Posts

Capitalist exploitation might begin in the workplace, but it certainly does not end there. If exploitation can also happen outside of the workplace, any measure of class should try to take this into account. This analysis uses data from the Canadian Income Survey to account for many sources of income when measuring exploitation.

If your boss makes a dollar, you make a dime. That’s why you analyze the links between social class and exploitation on company time. Rather than treating objective social class as some function of income, education, and occupation, we’re going to begin with capitalist exploitation in the workplace, then build out from there. Drawing on the labor theory of value, we’ll establish how much value each hour of labour adds to the overall production – the Monetary Equivalent of Labour Time – and use that as a basis for measuring exploitation.

Canada is a strong contender for the least class aware society on the planet. It’s stiff competition, but I think we have a good shot at the title. So what is the state of class consciousness in Canada? To find out, we’ll use survey data explore the subjective side of social class to see how most people think about class.

We don’t talk very much about class anymore, and when we do, the discourse is often very confused. This is an introductory post to a series on objective and data-driven class analysis, giving an overview of the mainstream (liberal) version of class and its counterpart of Marxist class analysis.

In the first post in the DS4CS Learning Series, I shared the code used to produce my first story on the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, which was a corporate feeding frenzy of historical proportions.

This is the first in an ongoing series of educational articles where I show my code and work used to produce a prior analysis. I hope that this series will serve as a useful resource to those curious about using data to advance the agendas of labour and socialism.

The Green Paradox of Canadian Climate Capitalism The writing is on the wall for either fossil capitalism or humanity. Nine hundred and eighty billion tonnes of CO₂ from 2020 onward stands between us and the best chance of preventing more than an already catastrophic two degree rise in average global temperatures.

In favor? 182 votes. Against? Only two, the usual suspects. Each year, the world comes together at the United Nations General Assembly to near unanimously condemn the cruel and illegal economic blockade that the US Empire has been imposing on Cuba for over 60 years. Designed to stifle Cuba’s ability to trade with the world and access credit, the blockade is aimed at suffocating economic life in Cuba. In this analysis, international trade data is used to examine the impact of the US blockade on Cuba in the 21st Century.

Have you ever wondered why Canada exists as such a hot mess of climate contradictions? This is the first in a series of posts on Canadian capitalism’s climate contradictions and Canada’s massively oversized role in driving the climate crisis. Fossil capital exercises considerable economic and political clout in Canada because it has been an extremely important site for new investment, commands huge amounts of capital, and produces the nation’s most important trade goods.

On capitalism’s historical necessity for oppression Exploitation and oppression are the twin pillars of capitalism. In this analysis, I demonstrate that a patriarchal and racist labour market hierarchy is an indispensable component of Canadian capitalism.