Critical Perspectives and Reflections

A s a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867) According to CNN (Isadore, 2022) the oil corporate giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron both reported massive second quarter, three-month profit gains “thanks to record gasoline prices during the quarter”. Exxon's profit, came in at an obscene $17.6 billion, almost double what it made in its very profitable first quarter as oil and gas prices started to surge in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to the CNN wording. Its 2nd quarter profit was up a stunning (to me) 273% from the same period last year. Chevron raked in a $1...

  I grew up as a Cayuga Language Immersion student, right from kindergarten to high school…and then I dropped out in grade 10… I have definitely come a long way on the journey of learning how to read and write in English, later in life, and doing my best to push myself to get a westernized education, and when I say push, I really mean PUSH… I’ve had to force myself to step out of my comfort zone in ways that were so cringing, scary and difficult…fearing nothing but judgment or whether you’re good enough to succeed… But it still absolutely surprises me some days just how much I need a dictionary (online or off) to know the meaning of what I think are everyday words. I do my best at being articulate when I’m writing or speaking, but it definitely requires some extra work and effort, as a result of being in immersion and dropping out of school early… But there is nothing more of a blessing to me, than growing up with our language and culture, regardless of how much I use it now or pa...