A new group launching in Fredericton later this month will give socialists, and everyone interested in socialism, the opportunity to meet, learn more and build community.
Socialist Project Fredericton emerged out of the Social Forum in Wolastokuk hosted by NB Media Co-op and partners in October 2025. At the Fredericton event, many participants expressed a big appetite for engaging with socialism.
The energy, enthusiasm and wisdom evident at the event inspired several organizers and workshop leaders to create an ongoing opportunity to share socialist ideas. After discussions with the Socialist Project in Toronto, the group formed a local committee, Socialist Project Fredericton.
Why socialism? The 20th-century physicist Albert Einstein posed this question in a famous essay in the early 1950s. His answer then was as straightforward as it would be today: because capitalism plainly doesn’t work. Capitalism thwarts individual potential, undermines social well-being, and tends to leave a trail of devastation and destruction in its wake.
As the economist and philosopher Max Weber declared in his celebrated book on the ‘spirit of capitalism’ a century ago, the capitalist economic system creates pathological souls that value personal advantage and gain above all else. Capitalism sadly rewards greed and duplicity–those very qualities that we teach our children to shun in favour of compassion, generosity, and respect.
Things were bad before Einstein penned his essay and have clearly gotten much worse. Socialist analysis has shown that an economic system based on the unlimited pursuit of profit lies at the root of a litany of problems including appalling levels of labour exploitation, chronic poverty, perpetual war, grotesque levels of wealth inequality, perennial unemployment and under-employment, alarming levels of debilitating social anxiety, periodic economic crises every few years that make everything even worse, and recurrent bouts of right-wing extremism full of venom and hatred.
Socialists also directly implicate capitalism in the existential crises (plural) bearing down upon humanity at this foreboding historical juncture: the possibility of global thermonuclear war, the continuing threat of global pandemics (worsened by the sobering anti-science posture of the second Trump administration), the threat of artificial intelligence, and the growing fear of a looming ecological collapse.
Tellingly, on January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday clock ahead to just 85 seconds to midnight. At the metaphorical midnight there will be no coming back from existential crises bearing down on humanity.
In its press statement, the Bulletin’s committee cast blame on the usual suspects including increasingly autocratic political regimes. “Our current trajectory,” they wrote, “is unsustainable. National leaders—particularly those in the United States, Russia, and China—must take the lead in finding a path away from the brink. Citizens must insist they do so.” Strikingly, no mention is made of capitalism in their statement, despite that Albert Einstein numbered among the Bulletin’s founding members in 1945.
Socialists too believe that our present trajectory is unsustainable. But the difference between socialists and the Bulletin’s clock setters is that socialists do not shy away from naming the underlying problem: capitalism. Einstein would have done so.
Socialism is guided by the informed conviction that humanity must find a way to consign the profit-driven capitalist system to history. We envision a future where goods and services are made to meet genuine human needs. A shift from a ‘profit-based economy’ to a ‘needs-based economy’ is the most basic goal that unites all socialist activists.
The journey will not be easy. Three years ago this month, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution “denouncing the horrors of socialism.” Although this may be easily dismissed as a piece of performative legislation consistent with a century of disparagement emanating from the leading capitalist nations, including Canada, the political reality facing socialists cannot be ignored. Speaking about capitalism is effectively taboo–and politicians learn to muzzle themselves quickly.
Such silence must be broken. The problems of capitalism continue to stare us down as New Brunswickers know all too well. This province is dogged by toothless labour laws, sustained anti-worker practices in both the private and public sectors, a corporate monopoly on the media, weak regulations on business practices in all economic sectors, effective political indifference to the matter of Indigenous reconciliation, privatized and gutted social services, and a political culture that protects power and privilege.
Added to these perennial challenges are the emergence of more acute crises including short-staffed hospitals and long-term care, the toxic drug crisis, homelessness, affordable housing and tenant protection, the erosion of LGBTQIA2S+ rights, migrant worker abuse, and the erosion of reproductive rights.
Socialist Project Fredericton is committed to building a better future – the flipside of naming the problem. The committee embraces an inclusive political strategy centered on respect and solidarity and is, in principle, democratic and pluralistic.
Socialists in the past might have had ambitions for quickly getting beyond capitalism that seem in retrospect to have been imprudent, but organizers of this new Fredericton committee remain inveterate optimists. There is no fast path out of capitalism but both the necessity and the possibility of finding our way to a non-capitalist future is needed—now more than ever.
The launch meeting of Socialist Project Fredericton is on Monday, February 23, at 7 PM at Conserver House, 180 St. John Street, Fredericton.
Dr. Thom Workman is a retired professor of political science at the University of New Brunswick.
