If you believed that in 1973, what would you do? Thought experiment. A second set of threads was James McGill Buchanan who was funded by the Koch brothers and he worked to change the rules - e.g. the constitutional problems encountered by Chile where progressives found the rules were obstacles to progress. If you want to read more about the Democracy In Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. The Koch brothers contributed to the Fraser Institute and used to own a stake in the Oil sands. What year was the Fraser Institute - a libertarian enterprise - created? Some interesting coincidences? One year after the Trilateralists met in 1973. Progressives believe in social responsibility but have they forgotten that is a major connection to personal freedom? My friends concerned about freedom and individual rights appear to have forgotten about social responsibility as part of that.
Interesting talk, but I would modify the focus in two ways. One, Marx's use of the word "social" is minimalistic, and refers at most to a kind of grudging cooperation between capital and labor. By contrast, people like Carol Gilligan and Stephen Porges limit the "social" to the distinctively "pro-social", that is, as Porges might put it, to human co-regulation under conditions of safety, seeking freedom and love. Hence, the embattled sphere is not the production of care, but rather the production of society, as opposed to the production of commodities. Two, Yalnizyan not only is dismissive of the social progress of China, but takes a pro-NATO stance on Russia and on US imperialism generally, as if America's trillion dollar defense budget has no impact upon the social prospects of beleaguered Americans. Instead, it must by emphasized that American unipolarity, hegemony and Exceptionalism are core ingredients of the impoverishment of American life both in and outside the workplace, and that corporate media propaganda aimed at our "authoritarian" enemies must be vigorously opposed.