by J. Sakai. Third edition 1989.

Reviewed by Tyler McCreary

First published in the early 1980s to inform and empower people of colour struggling against the white capitalist hegemony of American society, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat remains a relevant historical materialist interrogation of “whiteness” that has much to offer our understanding of the workings of race. However, despite Settlers’ vitality, Sakai’s critical inquiry is hobbled by certain critical lapses and overly strict conceptual categories. While acknowledging the ingenuity of Sakai’s thought, I intend to address some of his work’s shortcomings in an effort to advance our struggles against the politics of domination.

by Judy Rebick, Penguin Canada, 2005

Reviewed by Kirat Kaur

Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution is Judy Rebick’s attempt to provide a historical account of the second wave of the mainstream feminist movement in Canada. Rebick, herself an active participant in the latter part of this movement and a well known feminist today, is arguably well placed to take on the project of documenting a history that is in danger of being lost, and that is often subsumed within the history of the US feminist movement. In fact, as is revealed throughout the book, the Canadian feminist movement was unique in terms of the issues that mobilized women, the struggles and challenges faced, and the victories that were won.

Edited by David Austin, Alfie Roberts Institute, 2005.

Reviewed by Adrian Harewood

In the fall of 1995, the top writers in Canada’s Black literary firmament gathered at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa to take part in the Black Writers Conference. Andre Alexis, Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, Cecil Foster, Claire Harris, Nalo Hopkinson, and Makeda Silvera were just some of the authors present. Curiously, given the august assembly, the conference’s keynote speaker was neither a writer nor a literary critic of repute. He was not a renowned academic nor was he even a politician of middling significance. Doubtless, as he approached the stage, many in the audience wondered who this distinguished looking Black man with the salt and pepper goatee was.

With the brutal repression of Palestinian uprisings by the Israeli state now giving way to a more subtle, and less news-making, regime of occupation, Upping the Anti asked several of Canada’s most committed Palestine solidarity activists to discuss some of the obstacles and accomplishments they faced while organizing over the course of the intifada, and about the direction the movement should now take.

Mordecai Briemberg has been active in various forms of Palestine solidarity organizing since 1967. He is based in Vancouver and is active with the anti-war coalition Stopwar.ca, a founding member of Canada Palestine Support Network (canpalnet.ca), and works on the Wall Must Fall Campaign (thewallmustfall.ca).

Paul Burrows is a member of the Canada Palestine Support Network and ISM-Winnipeg, and is also an organizer with the Canada Palestine Film Festival (a-zone.org/canpalfilmfest). He participated in the ISM’s “olive harvest campaign” in the West Bank in the fall of 2002, and has written several articles related to Israel-Palestine for ZNet and Electronic Intifada.

Rafeef Ziadah is a third generation Palestinian refugee to Lebanon. She is active with Sumoud Political Prisoner Solidarity Group (http://sumoud.tao.ca) and Al-Awda right of return coalition in Toronto (www.al-awda.ca).

Adam Hanieh is co-author of Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children, and has recently received a Project Censored award (www.projectcensored.org) for his article in Left Turn, “Control & Resistance: Palestinian Child Prisoners.” He is active with Al-Awda – Toronto, and Sumoud Political Prisoner Solidarity Group, and recently returned from working on a documentary in Palestine.

Samer Elatrash is an executive member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights in Montréal. He has also served as an elected representative of the Concordia Student Union.

This roundtable is an attempt to address some of the issues currently facing anti-war (and, more broadly, anti-occupation) organizing within the Canadian state. While obviously not a representative sample of the diverse collectives and organizations that comprise the Canadian anti-war movement, these interviews hint at the political debates that underscore its organizing. Seven participants agreed to answer the following questions by e-mail and sent in their responses. The interviews were carried out by Lesley J. Wood with:

Chris Arsenault: Block the Empire, Students Taking Action in Chiapas, Halifax.

Mike DesRoches: June 30th Organizing Committee (now the Toronto Solidarity Project), Toronto.

Derrick O’Keefe: Stop the War Coalition, Vancouver.

Andrea Schmidt: Block the Empire, Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC), Montreal

George ‘Mick’ Sweetman: Punching Out North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists (NEFAC), Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Toronto.

Honor Brabazon: The Catapult! Collective, Direct Action Casework Ottawa, Solidarity Across Borders Ottawa; and Jessie X: The Catapult! Collective, Ottawa.

by Taiaiake Alfred and Lana Lowe

To explore the history and impacts of indigenous revolutionary organizing in Canada, we are pleased to publish excerpts from Taiaiake Alfred and Lana Lowe’s paper “Warrior Societies in Contemporary Indigenous Communities”. The excerpts we have chosen discuss history and spiritual aspects of indigenous resistance that are misrepresented by the Canadian state. With interviews and an historical overview, Alfred and Lowe argue that warrior societies are integral to contemporary indigenous nationhood and sovereignty struggles. The full text of this article is available on the website of the Ipperwash Inquiry at www.ipperwashinquiry.ca.

by Tom K.

"It is Marxism itself, in what was the best and most revolutionary in it, namely its pitiless denunciations of hollow phrases and ideologies and its insistence on permanent self-criticism, which compels us to take stock of what Marxism has become in real life."

-Cornelius Castoriadis, The Fate of Marxism (1)

INTRODUCTION

We live today in an era in which socialism has largely lost its meaning, and at least in the mainstream political consciousness, much of its relevance. Its role as the bogeyman of U.S. empire has been replaced by Arab/Islamic “terrorism,” and even to those unconvinced by the triumph of capitalism and of “the end of history,” socialism’s meaning is obfuscated by an endless variety of parties, movements and states claiming to be socialist. The profusion of social democratic, Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist governments over the past century which have failed to carry out their stated “socialist” objectives has dealt a serious blow to the integrity of the very concept of socialism and is largely responsible for today’s marginalization of revolutionary politics. Socialist organizations out of power have proved no better, as cultism, bureaucratization, and reformism have ossified and destroyed virtually every such grouping that has been able to amass more than a handful of members. Despite the best efforts of its founders, for most of the past century “scientific socialism” has become, as Cornelius Castoriadis puts it:

In June, Montreal’s Solidarity Across Borders (a broad coalition comprised of refugees, non-status immigrants, and their supporters) organized a walk from Montreal to Ottawa to push for four key demands: an end to all deportations, an end to the detentions of immigrants and refugees, an end to security certificates1, and the full and accessible regularization of all non-status immigrants.2 The walk was the culmination of years of organizing by such groups as No One Is Illegal (NOII) in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Kingston, Solidarity Across Borders (SAB) in Montreal, and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. The movement also has ties to a number of other cities and communities across Canada. In the follow-up to the walk, some participants discussed the future of this movement. To help further this dialogue, Upping the Anti asked three organizers from across Canada to answer some questions about the future of the refugee rights movement. Interviews were conducted by Macdonald Scott.

For over 60 years Grace Lee Boggs has been thinking about and working towards making social change. Along with her late husband, the African-American writer and activist Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993), she has been centrally involved in numerous grassroots organizations including the Johnston-Forest Tendency, Correspondence, the National Organization for an American Revolution, the Freedom Now Party and Detroit Summer. She has worked with and provided counsel to hundreds of writers and activists including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Kwame Nkrumah and Stokely Carmichael.

In this interview Nicolas Phebus reflects on the Québec student movement and its most recent mobilization in the Spring of 2005 against cuts to education funding by the ruling Liberal Party under Jean Charest. The Liberals’ attempt to convert more than 100 million dollars in grants and bursaries into loans, thereby effectively doubling the indebtedness of poorer students, was met by an unprecedented student mobilization. The mobilization evolved into a massive general strike: at its peak, more than 200,000 college and university students were out on strike. Highlighted by a demonstration involving as many as 100,000 students in Montréal on March 16, the student mobilization also involved school occupations and a campaign of economic disruption, including a blockade of the Port of Montréal. The strike was effectively ended when the government reversed course and agreed to abandon the loan conversion scheme. The education sector will continue to be an important front in the resistance to neoliberalism, with students in Québec once again leading the way. In this interview with Aidan Conway, Phebus provides some historical context for this most recent student struggle and reflects on the openings it has provided for developing radical perspectives on, and currents within, contemporary social struggles.

The Editors of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action invite you to our Toronto launch party at the Smiling Buddha, 961 College (just west of College and Dovercourt). The party will feature speeches, drinks, DJ missruckus, dancing and karaoke! $5 gets you admission and a copy of the journal, $3 gets you in without a journal. Bulk copies of the journal will also be available if you want to help us distribute it.

The party starts at 8pm on Thursday January 19th, 2006. For more info, email us.

A pdf poster and flyer for the event can be downloaded if you can help us to get the word out.

In this issue of Upping the Anti we continue our attempt to engage with the radical political currents in Canada and around the world from which we have taken our name; the politics of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and anti-oppression. In our first editorial, we took as our starting point the fact that these “anti” politics represent the diverse and organic efforts of thousands of people committed to renewing radical politics in the Canadian state outside of both sectarian “party building” and the dead end of social democracy. Though we begin this project with the very negation espoused by these “many no’s,” we recognize that a transformative political project cannot end with a politics of refusal, and that radical movements must make their visions of “another world” concrete. We do not claim to have ready made answers to the questions raised and contradictions produced by these movements, but we recognize the importance of developing spaces within which to expand critical reflection and analysis. As we remarked in our first editorial:

Himani Bannerji is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University where she teaches in the areas of anti-racist feminism, Marxist cultural theories, gender, colonialism, and imperialism. Her recent publications include Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism; Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism, and The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism. She is currently working on a book on Rabindranath Tagore, decolonization, and modernity. Erin Gray, Tom Keefer, and John Viola interviewed Himani at her home in Toronto in August of 2005.

UTA: In recent years, there has been a shift within the broader international anti-globalization movement towards a concentration on local radical organizing. Many activists have tried to integrate class into their analyses by organizing against poverty and for immigrant rights, but it has still been difficult to incorporate labour struggles into anti-war and anti-imperialist organizing. How do you define class, and how can it be a useful organizational concept?

Himani: A small task! Unfortunately, people often think in this either/or way, where class is thought to be either local or extra-local, international or national. It’s often framed as though you can’t have an informed politic that is concerned with the here and now through an understanding of its larger implications. The antiwar movement can surely become part of an anti-imperialist, class-based movement. Not having worked with left groups here in any systematic way, I just don’t understand this dichotomous approach to organizing.

Reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb

(The full version of this review is available on Karl’s website and on his blog.)

Ending women’s oppression is crucial to the struggle for human liberation, but serious investigations of why women suffer distinct forms of oppression, and why rape and other forms of violence play such an integral role in this oppression, have generally been beyond the scope of most left analysis.

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2005) is a welcome addition to a growing list of works that address the oppression of women from an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist perspective. Federici’s historical analysis brings previously “invisible” (at least, to those who don’t experience them) forms of oppression and resistance to light, exposing the subjugation and oppression of women as central not only to capitalist history, but also to our unfinished quest to find a way out of it. Medieval “women’s struggles” were not separate from “class struggles” (any more than they are today); rather, they were class struggles in their own right. Gender, Federici stresses, “should be treated as a specification of class relations”.

Congratulations to the editorial crew for an excellent first issue of Upping the Anti, which I found relevant and stimulating. I especially liked the editorial which argued for theory in a very unpretentious, on point way. And from that perspective, you provided a valuable set of writings. The two roundtables really engaged me, especially the one on organization since I myself am in a state of flux or limbo between my old commitment to democratic centralism, which failed, and my feeling that the anarchist alternatives are inadequate.

The editorial of the first issue of your journal put much needed words to things I’ve long felt in not quite articulate ways. It helped clarify the roots of and to historically situate our current impasse, the challenges ahead, and what steps might be taken in addressing them. As one of the “radical social workers” you described, I am very grateful for this, because I am, for several reasons, at a personal impasse very similar to the larger one you described.

Comrades, I just finished reading your first issue of “Upping the Anti” I think you are right to take anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-oppression as the basis for a lot of radical thought in Canada (and the US) right now. As someone who has been involved with all three in recent years, I was interested to see where you would take them. While I liked your starting point, I would take them in a completely different direction, and come to completely different conclusions. I think anti-oppression politics need to be more or less completely rejected, and I am very skeptical of anti-imperialism. The only way I see to move forward is by deepening our anti-capitalist perspectives. Let me explain what I mean.

Welcome to the second issue of Upping the Anti. We would like to start by letting you know that we have made new additions to the editorial staff of our journal. Erin Gray of Toronto has joined our editorial collective, and Dave Mitchell of Regina has joined us in the capacity of reviews editor. We are excited to have our project grow and develop, and in this issue we again provide you with a collection of writings addressing a wide variety of issues and debates concerning activists on the left in Canada. We begin this issue with responses from a number of readers to our first issue. We welcome this kind of feedback and encourage you to join in the discussions and respond to the contributions of others in the pages of Upping the Anti by email or regular mail.

The second issue of Upping the Anti is now out and ready for distribution. We have printed 2000 copies of the second issue along with another 1000 copies of the first issue in a "perfect bound" (paperback) format. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the journal or to distribute the journal in your community or organizations, please email uta_distro@yahoo.ca so that we can add you to our list of local distributors. The second issue of the journal is 190 pages long and we are selling it for $5 plus $2 postage (where applicable). The full text of our first issue is available here. Journal articles and PDF files will be uploaded to the website in a staggered process over the next few weeks.

Our mailing address where you can send your $7 in well concealed cash to for a copy of the journal is: Upping the Anti, 998 Bloor St. West, P.O. Box 10571, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6H 4H9. If you live in the US or elsewhere, please order our journal through AK Press as it costs us too much to mail it to you from Canada.