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To amplify their impact, two Canadian left-wing publications, Passage and the Maple, have recently merged. We spoke with Alex Cosh, news editor of the Maple, about the merger, their mission, and the state of both mainstream and left-wing media.

In Canada, left-wing publications Passage and the Maple have merged to increase their reach. (Roberto Machado Noa / LightRocket via Getty Images)

Independent left-wing media in Canada is having a moment. Recently, two left-wing publications — Passage and the Maple — merged to increase their reach. Meanwhile, outlets like the Breach, Ricochet, and Canadian Dimension continue to challenge the prevailing media consensus in a country where the media landscape is dominated by a handful of concentrated outlets. Jacobin recently spoke to the Maple’s news editor Alex Cosh about the Maple, the merger, and the state of Canada’s mainstream and left media.

David Moscrop

Independent, left-wing publications are refreshingly explicit about their objectives. Unlike many mainstream outlets that often pretend not to have a mission, left-leaning publications openly acknowledge and pursue their goals. So, what’s the mission at the Maple?

Alex Cosh

I would say the mission at the Maple is intricately bound up with how we are funded and how we obtain income to do the work that we do. We are a 100 percent reader-funded publication. Now, that sounds like a buzz phrase. And a lot of publications have a large chunk of their funding that comes from readers. But I think we’re among the only ones where it’s 100 percent — every dollar we make is from subscriber fees and from individual donations from our readers.

That really does give us a degree of editorial independence and freedom that is rare and very difficult to replicate elsewhere. Even organizations or news publications that might have the majority of their funding from readers may have substantial chunks of their funding from third-party organizations or perhaps even government grants. And I’m not knocking that at all. People must and should do what they need to in order survive and do their excellent work. But I think that’s the main distinguishing feature of the Maple, the degree of editorial independence that is afforded by our reader-funded model.

What that looks like in practice is that we’re giving our subscribers a daily product. They get a newsletter that breaks down a big story each day. They get opinion content delivered to their mailbox. And with that editorial freedom, we’re able to explore things. We’re able to upset people that other publications might feel are too risky or just not advisable for their supporter base. So, I’d say that’s the main thing that distinguishes us in terms of a mission.

The Merger

David Moscrop

You recently merged with Passage. How did the merger come about?

Alex Cosh

Passage and the Maple, although they were separate and editorially independent publications, were owned by the same nonprofit association, the organization that was formerly known as North 99. And North 99 was basically a network of social media pages that produced viral media content for a progressive audience in Canada.

In 2019, North 99 crowdfunded to create Passage, which was initially a kind of commentary and opinion-based conversation — again, 100 percent reader-funded. Passage came to operate as its own independent thing managed by Davide Mastracci, now my colleague at the Maple. And then North 99 was kind of choked by changes to social media algorithms that made it much harder to get viral content to audiences. So, North 99 transitioned into the Maple, this kind of newsletter-first, reader-funded, left-wing news publication.

We were operating two separate publications, although joined by this common ancestor in North 99. But as time went on, we realized sort of independently that our editorial visions were pretty closely aligned. Me and Davide worked together on a couple of projects. The Maple was doing news; Passage was doing opinion. It just seemed like a really obvious fit. We tentatively discussed the idea for a while and then just agreed amongst ourselves that it logistically made more sense to operate as one stronger publication.

We wanted to gauge what our readers thought of the idea and whether readers from each publication were familiar with the other publication. And we found to our relief that many readers were very much familiar with each publication and were very happy with the idea of us merging to become one publication. We went ahead with the merger last month. And now we’re one publication with an opinion section and a news section.

Reaching the People

David Moscrop

How’s the Maple’s reach? Is it growing? Has it been constrained by changes in social media?

Alex Cosh

Social media continues to be a challenge. Despite the challenges, we reach about 1.1 million people on social media each month. That’s through Instagram and Twitter — those are our main channels. Facebook has definitely seen a drop in terms of how many people we’re reaching. We are primarily delivering our content to our readers through email in the form of newsletters, rather than relying on stuff going viral and generating a ton of web traffic. We have about sixty-five thousand newsletter readers who are reached by email. So, that’s our total mailing list. And we regularly have an open rate of above 50 percent, sometimes as high as 70 percent. That’s the kind of numbers we’re working with. Of the pool of free subscribers, we have about thirty-seven hundred paying members who sustain our publication with donations and subscriber fees.

David Moscrop

Who’s the intended audience? I’m very curious about whether and to what extent editors at the helm of Canada’s left-wing media are conscious about who they’re trying to reach and who they are reaching. Are you more focused on, for instance, speaking to the Left or reaching beyond the Left and trying to engage and persuade others?

Alex Cosh

I would describe our core constituency, our kind of loyal, diehard fan base, as the independent left in Canada. So, that’s people who are not merely nonpartisan, but who might, in fact, be kind of hostile to the party offerings that currently dominate Canada’s mainstream politics. People who are seeking radically critical perspectives, not just on the Conservative and Liberal Parties, but also on the New Democratic Party (NDP) and other institutional organizations that purport to speak to left-wing and progressive values.

We’re unapologetically and highly critical of all these organizations. And, again, to go back to the freedom that’s supported by our funding model, we are able to stake out this position because none of these institutions pay our wages.

In terms of where and who our readers are in a more granular sense, the majority are women. Our social media audience is, I think, 75 percent women. The majority are based in Ontario, more than half are in Ontario. Although interestingly, the next highest proportion is Alberta. And Alberta is a difficult place to be a leftist. So is Ontario, of course, but in Alberta, as we saw last week, it’s not just that we have a kind of far right, ultrareactionary United Conservative Party government in power. It’s that we also have a devastatingly weak NDP, which ran on a pretty explicitly center-right fiscal platform this election.

So, I think there’s a decent pool of people here who feel really, really upset by what they’re being offered at the ballot box. And, again, that’s where I think that category of independent left readers finds their voice heard and spoken to in our publication.

Related to that, we regularly survey our readers just to get a sense of where they’re at and how they think about things, and to make sure that we understand them and they understand us. And 80 percent of our readers strongly agree that electoral politics is not the only way to pursue political change. Now, that sounds like an obvious and trite statement, but how that translates in our work is that we give space to ideas beyond electoral politics.

The State of Canada’s Left Media

David Moscrop

The left-wing media ecosystem in Canada is probably healthier than it has ever been despite the challenges we face. We’ve got long-running outlets like Labor / Le Travail, Socialist Project, and Canadian Dimension. We have some great labor reporting, such as Rank and File and PressProgress’s Labour News. And we’ve got new blood, as represented by the Maple, the Breach, and Spring. And Jacobin runs quite a lot of Canadian coverage. Do you think these publications are having an appreciable effect on setting the agenda, changing discourse, changing policy, raising class consciousness, or supporting new social movements?

Alex Cosh

I think it’s really hard to measure. I’m sure we’re collectively increasing skepticism and critical thinking around the NPD and the Liberal Party and the Trudeau government. But that’s hard to attach a number to. That said, our stories are picked up in mainstream media. Just the other day, the Maple revealed that Harjit Sajjan had been briefed to lobby Qatari ministers for a light armored vehicle deal while he was visiting the World Cup last year. That was picked up by the Global and Mail, and it was subsequently brought up in a parliamentary committee by a Bloc Québécois MP who grilled Sajjan about the issue. Obviously, that’s great. We were thrilled about that. But where did it go from there?

It’s great that it’s brought up in these mainstream milieus, but how does that reverberate into social movements and lead to transformation? That’s the bigger question. And the more important question is can we, with these stories, help organizations and social movements galvanize the push for more substantive change?

David Moscrop

What is left-wing media getting right and what is it getting wrong? Are we cultivating new and different voices? Are we speaking to the working class? Are we mobilizing folks? Are we reaching beyond our own borders? How do you think left-wing independent publications are doing on those fronts?

Alex Cosh

I think left-wing media in Canada does a good job fanning good populist fires. I think collectively we do a good job of mobilizing people, maybe not so much organizing, but we do a good job speaking to everyday concerns. I think a weakness in the larger landscape, which we try to fill as much as possible, is that a more internationalist perspective is crucial.

I think there needs to be more original investigative reporting of Canadian foreign policy and the harms that it causes. That’s definitely something we try to do. And, certainly, we’re not the only ones. There are other outlets in Canada that also do really great work on that. But I do think an international perspective is indispensable to building meaningful left-wing politics. That is an area that I think needs to be strengthened because it is an area that is woefully inadequate in mainstream political conversations. Trying to drive a more thoughtful and critical conversation around that is really important and something we’ll keep trying to do, and I hope others will too.

David Moscrop

What about media critique? I know Passage in the past, and now the Maple, have pieces critiquing the mainstream media — the Nepo baby round up is a great example. But it seems to me that part of the left-wing, independent media mission is to point out flaws in the broader media landscape. How important do you think that is?

Alex Cosh

I think that’s really key, and I think that’s something incredibly valuable that Davide does. We do have media-critiquing media in the form of organizations like Canadaland, for example. But I think what Davide brings is a kind if unapologetic, thoroughly well-researched and left-wing perspective to media criticism.

And I think the work that he does ruffles the right feathers; he’s creating resources that serve as evergreen repositories of information that can be used for further investigation and further reporting. I think that’s another really key niche that we fill — I should be more specific, that Davide fills — in Canadian left media, whether that’s opinion pieces or more thoroughly investigated research. You mentioned the Nepo baby resource, that’s been very much appreciated by a lot of our readers and, on the other hand, very much hated by all the right people.

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Two leading anti-corruption activists in the Palestinian Authority called in for questioning by PA security forces, sparking backlash among human rights groups and NGOs.

By World Israel News Staff

Two top anti-corruption activists in the Palestinian Authority were called in for questioning Tuesday, drawing the angst of local watchdog organizations.

PA police in Ramallah summoned Azmi Shuaibi and Isam Haj-Hussein, leaders of the Coalition for Accountability and Integrity (AMAN), a Palestinian organization which monitors corruption by PA officials.

According to a report in The Jerusalem Post, the two senior AMAN activists were called in for questioning for allegedly “defaming” Palestinian leadership. The charge is reportedly in connection to the organization’s recent report which accused Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ office of covering up an operation to pass off dates grown in Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria as Palestinian produce.

PA media reports claim that a number of senior Palestinian officials, including members of Abbas’ cabinet, have been involved in illegally “whitewashing” Israeli dates as Palestinian produce, with Ramallah taking steps to cover up the scandal.

The pursuit of the case of money laundering regarding colonies’ dates has not ended for more than three years,” AMAN claimed in its recent report.

“But in 2022 it took a different turn. Instead of referring the implicated individuals to the courts, it seems to be more of settling scores since the assets of one of the major investors in the dates and marketing sector were seized. The dates case has turned from a legal pursuit into blackmail…to seize the property by some senior [Palestinian] officials.”

On Tuesday, AMAN issued a statement condemning the interrogations of Shuaibi and Haj-Hussein.

“This is disrupting their work and activities, thus contravening the guarantees set forth in the Palestinian Basic Law, Law of Charitable associations and NGOs and the freedom of opinion and expression.”

“AMAN issues its annual reports to provide recommendations to Palestinian decision-makers and stakeholders parties to help them adopt suitable procedures and measures to strengthen the national system of integrity and corruption prevention.”

A umbrella organization representing over 140 Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also condemned the Palestinian Authority leadership for summoning the two AMAN leaders.

“The Network considers the summons process as an infringement on the freedom of opinion and expression.”

“This is an attempt to restrict the work of Palestinian civil society; it’s also a flagrant violation of Palestinian and international laws.”

A number of activists demonstrated in Ramallah to protest the police summons.

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The tragedies, brutalities, and absurdities of Stalinism are all there onscreen in Costa-Gavras’s classic 1970 film The Confession.

Yves Montand in a scene from The Confession, 1970. (Paramount / Getty Images)

“The party’s always right.” This phrase weighs like a nightmare on the events portrayed in The Confession, the 1970 film by Greek-French director Costa-Gavras based on a book of the same name by Artur London, a high official of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) who was swept up in the infamous 1952 Slánský trial. London was sentenced to life in prison, but eleven of the fourteen accused, including KSČ general secretary Rudolf Slánský, were hanged for allegedly conspiring against the state.

The trial was totally absurd — the accused were all loyal Communists, not “Trotskyists,” “Titoists,” or “Zionists” in cahoots with the Americans, as the prosecution claimed. But it served the perceived interests of the Kremlin, whose agents instigated the proceedings and literally wrote its script. It also gave a brief reprieve to Czechoslovak president Klement Gottwald, who sacrificed his erstwhile friend and comrade Slánský to avoid being purged himself. Gottwald, who became the party’s general secretary in Slánský’s wake, died the next year of an aneurysm brought on by alcoholism and untreated syphilis.

The iconic French-Italian actor Yves Montand plays London, known as “Gérard” in the film, and the equally iconic Simone Signoret, Montand’s actual wife, plays Gérard’s wife, Lise. Montand and Signoret were themselves leftists, which heightens the film’s moral and political force. Montand’s family fled Italy after Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922. They moved to Marseille, where his father was a Communist Party militant and young Ivo Livi (Montand’s birth name) inherited his father’s leftist political faith.

Neither Montand nor Signoret joined the Communist Party, but the two were open fellow travelers and were very popular in the Soviet bloc as well as in the West. Amid controversy, they toured the USSR while Soviet tanks rumbled into Hungary to crush the uprising there in 1956. Despite their Communist sympathies, Montand and Signoret were horrified by these events and told Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev so to his face while on tour. By the time they starred in The Confession, the couple was openly critical of Stalinism and the Soviet Union while maintaining their basic leftist commitments.

In doing so, they followed the example of London himself. Until his death London insisted that he was still a Communist, “but I have nothing to do with [Gustáv] Husák, [Leonid] Brezhnev, not even [Georges] Marchais,” the leaders of the Czechoslovak, Soviet, and French Communist parties, respectively.

“The party’s always right.” Lise says this in a flashback Gérard has after being arrested off the street in the film’s first act. Two guards repeatedly slam him face first into the wall, then spin him around. The camera assumes Gérard’s point of view as the hammer and sickle on a guard’s hat takes up most of the frame, which dissolves into a montage of archival footage depicting scenes from Communist history. They all depict acts of violent conflict: the armed uprising of 1917, the vicious civil war between Reds and Whites, Red Army tanks, and troops on the move during World War II.

The montage dissolves, replaced again by the guard’s stern young face. “Walk!” he barks at Gérard, who’s forced to pace the floor of his dank cell for hours between beatings and trips to the interrogation room.

London avoided the gallows, and in 1955 he was freed amid a relaxation of Stalinist terror. He and Lise moved to France in 1963, where he remained until his death in 1986. In You Speak of Prague, his documentary about the making of The Confession, Chris Marker describes London’s story as “the tragedy of a Communist trapped by his loyalty who had the courage to denounce the trap without denying his loyalty.”

Still from The Confession. (Paramount)

Loyalty to what, exactly? Above all, London was loyal to the anti-fascist struggle that shaped so many of his generation and gave their lives meaning. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, joined the French Resistance after Spain fell, and survived the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen — a fact that was perversely used against him as evidence of treachery in the Slánský trial. How could a Jewish Communist possibly survive the camps, according to the prosecution’s twisted logic, without collaborating with the Nazis?

“The fight against Fascism was a great fight,” London recalled in an appearance on French television available through the Criterion Collection. “In that fight, all the good men were on the same side, the anti-Fascist side. That period of struggle was a fantastic time,” when Communists could feel unequivocally that they were on the right side of history. London’s arrest and persecution was a terrible trauma for him, shattering the party’s identification with all that was good and true. Nevertheless, he continued to insist, “I never confused the Inquisition of Torquemada with Christianity, and I won’t confuse Stalin, Beria, and that whole group with Socialism . . . it didn’t make me lose faith in authentic Socialism.”

“Arise, Lenin! They’ve Gone Mad!”

London’s use of a religious analogy is not an accident. The Confession is, whether the filmmakers intended it or not, a deeply religious film.

The title doesn’t simply reference the false confession his torturers wrung out of him. In Marker’s documentary, London visits the set where The Confession is being filmed. Upon seeing Montand’s striking physical transformation into the former version of himself — Montand lost twenty-five pounds to fully inhabit the role — London exclaims, “his attitude, the stigmata of suffering, his exhaustion, all that is fantastic.”

Still from The Confession. (Paramount)

London’s suffering, played with harrowing verisimilitude by Montand, is portrayed as Christlike in its redemptive power. The film’s emotional structure is grounded in the sacramental power of penance, one of the central tenets of Catholic interpretations of Christian theology. The act of confession gives a believer the opportunity to admit one’s sins, receive absolution, and be reconciled with God. One is redeemed and strengthened in one’s faith by telling the truth and making penance for mistakes.

This is precisely what London’s book and Costa-Gavras’s film attempt to do, in their own secular way, for the Communist faithful. As London put it in his television appearance:

If Communists themselves, with honesty and courage, undertake a critical examination of the different stages of socialism, if they examine the errors, lay them bare, in this way they give socialism its purity back. Or to use an expression from my country, they “put a human face back on socialism.”

The Stalinist show trial was a ritual of abuse; to give witness to crimes committed in the name of socialism was a ritual of absolution — including for London himself, who surely must have committed his own share of misdeeds on the path from Spain to a high position in the party-state.

“Socialism with a human face” was the slogan of the Prague Spring movement for democratic reform in Communist Czechoslovakia. The Confession concludes with Gérard arriving in Prague to publish his exposé. But he arrives just in time for Soviet tanks to crush the movement, in a bleak echo of the generals’ coup that crushes hopes for justice at the end of Costa-Gavras’s previous film, Z.

This scene doesn’t quite end the film. A brief coda shows a group of young militants painting the slogan “Arise, Lenin! They’ve Gone Mad!” on a Prague wall. Calls to return to Vladimir Lenin as the original repository of revolutionary virtue were common among critical Communists. London does this himself in Marker’s documentary when he insists that “Lenin always affirmed that the relationship between the Party and the people should be based on absolute trust, on its ability to always tell people the truth and to recognize any mistakes that might be made.”

Lenin did not pursue (and, had he lived longer, likely would not have pursued) the kinds of show trials that were so central to Joseph Stalin’s rule. Lenin was not Stalin, but there is not a bright line separating them either. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Bolsheviks fought to exclude other socialist parties from government participation after the October Revolution and subordinated all institutions of state and society to the Communist Party. Arbitrary acts of repression and violence, carried out through party-dominated organs like the Cheka, began shortly after the Bolsheviks took power.

Historian S. A. Smith, who is sympathetic to the motivations that drove the October Revolution, concludes in Russia in Revolution: “Lenin was the architect of the party’s monopoly on power; it was he who subordinated the soviets and trade unions to the party; he who would not tolerate those who thought differently; he who dismantled many civil and political freedoms; he who crushed the socialist opposition.”

Even if Stalin had lost the struggle for power after Lenin’s death, it is difficult to imagine a fundamentally different trajectory for the Soviet Union or Communism generally unless the fundamental principle of exclusive Communist Party rule that Lenin — backed by Leon Trotsky and Stalin alike — insisted on was abandoned. London’s stance, whatever its limitations, was superior to that of former Communists turned professional anti-Communists. But it’s tragic that he and others like him could not escape the need for identification with an alternative Bolshevism that did not exist.

The Soviet leader most committed to reviving Lenin was, quite ironically, the one most responsible for the system’s demise. Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, bent on saving Communism from itself by returning to first principles. In Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, historian Vladislav Zubok describes Gorbachev as “the last true Leninist believer.” According to Zubok, one of his aides reported an occasion when “Gorbachev began to impersonate Lenin, mimicking his style and gestures, his accent and favorite words, his acrimony and ire. This bizarre performance lasted over an hour.”

Zubok astutely observes the deeply paradoxical nature of Gorbachev’s identification with Lenin. In seeking to remake the Soviet Union,

Gorbachev consistently rejected methods and features that were at the core of Lenin’s revolutionary success. He preferred speeches to action, parliamentary consensus to violence, and devolution of power to dictatorship. In a word, his messianic idea of a humane socialist society was increasingly detached from the realities of Soviet power and its economy.

In Zubok’s estimation, Gorbachev’s attempt to conjure the spirit of Lenin — or, more precisely, his idea of what Lenin represented — made him the proverbial “sorcerer’s apprentice; he did not know how to regain control over the forces he had unleashed.” Much the same could be said of Lenin himself, who spent his last years trying and ultimately failing to keep Stalin from mastering the system he founded.

Socialists looking to the Communist movement for a usable past would do well to heed C. Wright Mills’s advice to the young radicals of his day: “Read Lenin again (be careful).” Watch The Confession, too.

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