This week, I’ve been thinking about figuring out how to act in the world when we genuinely don’t understand what’s happening in the world. Last Sunday night, I was reading an article about one particular aspect of the instabilities in the global economy caused by the authoritarian regime in the United States. As I was …
I’ve been thinking, this week, about how we, as Canadians, should be doing whatever we can to support grassroots struggles in the US. Contrary to what you might think based on the tide of popular sentiment at the moment, the bad things that ordinary people in so-called Canada are facing are, first and foremost, brought …
(Originally published at The Breach) As 2024 draws to a close, there are many good reasons for liberation-minded people to feel concern about the state of the world. But there are also many victories to celebrate—victories that were achieved by ordinary people joining together to fight for a better future. With right-wing forces celebrating their …
We live in a culture that tells us to face the world’s problems on our own—but any chance we have of making transformative change can only come from organizing collectively. This past year, governments around the world responded to sustained popular pressure—Portugal announced a radical plan to tackle the housing crisis; Chile signalled that it …
David Spaner is a long-time writer based in Vancouver and the author of Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983 (Ronsdale Press, 2021). Scott Neigh interviews him about the book and about the uprising against a right-wing government in British Columbia that it documents. Despite happening well within living memory, being one of the largest grassroots …
Thanks to Sharmeen, Thania, and Kieran for the interview just now about Upping the Anti! We talked about the journal, the relevance of theory to radical struggles, and the challenges of grassroots media. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio soon!
Scholarly. Edited collection. Pieces from a range of authors examining how people in different social movements and communities-in-struggle have engaged with material and ideas from earlier movements and made use of them in political education and struggle in the present. Read it because I thought it might be useful to something I’m working on. Turns …
A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn’t quite predict the uprising but that described dynamic circumstances allowing …
A multi-author collection edited by three of the core members of Black Lives Matter – Toronto. Personal essays, dialogues, scholarly essays, poetry, photo essays. Includes accounts of the iconic moments of BLM-TO’s founding and early years of action, but ranges far beyond in its exploration of Blackness and Black struggle in Canada today. I’m a …
History. Published 25 years ago, this is an early book by a prominent historian of US social movements. Examines everyday resistance and/or cultural politics and their interface with more formal social movements in a number of African American contexts across the 20th century, from everyday struggles on public transit in Birmingham under Jim Crow, to …