25. 5. 2026

Farewell from Midnight Sun

The Midnight Sun editors

It’s in the nature of a sun to rise and set. After five years, Midnight Sun Magazine is winding down.

The Midnight Sun project was born during some of the darkest hours of the COVID-19 pandemic, in late 2020 and early 2021. Its main goal was to provide a forum for strategic reflections on how the left in the Canadian state should orient itself and act. Its editors also wanted to create a space where analytical offerings could live alongside politically aligned literary works: poetry and prose grounded in solidarity with social movements for liberation. Midnight Sun was never an organizing project, never formally affiliated with any active left group seeking to recruit members, mobilize people in the streets, or build power in other material ways. In this as in other respects, it was a product of its moment. 

After 2019’s polyphony of global uprisings, the new decade began with a cascade of mass mobilizations closer to home, in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people and in defence of Black lives. Yet by the end of 2020, those surges had significantly subsided. In many of our communities, that moment saw an upturn in tenants banding together to confront bad landlords, important organizing in solidarity with unhoused neighbours in encampments, and pockets of resistance to the ways the capitalist state called many workers essential while exposing them, with paltry protections, to a deadly new virus. But in general, it was a moment when organizing for justice across Canada and the United States appeared to be at a low ebb. It felt like a time to reflect, educate, and prepare: to build collective readiness to make the most of strategic openings that might arise in the coming period.

We’re in a different moment now. For well over two years, the movement for Palestinian liberation has catalyzed fresh mass mobilizations here at home and around the world. That movement has clarified, for growing layers of the public, some of the fundamental antagonisms of the capitalist, imperialist world order. Anti-imperialist organizers have fought for, and won, divestment and arms embargoes, uprooting key institutional complicities with imperial violence. Electoral politics have also generated some promising wins, with left leaders Zohran Mamdani and Avi Lewis, both of them backed by experienced grassroots activists, successfully campaigning for mayor of New York City and leader of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party, respectively. And in Toronto, where many of Midnight Sun‘s editors live, a youth-driven climate justice organization that was most active before the pandemic has recently partnered with tenant organizers to transform itself into a city-wide tenant union, a major milestone in the city’s radical history and future.

There are many questions of strategy that have undiminished urgency in this moment. Should socialists get active in the NDP now that Lewis is its federal leader, and can a useful radical political organization be created out of the campaign that elected him? What relative emphasis should left activists place on organizing around local tenants’ and workers’ issues, on the one hand, and advancing global solidarities on the other? How might we struggle for a meaningful left internationalism, including a strategically effective anti-imperialism, in a period when left nationalism appears to be on the rise? How should we collectively fight back against deepening state agendas of austerity and militarization? 

The editors of Midnight Sun remain invested in these questions and in finding ways to engage with them in our lives, in solidarity with our peers. But we no longer wish to explore them through a magazine that isn’t rooted in other forms of collective organization. While this independence has been helpful at times, in part because it’s allowed us to welcome a relatively broad range of perspectives into the magazine, we feel our friends and comrades at other publications are doing an excellent job of providing a similar kind of independent, anti-dogmatic left forum: The Breach and Briarpatch Magazine are two brilliant examples in the Canadian state, while the Tempest Collective and Spectre Journal have created helpful venues for strategic reflection south of the border. At this point, we’d rather find ways to contribute to the good work happening all around us than insist on piloting our own ship.

Though the magazine will no longer be publishing new work, a version of the Midnight Sun website will remain online as an archive for the foreseeable future. We hope the website remains a useful resource for comrades reflecting on what is to be done to build a better future for us all, as well as a document of the questions and ideas swirling around the broad left in the Canadian state from 2021 to 2026.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting this modest project. We look forward to seeing you out in the world, in friendship and solidarity, carried together through even the darkest of nights by the unextinguished promise of daybreak.