Andony Melathopoulos

LAST NOVEMBER PLATYPUS organized a teach-in led by Sam Gindin of the Canadian Auto Workers on “Public Sector Unionism, Austerity and the Left” at York University in Toronto. An audio and video recording is available above. What follows is an edited version of the interview Andony Melathopoulos of Platypus conducted with Gindin as a follow up to the teach-in. Andony Melathopoulos: Clearly these are not very good times for public sector unions, not only in Canada but worldwide. [Read More]

IN SEPTEMBER OF THIS YEAR, Andony Melathopoulos interviewed Imre Szeman, author, professor, and founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, on behalf of the Platypus Review, to discuss his analysis of oil politics in light of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the political responses to it. The interview was prepared in conjunction with Brian Worley. Andony Melathopoulos: In your estimation, did the recent BP disaster precipitate any new thinking from the Left? [Read More]

A bustling city at dawn. Industrious workers set out from their homes, coming and going in a perfect and productive ballet. But by evening the workers vanish. No trace of foul play. No bodies left behind. Mass disappearances like this have recently occurred across the globe, not of humans, but of millions of honey bees.1 THE OMINOUSLY TITLED 2007 PBS documentary Silence of the Bees begins with a montage of the streets of a major U. [Read More]

THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW was conducted as an email exchange between Andony Melathopoulos and Terry Glavin in December 2008. Terry Glavin is a Canadian journalist, an outspoken critic of the anti-war movement’s call to withdrawal foreign troops from Afghanistan and a founder of the Afghanistan Canada Solidarity Committee (afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org). Andony Melathopoulos: You just returned from a trip to Afghanistan and have been busy writing about your experience in the Canadian news media and, most recently, in an online piece in Democratiya (”Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades,” Winter (15), 2008). [Read More]

A PARADOX CONFRONTS AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISTS, according to James Gustave Speth, the Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies: “We now have a flourishing environmental movement, a proliferating number of organisations, more and more money going into this, decades now of environmental legislation and programs, at all levels of government, and the environment keeps going downhill.” The contradiction, according to Speth, results from the U.S. environmental movement focusing too narrowly on working “within the system. [Read More]