Upping the Anti is in the process of making all of our back issues free online. Soon all of our past articles, interviews, reviews and roundtables will be freely available on this website. We will withhold the content from the most recent issue until the next one is out. To read our most recent…
Stacy Douglas
In September 2009, Raw Nerve Books announced that the edited collection Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality(2008) was out of print. Edited by Adi Kunstman and Esperanza Miyake, the book was one of the first anthologies on queerness and raciality in Britain. The independent…
John Clarke
On July 21 of this year, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) rallied outside the Ministry of Community and Social Services in Toronto. We were challenging the Ontario government’s brutal elimination of the Special Diet for those who are forced to survive on sub-poverty welfare and…
Lesley Wood
When the location of the 2010 G8summit was announced, many grassroots organizers in Toronto were wary. Some were concerned that such protests would weaken local organizing and lead to serious repression against the communities of poor people and immigrants we work with. As a member of the Ontario…
Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou
The cold-blooded police killing of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the Athens neighbourhood of Exarcheia on December 6, 2008 sparked an unprecedented wave of protests and rioting. These protests quickly spread not only throughout Athens and the majority of Greek cities but also beyond the…
Tom Keefer
The 2008 publication of Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation ignited a firestorm of controversy. The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Ottawa Citizen all published glowing reviews of the book, while…
AK Thompson
“Our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analyzing the
mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself… It will then become
evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has
only to be conscious in order to possess it in…
Chris Hurl and Kevin Walby
In Canada today, the terms “student government” and “student movement” are considered synonymous. At least this is how the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) promotes itself. “We are the student movement,” their slogan goes. Yet glossy stock photos of the same old CFS staffers…
Kate Milley
The Six Nations people of the Grand River Territory have been faced with a steadily increasing level of anti-Native organizing since they began the reclamation of the Douglas Creek Estates housing development in Caledonia in February 2006. This situation returned to the media spotlight in June…
Ben Saifer
The full PDF version of this article is freely available by clicking here.
In the early months of 2006, Israel advocacy groups at the University of Toronto had a problem on their hands. The previous year, the Arab Students’ Collective had organized a series of educational events under the banner…
For over a generation, the decline of anti-colonial liberation struggles inspired by socialism has coincided with the rise of new forms of anti-imperialist mobilization in Western Asia. Beginning in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, and continuing in the present with national liberation struggles…
Caelie Frampton
In October of 2006, 1,000 students gathered at a mass meeting at Simon Fraser University (SFU) to impeach seven elected student union directors who were widely perceived to be acting against student interests and to be supported by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).1 In the lead up to the…
Macdonald Stainsby
When I moved from British Columbia to Alberta recently, I discovered that the political realities of one province are largely unknown to those living in the other. In BC, oil is seen as a scheme hatched by mad cowboys that has little effect on the mountainous peace of the West coast. Similarly,…
Kole Kilibarda
Since Palestinian civil society groups launched a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS)1 against Israel in July 2005, growing networks of grassroots activists in Canada have mobilized behind the campaign. The recent surge in Palestine solidarity work comes at a time when official…
Tom Keefer
In September of 2008 three distinct political moments highlighted the perils and possibilities of the ongoing struggle of the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) people in southern Ontario. On the morning of Labour Day, Brantford police moved in to make three arrests at a building site where Six Nations…
Nava EtShalom and Matthew N. Lyons
In Philadelphia on May 18, 2008, the Jewish Federation hosted its annual Israel Day Parade. Thousands of youth and adults carried banners and sang songs to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. A small contingent of anti-Zionist Jews dressed in black confronted the…
Shiri Pasternak
One of the most dangerous First Nations in Canada is a small community of around 250 Algonquins living in rural Québec. The threat they pose is so grave that the Canadian government has repeatedly intervened in their customary governance laws to put minority community factions in power. The…
Shourideh Molavi
In a cartoon by Brazillian artist Carlos Latuff an Israeli Apache helicopter fires a rocket directly at a Palestinian child. Wearing a kaffaiyah and holding a teddy bear, the child stands alone, the word “Gaza” narrowing at his bare feet. A concrete wall with watchtowers marks the horizon, and…
John Clarke
For nearly two decades, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has been working to mobilize resistance in some of Toronto’s poorest communities. These years have been marked by a concerted drive by capitalist governments at every level to cut social programs and to transfer wealth from the…
Jeff Monaghan and Kevin Walby
The burgeoning “War on Terror” is facilitating the re-emergence of “terrorism” as a legal and discursive framework for classifying and suppressing political radicalism. Despite the jingoism, xenophobia, and racism of the “War on Terror,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation has…
Caelie Frampton
Eric Newstadt centers his defense of the Canadian Federation of Students on a definition of neo-liberalism. Newstadt explains that “the state has been instrumental in the creation and imposition of neoliberalism” and on this basis claims that “it is likely to be a vital agent in progressive…
Eric Newstadt
Although we should be wary of idealizing the past and ignoring the extent to which the modern university has always been linked to corporate interests, the current state of North American campuses is alarming and calls for monumental change. We are witnessing a near total erosion of the spaces that…
Joshua Kahn Russell and Brian Kelly
“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” – Sun Tzu
Recently, at a party, one of us was introduced as an organizer involved in launching the “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The person raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know anything about the new SDS,” she said, “but…
Tom Keefer
This article will address some issues which have arisen in the context of non-native activists doing solidarity work with the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) people of the Grand River Territory who recently reclaimed land near Caledonia, Ontario.1 I will begin by discussing the problems with how many…
Carmelle Wolfson & Lesley Wood
Since its founding in 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) has gained international prominence as a space for various activists and NGOs to converge, meet, discuss, and strategize against globalization and imperialism. Organized to counter the annual World Economic Forum, the WSF has grown both in…
Richard JF Day
When one writes a book, one hopes that it will be read. And when a book is read, one hopes that it will be read well - heartily, carefully, honestly, provocatively. I can say that I’m quite happy that Gramsci Is Dead (Between the Lines, 2006) has been read, and that it has generally been read…
Jen Plyler
In the context of everyday injustices like poverty, racism, heterosexism, colonialism and ableism, community organizing is often carried out with a strong sense of urgency. While this urgency is understandable given the intense struggle for basic survival on the part of those living on the streets,…
RJ Maccani
The Zapatistas, an army of indigenous Mayans and their support communities in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas, have had a profound influence on people’s movements around the world. From their armed uprising on New Year’s Day in 1994 to their hasty transition less than two weeks later…
Isabel MacDonald
Last December, I visited Annette “So Ann” Auguste, a popular Haitian folksinger, Lavalas activist, grandmother, adult educator – and, since her violent May 2004 arrest at the hands of US Marines1 – one of Haiti’s most high-profile political prisoners. Even in the overcrowded prison where…
AK Thompson
It’s nice to have a victory every once in a while. As someone who lived through the rise and fall of militant action on this continent during the last dozen years, I should know. These days, there’s something demoralizing and vaguely absurd about our habits. We issue urgent call-outs for…
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…
by Tom Keefer
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…
Selma James
Selma James is an organizer with the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London, England. Her activism reaches back to the 1950s when she participated in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, (along with CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Marty Glaberman and Grace Lee Boggs. She is well known for critiquing the…
Chris Hurl
Introduction
The recent wave of protests that have swept across the world under the banner of “anti-globalization” have recaptured the left’s imagination, shattering the illusions of inevitability cast by neo-liberal magicians. The images and slogans from Seattle, Québec City, Prague, and…
Gary Kinsman
Introduction: Not All Power to Capital
Autonomist Marxism can be seen as a form of Marxism that focuses on developing working class autonomy and power in a capitalist society that is constituted by and through class struggle. One of the strengths of autonomist Marxism is its critique of political…
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