There is little doubt today that capitalism can no longer provide a solution or answer to the problems facing workers and youth.  In this video, Fightback editor Alex Grant answers the question, "Is Marxism still relevant?" to a class of 150 students at Toronto's York University. This video was recorded in the autumn of 2012.

For the second time in seven years, workers in Canada and the northern United States have been deprived of a much-needed respite from a long cold winter.  The owners of the 30 National Hockey League (NHL) teams have imposed a lock-out, demanding that players receive a much smaller piece of league revenues.  A battle between multi-billionaire owners and multi-millionaire players may, on the surface, seem to be a trivial issue — especially when so many workers are losing their jobs or living paycheque-to-paycheque.  But, hockey plays a vital role in the life of workers in Canada and, indeed, this particular lockout has many of the same hallmarks of the bosses’ offensive against other workers. Adopting a cavalier or dismissive view of the NHL lockout only helps to serve the interests of the greedy NHL owners, as well as ignores the way in which we can fight the corporatization of the game and reclaim it as our own.

A year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a financial avalanche, the US economy remains in a mess. Official unemployment is steadily creeping toward 10%. The total number of job losses since the recession began two years ago is now nearly 7 million. Health care remains the number one issue facing working Americans, as the average premium for family health insurance offered through an employer surpassed the $13,000 mark this year, far outpacing increases in wages and inflation. It is against this volatile background that Michael Moore premieres his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story. The fact that a film with such broad distribution even openly calls out the system by name is a tremendous step forward, a reflection of how far Americans’ consciousness has come since the dark days of September 2001.