Canada’s Assisted Dying Program Is Bad for the VulnerableIn 2016, Canada passed landmark legislation to legalize what it euphemizes as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) — physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia by doctor. At the time, it was hailed as a progressive victory allowing Canada to join the ranks of liberal scions such as Belgium and the Netherlands, which had legalized such practices in 2002 and 2001, respectively. But the unfolding of the MAiD program since its inception, coupled with recent and upcoming legal changes in Canada, have done more to reveal the moral poverty of the neoliberal project and its attendant conception of autonomy than to buttress the country’s progressive credentials. The history of the movement for MAiD — and the larger discussion of end-of-life issues in biomedical ethics — is usually understood as a cultural victory over traditional prejudices. This is due in no small part to the fact that the most strident opponents of MAiD in the United States are conservative evangelical Christians. Those working to legalize MAiD have tended to ally themselves with other activists working on causes thought of as progressive, such as efforts to legalize marijuana, expand abortion access, and so on. In the United States, such efforts resulted in a broad-based coalition of voters approving a ballot measure legalizing physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients in Oregon in 1994. (Following legal challenges, the law took effect in 1997.) Other states followed suit not long after; it is now legal in eleven states as well as Washington, DC. But it would be too hasty to conclude that all of the changes in end-of-life law in the Western world seen in recent decades are unambiguous victories for individual liberty. Analyzing the political-economic context in which Canada has full-throatedly embraced its relatively new MAiD program brings serious moral concerns to light.
https://jacobin.com/2025/12/canada-austerity-assisted-suicide-autonomyTo hell with social mobility: it’s workers moving together who will change this countryWHEN others would head for the coast of a summer, we would head inland to Muirhead. I used to look forward to the smell of the coal fire and my granny soup when we got in — they were Scottish summers after all. The nearby Cardowan pit had closed a few years earlier, and while my grandpa was able to treat himself to a few new tools from the redundancy money, even as a sproglet there was a sense that the walls might just be closing in for the next generation. My youngest uncle lived there too. He’d come of age at just the right moment to catch the tide of unemployment that swept across the communities that built everything, even today, many of us hold dear, a wave his elder siblings had only just been old enough to dodge. His cynicism and obsession with music and motorbikes at the time made him very much the cool uncle. Always reading, always full of odd facts, and always up for a wind-up. He once wrapped me in bandages and told me to wander out into the street and tell people I was Howard Hughes. I had no idea who Mr Hughes was at the time, but happily went along with it. He schooled the six-year-old me in how to answer the “and do you want to be a GPO engineer like your Dad?” question from a great, great aunt. “No,” said I, telling her in my innocence, “I’m going to be a genetic engineer.” A tumbleweed moment before I knew what tumbleweed was, punctuated only by his laughter from next door. He’d greet the nieces and nephews that were usually deposited in Muirhead over the summer with “are we all spiffing and upwardly mobile today?” We knew it was sarcasm, but none of us had the slightest idea what he was on about. Upward mobility was a bit of a thing in the ’80s, it would appear. The phrase has now fallen out of favour, being substituted for the equally vacuous “social mobility.” There’s even a Social Mobility Commission. If I had ever crossed paths with this commission in the past, I clearly sent it to the furthest reaches of my brain, where even there it takes up too much space, to be forgotten. This week, however, up it popped again.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/hell-social-mobility-its-workers-moving-together-who-will-change-countryThe Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy Pt2. Division of labour and Machinery The division of labour, according to M. Proudhon, opens the series of economic evolutions. Good side of the division of labour “Considered in its essence, the division of labour is the manner in which equality of conditions and intelligence is realized.” (Tome I, p. 93.) Bad side of the division of labour “The division of labour has become for us an instrument of poverty.” (Tome I, p. 94.) “labour, by dividing itself according to the law which is peculiar to it, and which is the primary condition of its fruitfulness, ends in the negation of its aims and destroys itself.” (Tome I, p. 94.) Problem to be solved To find the “recomposition which wipes out the drawbacks of the division, while retaining its useful effects." (Tome I, p. 97.)
The division of labour is, according to M. Proudhon, an eternal law, a simple, abstract category. Therefore the abstraction, the idea, the word must suffice for him to explain the division of labour at different historical epochs. Castes, corporations, manufacture, large-scale industry, must be explained by the single word divide. First study carefully the meaning of "divide", and you will have no need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labour a definitive character in every epoch. Certainly, things would be made much too easy if they were reduced to M. Proudhon’s categories. History does not proceed so categorically. It took three whole centuries in Germany to establish the first big division of labour, the separation of the towns from the country. In proportion, as this one relation of town and country was modified, the whole of society was modified. To take only this one aspect of the division of labour, you have the old republics, and you have Christian feudalism; you have old England with its barons and you have modern England with its cotton lords. In the 14th and 15th centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America did not yet exist for Europe, when Asia existed only through the intermediary of Constantinople, when the Mediterranean was the centre of commercial activity, the division of labour had a very different form, a very different aspect from that of the 17th century, when the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French had colonies established in all parts of the world. The extent of the market, its physiognomy, give to the division of labour at different periods a physiognomy, a character, which it would be difficult to deduce from the single word divide, from the idea, from the category.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02b.htm