Connexions works to connect people working for social justice with information, ideas, groups, and with the history of social change movements. The heart of Connexions is an online Library/Archive organized by subject with thousands of resources on a wide range of issues. Each topic page features resources about democratization, economic justice, ecosocialism, civil liberties, and community.

Search: Find names, titles, topics related to your query.

Browse options: Subject – Title – Author – Year of publication – Format

Connexions Calendar – Events, shows, festivals, conferences, exhibitions with a focus on political and enviromental issues. Add events to Calendar here.

Connexions Library – Articles, books, documents, periodicals, films, other resources on a wide range of social and environmental issues. Includes thousands of full-text online documents and a searchable catalogue with bibliographic information, abstracts, and links for more than 12,000 publications indexed by Subject, Title, Author.

Connexions Directory – Groups working for social justice, human rights, and environmental alternatives. – Subject Index — A-Z Index. Add your group here.

Connexipedia – The Connexions Social Justice Encyclopedia with more than 1,000 articles on persons, events, movements, and concepts related to activism, radicalism, resistance, solidarity, and social justice. Includes a subject index.

Alternative Media – Selected progressive news websites and publications.

Manifestos – Programs – Visions – Selected political programs, vision statements and manifestos.

Focus on Israel/Palestine – A selection of resources for those looking for a solution to the conflict based on peace, justice, and human rights.

Publicity and media – Resources to help your organization get more and better media coverage and raise awareness of your issues.

Connexions Archive Needs a New Home
The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home. Founded in 1975, Connexions exists to conserve important documents and resources created by citizen activists spanning decades of activism. By digitizing them we make them available to a wider national and international public of activists, students, scholars, and interested individuals. For the past 15 years, Connexions has been housed in downtown Toronto space donated by a supportive organization. That arrangement will be coming to an end, making it necessary to find a new and hopefully permanent home for the Connexions Archive. More...

Recent & Selected Articles

1. Occupy Movement a valuable partner
   The progressive community must learn it has to confront power with power – something we don’t do well in Canada. It seems enough to most Canadians to simply point out that something is wrong, and leave it to someone else to shoulder. This doesn’t cut it any more. We need to stop being nice, and start fighting harder!
2. Traité du Savoir-Vivre for the Occupy Wall Street Generations
   Once upon a time, twenty thousand people descended on Wall Street, the capitol of capital, occupied it nonviolently, and won exactly what they demanded. This is not a fairy tale. It really happened. This is the story of how it happened.
3. The Politics (and Anti-Politics) of Occupy Wall Street
   At present, the occupation reveals a lot about where people's politicization begins in the United States.
4. Strike Wave Sweeps Brazil
   Workers in Brazil—in heavy industry, services, the public sector, and agriculture—are involved in a series of strikes and mass protests such as the country hasn’t seen in decades.
5. Libya and the World We Live In
   The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like “humanitarian”.
6. Rebuilding the Left in a Time of Crisis
   The type of organizers we need to develop need to be those who have developed the skills and capacities and depth that allow them to be good at taking a defensive struggle and saying ‘we can both fight it, and maybe fight it more effectively, if we can link it to a set of demands that are forward looking. They need to be visionary in terms of a socialist strategy.
7. In Praise of Marx
   Why might Marx be back on the agenda? The answer, ironically, is because of capitalism. Whenever you hear capitalists talking about capitalism, you know the system is in trouble.
8. Iceberg Economies and Shadow Selves
   Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system.
9. Information Terrorists?
   WikiLeaks is under concerted attack from the US government. Also under attack by the US government is the whole idea of freedom of thought and of information. It needs to be clearly understood that the attacks on WikiLeaks by the US government could as easily be used against news organizations and political organizations.
10. Truth in Chains
    Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.
11. The National Security State Cops a Feel
    It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
12. The Crimewave That Shames The World
    It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'.
13. In the Aftermath of the G20: Reflections on Strategy, Tactics and Militancy
    The tactics of the Black Bloc make it clear that, for them, it is more important to smash windows than to try and march with thousands of workers and engage them in arguments about how to move struggles forward or that the problem is capitalism. How radical is it to trash a few windows? For us, radical is about workers gaining confidence and consciousness to fight back, not just at work, but in solidarity with others. Radical is about developing a sense of mass power, organising based on moving others into struggle, winning others to challenge the power in their workplace or community collectively, beyond the individualization of our society. Radical is about going to the roots of the system - not trashing its symbols.
14. Summit Protests Are Obsolete
    I can understand why a lot of folks went to the G20 protests in Toronto, sincerely wanting to stand up and be counted against savage global capitalism and its consequences. The problem is, almost nobody who didn't participate, especially those who only heard of the protests through the media, has any idea what the protests were about, or why the protesters were there.
15. The People v. the Bankers
    The Greek "bailout" is actually a bailout of the international banks.
16. The Global War on Tribes
    The point is not that all tribal peoples pose an egalitarian alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Some (such as Indigenous peoples) certainly do have strong egalitarian principles, but many other tribal peoples -- such as in the new conflict zones -- certainly do not (particularly toward women). The salient point is not that all tribal cultures are paradise, but that they are not capitalist, and neoliberal capitalism cannot stand anything other than Total Control.
17. The Dead End of Climate Justice
    The notion of climate debt, highlighted as the principle avenue of struggle for the climate justice movement, poses some large problems. Contemporary demands for reparations justified by the notion of climate debt open a dangerous door to increased green capitalist investment in the Global South. Everything from energy to agriculture, from cleaning products to electronics, and especially everything within the biosphere, is being incorporated into this regime of climate markets. One can only imagine the immense possibilities for speculation and financialization in these markets as the green bubble continues to grow.
18. Doom and Gloom
    Jermey Brecher says that the social roots of doom are part of a common pattern that we can observe repeatedly in history. People live their lives and pursue their goals by means of strategies that have been developed over time. But sometimes they discover their established strategies aren't working. No matter how hard they try, their problems remain intractable. The natural result is despair. But the awareness that other people are experiencing the same despair changes the context in which it is experienced. It opens up new possibilities. Perhaps the problems that we despair of solving as individuals can be addressed through some kind of collective action. When people begin to explore that possibility, the result may be a social movement.
19. Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
    David Harvey says that there is a lot of work to be done to coalesce various tendencies around the underlying question: can the world change materially, socially, mentally, and politically in such a way as to confront not only the dire state of social and natural relations in so many parts of the world, but also the perpetuation of endless compound growth? This is the question that the alienated and discontented must insist upon asking, again and again, even as they learn from those who experience the pain directly and who are so adept at organizing resistances to the dire consequences of compound growth on the ground.
20. On Palestinian Civil Disobedience
    Human rights organizations have documented the forms of repression Israel deploys against villages that resist the annexation of their land. Once a village decides to struggle against the annexation barrier the entire community is punished. In addition to home demolitions, curfews and other forms of movement restriction, the Israeli occupation forces consistently use violence against the protestors - and most often targets the youth -- beating, tear-gassing, as well as deploying both lethal and 'non-lethal' ammunition against them.
21. Carbon trading: privatising the world's forests
    The World Bank sponsored carbon offset program has faced widespread criticism for, in effect, privatising forests and allowing rich nations to evade responsibility for cutting emissions themselves.
22. Hypocrisy over Cuba's 'political prisoners'
    Political prisoners and Cuba can be a confusing mix, in our time of mass propaganda. Three groups have attracted international attention over the past decade.
23. Meet the Real Death Panels
    Harvard-based researchers found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.
24. War Is Peace
    Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment.
25. Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses
    Whether you're a climate change denier or doomsayer, an avid recycler or rabid consumer of plastic bottles, there is one very good but little-known reason to oppose carbon offsets: their immediate and dire human costs.
26. The Corporate Stranglehold on Education
    Rather than challenge the economic irresponsibility, ecological damage, and human suffering, and culture of cruelty unleashed by free market fundamentalism, higher education appears to be one of its staunchest defenders, uncritically embracing a view of itself based on a market model of the academy.
27. Killing America's Kids
    Why is the Secretary of Defense so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping, acquiescent, ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this.
28. Crisis And Hope: Theirs And Ours
    Overcoming the multiple crises means tearing down an enormous edifice of delusions about markets, free trade, and democracy that has been assiduously constructed over many years and overcoming the marginalization and atomization of the public so that they can become participants, not mere spectators of action.
29. The Globalization of Garbage: Following the Trail of Toxic Trash
    Despite a near universal international ban on exporting toxic or hazardous material, most of electronic waste from the United States ends up in China, India, Vietnam, or in African countries like Ghana, and Nigeria.
30. Echo Platoon
    Echo and other platoons like it are grim yardsticks for measuring the desperation in which a military under immense strain is now operating. Looking up at that military from Echo's airless limbo, from a world of soldiers who have fallen through the cracks of a system under great stress, you can see just how devastating America's two ongoing wars have been for the military itself. The walking wounded, the troubled, and the broken are now being pressured to reenter the fray.

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Connexions exists to support individuals and groups working for freedom and social justice. We work to maintain and make available a record of the theory and practice of people struggling against oppression and for social change. We believe that the more we know about the struggles, victories, and defeats of the past, and about those who took part in them, the better equipped we will be to bring a new world into being.

We are internationalist in our orientation, but as a Canadian-based project we feature an especially extensive collection of Canadian documents and profiles of Canadian activist organizations.