A review of Introduction to Civil War
Etienne Turpin
This challenging text operates as an intervention and has consequences for the ways in which activists and organizers understand the social and political civil war that extinguishes any possibility of neutrality. The epigraph that opens the first section of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War is…
A review of Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism
Chandra Kumar
Michael Keefer’s Antisemitism Real and Imaginedis a timely, well-researched and well-argued collective work that is much needed, especially in Canada. In addition to four chapters by Keefer, the bookcontains 19 shorter contributions from various Canadian activists, academics, and organizations…
A review of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation
Tim McCaskell
A review of The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind
Sara Falconer
The incarcerated know firsthand the brutal realities of repression in capitalist society, so it is no coincidence that some of the most important revolutionary writing has come from behind bars. The voices of prisoners have had a tremendous impact on movements in “free” – or, as prisoners…
A review of Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames from a Life, Arbeiter Ring, 2009.
Noaman G. Ali
From 1964 to 1974, the people of Mozambique waged an historic armed struggle against the Portuguese colonialism that had intervened in their lands for centuries. The militants of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, FRELIMO, operated from their rear bases across the northern border in…
A review of You Don’t Play with Revolution: the Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. AK Press, 2009.
Pat Harewood
A review of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, RED/Fernwood Publishing, 2009
Jerome Klassen
Over the last two decades, activists on the Canadian left have confronted two major trends in Canadian foreign policy. The first involved the free-trade agreements of the 1990s and the international expansion of Canadian capital as part of the globalization agenda. As a result, Canada became highly…
A review of The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History, Volume 1: Projectiles for the People. PM Press/Kersplebedeb, 2009.
Jeff Shantz
The Red Army Faction (RAF) is one of the last half-century’s most talked about and least understood radical left groups. An anarchist colleague, upon hearing that I was reviewing this book, felt compelled to ask why, as an anarchist, I would bother to spend any time reading about – much less…
A review of Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. AK Press
Sean Benjamin
Written by two members of the South African Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), Black Flame is the first volume of a projected two-volume work on the history of the global anarchist movement and the theories that have emerged from it. The authors begin by framing the core principles of what…
Erika Meiners
Women, specifically women of colour, are one of the fastest growing prison populations in the US. In Illinois, the state where I currently reside, between 1983 and 2002 the number of women in prison for drug related crimes skyrocketed from 32 to 1,325, a 4,041% leap.1 This growth is mirrored across…
Matthew N. Lyons
In July of 2006, Bluestockings bookshop in New York City announced it was hosting a workshop for social justice activists on “opposing anti-Semitism in the movement.” The announcement sparked a heated online discussion on New York’s Indymedia website. Some people asked if the workshop was…
Anna Feigenbaum
In a 2001In These Timesarticle on the FTAA demonstrations in Quebec City, Abby Scher, like many others, reflected on the effective interplay between protesters’ violent and non-violent tactics. She ended her discussion with the question: “Is Quebec… a wonderful demonstration of ‘a diversity…
A review of We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960-1975.
Chris Harris
Toronto’s Black community has long suffered a crisis of increasing poverty, racism, and violence. This is largely the result of the oppression that African-Canadian people have endured through the implementation of neoliberal policies and the expansion of both the police state and the prison…
A review of A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture
Reviewed by Bryan Doherty
For years, John Hagedorn has made the honest study of gang culture and its institutionalization the cornerstone of his research and work. With A World of Gangs, he provides a valuable primer on the overall character of major gangs, building upon his previous work, including People and Folks, Female…
A review of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy
Jen Angel
Stephen Duncombe’s compelling book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, analyzes the ways in which political groups engage the public and communicate their messages. Duncombe is both an activist and a scholar, currently teaching the history and politics of media and…
A review of Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
Reviewed by Alejandro de Acosta
Simon Critchley, a philosopher in the Continental vein, offers us Infinitely Demanding, a brief text in which he aims to explicate a possible movement from ethics to politics, and from commitment to resistance. It serves as an index of what is promising and what is a dead end, both ethically and…
A review of In Defense of Lost Causes
Reviewed by Neil Balan
In UTA 6, the editorial collective called for “good maps” and “the ability to think historically…”1 Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes provides an answer to the call. His capacity for historical thinking – “to think from two points at once” - is at the core of his defense of…
A review of The Political Economy of Media
Reviewed by DT Cochrane
As with all things under the control of capital, the mainstream media aims for profitability. Under the current dominant model, media profitability depends on advertising, which fosters an important relationship between media owners and the rest of Big Business. According to Internal Revenue…
A review of Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movement to Free US Political Prisoners
Reviewed by Ernesto Aguilar
In my office, stuffed in a green hanging file folder on four sheets of yellow legal paper is the original manuscript for “We Will Rise Again,” Alvaro Luna Hernandez’s manifesto on the Chicano Mexicano experience, his case, and the fight against colonialism. When I received “We Will Rise…
A review of Autonomia: Post Political Politics
Reviewed by Frank Edgewick
The original “movement of movements,” Autonomia grew out of the Italian student and worker mobilizations of 1968. It included migrant workers, feminists, and the unemployed. In 1977, it exploded into open revolt in the industrialized north of Italy. It made important links between theory and…
A review of Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i
Reviewed by Katy Rose
The contemporary migrant justice movement has done an admirable job educating sectors of the Left and sustaining struggles to address the concerns of migrant workers. Grappling with questions of racism, workers’ rights, imperialism and gender oppression, the migrant justice movement has…
A review of Canada’s Economic Apartheid
Reviewed by Scott Neigh
It is far too easy for those of us on the left to respond to a piece of political writing by fixating on what we feel it lacks. This often means that instead of critiquing from a place of respect and deep listening, we compose itemized lists of real or imagined political shortcomings and fail to…
A review of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Reviewed by Chris Keefer
The Revolution will not be Funded is a collection of 16 essays from activists and scholars that deals with the contradictions of operating within the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), a system that has rapidly come to characterize the organization of civil society. The NPIC has been…
A review of Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology
Reviewed by Alexis Shotwell
Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology came out in October 2006. Along with The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, (see review in this issue), this book offers us the kind of fierce, sharp analysis we need for doing meaningful political work. Both books were…
A review of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Reviewed by David Calnitsky
The brilliance of Naomi Klein’s latest work, The Shock Doctrine, lies in its near boundless applicability. Rather than merely offering a coherent narrative to explain the apparent incoherence of the politics of occupied Iraq – her original objective, which itself is no simple task – the…
A review of Taking Responsibility Taking Direction: White Anti-Racism in Canada
Reviewed by Scott Clarke
How can toward activists move from a cycle of guilt and inaction over racism to developing anti-racist politics that effectively challenge white supremacy in Canada? Taking Responsibility, Taking Direction: White Anti-Racism in Canada is a timely and critical look at the anti-racist politics of…
A review of Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism
Reviewed by Kimiko Inouye
In Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, bell hooks and Amelia Mesa-Bains discuss critical perspectives on the social conditions of African and Latin American communities in the United States. Homegrown takes up issues related to multiculturalism, art, pedagogy, socio-economic oppression,…
A review of Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society
Reviewed by Sharmeen Khan
I read Inga Muscio’s first book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence a few years ago when I wasn’t really in the mood for a “love the cunt” diatribe. I was never one to look lovingly at my own cunt while making vagina cookies for the annual showing of the Vagina Monologues. But the reason I…
A review of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity
Reviewed by Yutaka Dirks
Sam Green’s 2005 Academy Award nominated documentary The Weather Underground brought the armed struggle organization of the same name to film festivals and theatres across North America. With Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, Dan Berger provides us with…
A review of Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research
Reviewed by Scott Neigh
It is perhaps Marx’s most oft-quoted piece of wisdom – that while the philosophers had interpreted the world, the point was to change it. Marx’s words were never intended to give the impression, however, that we must choose between understanding the world and changing it; both are absolutely…
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…
Reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb
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…
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…
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…
Reviewed by D. Oswald Mitchell
One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude is as an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we can all work collaboratively to solve its bugs.
- Hardt and Negri, Multitude
After the unprecedented commercial and critical success of Michael…
Reviewed by Erin Gray
In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler develops upon her earlier work in gender and queer theory. Butler, a professor in Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is best known for her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble, in which she outlined her…
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