Dock Currie is a 2021 JD graduate of the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law and a committed adherent of the principles of Scientific Socialism. In 2012 he was awarded a Master’s degree in Theory and Criticism from the University of Western Ontario, and in 2014 he participated in the victorious CUPE 3903 contract faculty strike at York University, which secured tuition indexation for foreign TA and RA labour. Today he works as a labourer in the British Columbia restaurant and craft beverage industry.
Throughout his academic and legal studies, Currie has sought to illuminate the problems of our present society with recourse to the most incisive analyses in political-economy and critical legal studies. As a historical materialist, he believes that many of the crises we face as a society – in terms of the climate crisis, or the housing crisis, for example – are products of an alienated mode of production and exchange, and of, moreover, a post-political foreclosure of the possibility of intervening politically into the organization of production and exchange. Addressing these crises, which everyone recognizes more and more, requires intervening into the organization of production and exchange in our society, making economic life in society function in the interests of definite social needs by means of rational planning.
As a sociologist and political scientist, Currie studied the works of Baruch Spinoza and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as contemporary political thinkers such as Giovanni Arrighi, Domenico Losurdo, and Jacques Rancière. The last of these, Rancière, has a notion of ‘the emancipated spectator,’ the subject which breaks a condition of passivity and intervenes into their own situation. In academic and legal life, Currie advocates this kind of rejection of spectacle and passivity, and the active, mass, democratic intervention into the political and economic situation.