Hatching Plans for Daybreak

The Midnight Sun Editorial Board

It feels as if the crises multiply each year.

Climate emergency. The cascading social disasters of COVID-19. Unremitting state violence in the form of prisons and police, borders and colonial extraction, afflicting communities unrecovered from historical traumas. Poverty wages, high rents, bullshit jobs, the devaluing of care work, our neighbours unhoused while thousands of homes sit empty, loved ones lost to overdoses in staggering numbers. Capitalism has carved up the globe with its imperialist hierarchies, stealing life chances from so many of us.

Midnight Sun is a new online magazine for everyone watching the catastrophes deepen and wondering with urgency, even with desperation:

What do we do?

And how?

And with whom?

Midnight Sun asks those questions from a revolutionary socialist perspective. We assert that any acceptable answers must centre Indigenous sovereignty and Black freedom. Must fight for disability justice, women’s liberation, and the flourishing of Two-Spirit, queer, and trans people. Must be committed to workers’ self-emancipation, socialist feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, full decriminalization of sex work, and solidarity with migrants. Must be abolitionist, standing against the violence enacted daily by all of the state’s repressive institutions. Must be rooted in new organs of radical democracy in workplaces, schools, neighbourhoods, and communities more broadly. Must recognize that capitalism is bound up with ongoing land theft from and genocide of Indigenous peoples, a situation that demands of settlers active struggle to end the genocide and give the land back. Must respond to the increasing number of our friends, relatives, and neighbours hungry for credible alternatives to capitalism’s cruel, banal death cult. Must forge an internationalist socialism-from-below for our time.

To ask What do we do? is to ask about revolutionary strategy. From Indigenous land defence to Black Lives Matter, from the International Women’s Strike to tenants organizing their apartment blocks one conversation at a time, we’re witnessing an upturn in dissent – which brings with it a multitude of visions of the way forward. What kind of future do we want? How and with whom do we get there? How do we build the power necessary to realize our hopes for a better world? And what are the roads we don’t want to take? The dead ends where our collective potential is bound to dissipate?

This publication seeks to be a springboard for such questions and a point of convergence for those asking them, and especially for those of us asking them on the territory currently known as Canada. Neither a news magazine nor a scholarly journal, Midnight Sun is a forum for writing that tries to bridge revolutionary theory and practice, that weds a deep curiosity about how the world works to an urgent interest in how we might organize most effectively for justice. We embrace both concreteness and abstraction, the poetic complexity of everyday language alongside the simple force of clearly explained theory: whatever method can best reveal both the surfaces and the hidden layers of a given topic, and can speak most effectively to whichever public a particular argument needs to reach.

While returning always to our core questions – What do we do? And how? And with whom? – we also dig into the broader contexts by which any promising left strategy must be informed: investigations of revolutionary histories; critical analyses of our moment’s key social conflicts; and inquiries into struggles around the world that may inspire, educate, and complicate those unfolding in our own communities.

Midnight Sun insists, too, that art and culture are central to social transformation – both its seed and its bloom. In this spirit, we showcase poetry and literary prose written against capital, in pursuit of beauty, against empire, in pursuit of pleasure. Writing that confirms imagination as a site of production and power, and affirms, with the poet Anne Boyer, that “a poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.” And so armours us for our collective struggles.

By the midnight sun we make our plans for daybreak. 

We hope you’ll join us.