This review is from http://burning.typepad.com/burningman/2006/01/upping_the_anti.html the website of "Red Flags: News and Views from the Revolutionary Left"

Upping The Anti: New Radical Journal from Canada

Upping the Anti is an exciting new journal printed in Canada that does one of my very favorite things: they argue. Not in a mean-spirited way, but by printing a number of contradictory opinions side-by-side. Located at the nexus of what the editors describe as the "three antis" that guide the Canadian far-left -- anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and anti-oppression -- they are constructing a dialog among activists and sharing it with the rest of us. Putting the toughest arguments to print means we move forward, or at least open the door. Too much of the left press is dedicated to singularly selling one vision, or on the flip side, producing generic activisty content that is neither challenging nor rigorous.

Contributors include open Marxists (generally of the autonomous/ultra-left variety), anarchists, indigenists, and the willfully eclectic. What seems to unify them is revolutionary politics that distrust Leninism, even while recognizing that the man was on to something. On one hand this is a welcome response to the crude anti-communism that passes for analysis among North American "activists," on the other, they do not engage internationally existing revolutionary communists who are also exactly concerned with the same set of issues they are. The continued use of pejoratives, such as sectarian, to describe all revolutionary parties continues to skew how far their discussion will go. They also accept the heavily promoted bourgeois-liberal party line that the vanguard party has essentially failed -- without accounting for the plain fact that literally every successful proletarian political movement has made use of it in one form or another.

That said, what is most interesting is that they have an essentially revolutionary and communistic orientation trying to advance over the conceptual roadblocks (regarding Leninism, unfortunately often by way of Trotsky) that they've accepted. Most of the contributors appear to be actively engaged in social movements as their primary site of political work and are problematizing the relationship between political leaders and the felt needs of the social base they work among. Tricky stuff no matter how you cut it, and for that we can be thankful they are putting their thoughts to paper.

Of the two issues printed so far, both focus on much tougher interrogation of ideas than we tend to get here in the USA, with a more respectful engagement than the "political identity politics" that we get for debate.

Jan. 19 Launch Party in Toronto for Issue #2: promo flyer

Issue #1 -- Now available in its entirety online, both story links and PDF

Issue #2 -- Partially available (enough to check out)

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This kind of publishing is hard as hell to sustain and even where you disagree, it's an education.