Robin Isaacs is a long-time queer anarchist who has lived in Toronto for the past 30 years. Over the course of a lifetime of political activity, Isaacs has been involved in a variety of activist projects including the anarchist publication Kick It Over, the 1988 “Survival Gathering” in Toronto, Anti-Racist Action, Queer Nation, AIDS ACTION NOW!, Limp Fist, and the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. This interview was conducted by Dale Altrows in February of 2007 in Montreal, Québec. The complete text of this interview was over 20,000 words, and, due to space restrictions, we have excerpted sections to run in this issue of the journal.

Dan Irving is a trans activist and teacher. In 2005, he completed his PhD thesis in Political Science at York University on Trans Activism and Alliances with Labour, Feminist and Gay and Lesbian Organizations. In his work, Irving combines a fierce dedication to trans struggles with a commitment to a Marxist class analysis. He has been an active member of CUPE 3903 at York University, a contract faculty member in the Sexual Diversity Studies program at the University of Toronto, as well as an event organizer and community-based researcher within trans communities. Dan Irving currently lives, writes and struggles in Toronto. Gary Kinsman interviewed him in the spring of 2007.

In February of 2007, John Holloway and Marina Sitrin discussed the new social movements in Latin America, power, the state, and prefigurative politics. This is a continuation of a discussion that began in 2004, also on the topics of power, prefigurative politics and Latin America (http://auto_sol.ao.ca/node/view/1052). John Holloway is the author of Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press, 2002) and co-author of Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico (Pluto Press, 1998). Marina Sitrin is the editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006 – Spanish edition, Chilavert, Argentina, 2005) and the author of the forthcoming Insurgent Democracies: Latin America’s New Powers (Citylights Press, 2007)

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 well. Not surprisingly, I don’t agree with everything everyone has said, so I’m glad to have an occasion to respond to AK Thompson’s lengthy discussion of the book in the previous issue of Upping the Anti, and to a number of other commentators who have taken up similar themes. I will do my best, of course, to read them well, too.

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 size and influence. Since 2001, hundreds of regional social forums have emerged all over the world. Several such forums are held in Canada.

Carmelle Wolfson is a media activist involved with Grassy Narrows solidarity work in Canada. She spent seven weeks in Kenya reporting for Carrefour International de la Presse Universitaire Francophone (CIPUF). Lesley Wood is an activist and teaches global sociology and social movement theory at York University.

Arising from and extending the life of slavery’s economy, the modern prison-industrial complex continues to earn the rage of abolitionists worldwide. Like anti-slavery abolitionists before them, prison or penal abolitionists seek to make redundant an institution most people - including many leftists - take as an inevitable feature of human society. In summer 2006, Caitlin Hewitt-White spoke with seven activists within (and beyond) the Canadian state about the struggle for prisoner justice and prison abolition. Peter Collins is currently held in Bath Institution, in year 23 of a 25-year life sentence. He is a politically active prisoner who has done work with communities inside and outside of prison on issues of prisoners’ rights, as well as exposing the corruption and brutality of Correctional Services Canada through his writings, media interviews and political cartoons, which are online at www.buriedaliveillustrations.com. Joint Effort: Emily Aspinwall, Filis Iverson and Sonia Marino are prison abolitionists in Vancouver. They are part of different projects including Joint Effort, Books 2 Prisoners, the Stark Raven Media Collective, prisonjustice.ca and the Vancouver Prison Justice Day Committee. Julia Sudbury is Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, Oakland, CA. She is editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex (Routledge 2005) and author of numerous books and articles on women’s activism and women’s prisons. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance and former member of the Prison Activist Resource Center. Kim Pate is currently the Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. A teacher and lawyer by training, she has advocated for criminalized men, women and youth in the Canadian state. Patricia Monture is a member of the Mohawk nation, Grand River Territory, a lawyer by training and a long-time activist. She teaches sociology at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

Krisztina Kun

Of all the socio-economic problems facing residents of Vancouver, housing is the number one issue on almost everyone’s mind these days. Homelessness is rising at alarming rates, and nowhere is this felt more acutely than in Vancouver’s most impoverished neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside (DTES), where the number of homeless people has doubled in three years. At this rate, it is projected that, by 2010, the year the Olympics hit town, there will be more than 3 000 people living on the streets.

Because of the Olympics, the ongoing condo boom, and the fact that Vancouver’s downtown peninsula is quickly running out of land on which to build glass towers, all roads point East to the DTES as the next area marked for million-dollar condos. Realtors are already marketing the area as “hip” and “edgy.” The recent Woodward’s development, celebrated as a victory four years ago by housing activists when the City of Vancouver bought it and slated 200 units for social housing, is now seen as the flagship of gentrification that will change the face of the area. With slogans such as “be bold or move to suburbia,” Woodward’s has become the symbol of the rapid shift in the area from low-income rental suites to upscale ownership. The area is so promising that speculators are buying up buildings and leaving them empty, driving up the price of the remaining housing stock.

Local and Organic

Kimiko Inouye

bell hooks and Amelia Mesa-Bains. Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism. South End Press, 2006.

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, resistance and revolution. It is in many ways an extension of the critical, creative, and pedagogical practices already associated with hooks and Mesa-Bains. hooks is perhaps most well-known for her critical writings on the workings of race, class, and gender in popular Western culture, including Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), and Teaching to Transgress: Education and the Practice of Freedom (1994). Mesa-Bains, as an artist, curator and writer, has been involved with a number of Chicano art projects, including Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation and Mi Alma, Mi Tierra, Mi Gente: Contemporary Chicana Art.

Presented as a dialogue between hooks and Mesa-Bains, Homegrown weaves in the authors’ personal experiences in order to give readers a sense of where they are coming from in their analyses of race, class, sexuality and gender. Rather than aim their text at an academic audience by contributing new theoretical perspectives and frameworks, hooks and Mesa-Bains aim their book at a wide range of activists in North America; the use of the word “homegrown” addresses this audience of “organic intellectuals.” While the political, historical, cultural, and economic conditions that hooks and Mesa-Bains discuss are situated within the United States, the analyses are relevant to activists in Canada as well.

The New Abolitionists

Erica Meiners

Review of – Angela Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press 2003; Angela Davis. Abolition Democracy: Prisons, Democracy, and Empire. Seven Stories Press 2005; Karlene Faith with Anne Near. 13 Women: Parables from Prison. Douglas & McIntyre 2006.; and Julia Sudbury (Ed.). Global Lockdown. Routledge 2005

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 the US. As Sudbury states:

Whereas in 1970 there were 5,600 incarcerated women, by June 2001, 161,200 women were held in U.S. prisons and jails, representing a staggering 2,800% increase. (xiv)

While Canada, with almost the same population as California, “holds approximately 350 women in federal detention centers” and “California has about 11, 000” (Faith, 2006, 340), women in prison in Canada, California, and across the US, are overwhelmingly arrested for offenses that are non-violent and generally drug related. Research clearly documents that incarcerated women are undereducated, under or unemployed, frequently homeless prior to entering prison or jail, and they have a significantly higher rate of experience with sexual or physical violence. As Faith writes, poverty is the “common denominator.” “If a women is not poor when she enters prison, she will be when she leaves” (5), as women with criminal records, in particular in the US, are formally and informally denied access to higher education, housing, employment and social assistance benefits.

Getting Over Guilt - Reviewed by Scott Clarke

Sheila Wilmot. Taking Responsibility Taking Direction: White Anti-Racism in Canada. Arbeiter Ring, 2005

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 ‘the left.’ Driven by the goal of building a movement for social change rooted in anti-racist socialist politics, Sheila Wilmot reflects on different forms of anti-racist activism in Canada, and suggests methods for more effective organizing in the future.

At a slim 151 pages, this book serves as an introduction to anti-racist socialist politics and the role of white allies. As this book is intended for those invested in political struggle, Wilmot could have delved deeper into the complexities of integrating her anti-racist ideals into organized forms of resistance. For activists who have been committed to challenging racism within ourselves and our organizations, Taking Responsibility Taking Direction will help to illuminate many of the ongoing struggles we face. Yet the text falls short in providing us with tools and in-depth personal accounts to increase our effectiveness as anti-racists in Canada. Despite these criticisms, I commend Wilmot for addressing white anti-racist activism in a Canadian context; the concise resource she has produced reminds us why we need to address anti-racism in our organizing, and it is a tool we can use to discuss, debate and analyze our politics and engagement with anti-racist activism.