Edited by Aidan Conway

That we have recently seen an important radicalization can be registered in the rising appeal and relative rejuvenation of anti-capitalist politics and perspectives, particularly in the anti-globalization and anti-war movements. While there has been a notable downturn in the last couple of years, associated with both the “war on terrorism” (at home and abroad) and the contradictions of these movements themselves, the fate of this anti-capitalist radicalization is not a foregone conclusion. Many people would agree that whether or not the movements extend their reach and deepen their roots will depend in part on their ability to organize. But how?

For much of the twentieth century, the most common and influential (though never monolithic), answer to this question was one or another version of the vanguard party. The virtue of Leninism, and the basis for its widespread appeal to revolutionaries around the world, was that it provided a relatively coherent (if seriously flawed) set of answers to the fundamental questions of how to organize for revolutionary social change. It addressed the role of organization, the problem of (uneven) political consciousness, the nature of leadership and democracy, and the basic tasks of revolutionary movements.

Edited by Sharmeen Khan

The modes of resistance and struggle that came out of liberation movements in the latter part of the 20th century gave rise to anti-oppression organizing and politics. Anti-oppression arose out of the left’s failure to develop a nuanced approach to questions of oppression and to consider various forms of oppression as “class issues.”

In recent years the rise of the anti-globalization movement has influenced, and been influencedby, anti-oppression analyses, as the movement sought to address the effects of global capitalism on different communities and peoples, and to understand the varied effects of power, privilege and marginalization in individual communities, as well as in national and international contexts.

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, Quebec City, Prague, and Genoa have become an important legacy, a fresh inspiration to replace the fading images of Weathermen in football helmets. The "new activism," as exemplified in the anti-globalization movement, appears as a paradigm shift away from the politics of stale social democratic parties and small Marxist-Leninist sects awaiting their turn to play vanguard. In contrast to the homogenizing impulse of global capitalism, resistance appears irreducibly plural.

While the anti-globalization movement is often celebrated for its apparent diversity, it often remains unclear how this diversity manifests itself in practice. The ambiguous boundaries of the movement serve to obscure its specific social relationships. Insofar as "diversity" is treated as a thing residing beyond specific social relationships, it is fetishized. In the fragmented and episodic movement of "anti-globalization," diversity is often treated as universal, serving to supplant the organization of specific social practices. I will explore how a "diversity of tactics" emerged as a viable tactical orientation within this new anti-capitalist movement and eventually turned against itself, when the conditions for such diversity no longer existed.

Ward Churchill is one of the most outspoken activists and scholars in North America and a leading commentator on indigenous issues. Churchill's many books include Marxism and Native Americans, Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, The COINTELPRO Papers, Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization, Pacifism as Pathology, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. In his lectures and published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo.

Churchill has recently come under attack for views expressed in the article Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. An important part of the future of US academic freedom in the coming years will likely be determined by the outcome of the ongoing attempts to strip Ward Churchill of his academic position at Colorado University in Boulder. Two members of Autonomy & Solidarity sat down with Ward Churchill in Toronto in November of 2003 to do this interview. It was transcribed by Clarissa Lassaline and edited by Tom Keefer, Dave Mitchell, and Valerie Zink.

Upping the Anti: Number 1.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2004.

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, (340)

After the unprecedented commercial and critical success of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s dense and manic Empire (2000), which the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson called “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium,” and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek praised as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time,” the publication of its sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), has generated a significant amount of interest. Empire’s theorization of “a fundamentally new form of rule,” a new global sovereignty that transcends both national borders and modern imperialism, was eagerly seized upon by many in the anti-globalization movement and the academic Left seeking a theoretical framework for naming that-which-they-opposed, in place of the vague and inaccurate term “globalization.” Hardt and Negri’s new book Multitude picks up where Empire left off, theorizing the potential forms that popular resistance to Empire might take.

From Upping the Anti: Number 1
Undoing Gender by Judith Butler, Routledge, 2004
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 the groundbreaking Gender Trouble, in which she outlined her theory of gender performativity and the construction of sexuality. Since Undoing Gender appeared in 1990, feminist, queer, and literary work in the humanities has been heavily influenced by Butler’s nuanced exposure of gender’s construction. Moving beyond a binary frame in which gender is assumed to signify an essential self, Butler exposes the categories of sex, desire and gender as effects of specific power structures. Focusing more on linguistic action than on a theatrical sense of performativity, Butler defines the latter as a stylized repetition of acts that produces the effect of an internal, natural core on the surface of the body. Because gender is often assumed to be an extension of natural interiority, its sociality and public function is often overlooked. Butler’s emphasis on the simultaneity of improvisation/performance and constraint underscores the paradoxical nature of gendered identity construction.

part 1 of 2.

For over 60 years Grace Lee Boggs has been thinking about and working towards making social change. Along with her late husband, the African-American writer and activist Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993), she has been centrally involved in numerous grassroots organizations including the Johnston-Forest Tendency, Correspondence, the National Organization for an American Revolution, the Freedom Now Party and Detroit Summer. She has worked with and provided counsel to hundreds of writers and activists including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Kwame Nkrumah and Stokely Carmichael.

Welcome to the first issue of Upping the Anti. We have been working on bringing you this issue since September of 2004. We have been torn between the desire to get something out according to our original timeline (February of 2005) in order to establish the journal as a timely and viable project, and our wish to produce the most politically relevant publication that we can. In this, our first issue of the journal, we feel that we have done our best to strike an appropriate balance between these two objectives. So here is Upping the Anti, our first effort in an ongoing project of trying to engage with and understand the political conjuncture facing radical activists in the Canadian state today.

Our name Upping the Anti refers to our interest in engaging with three interwoven tendencies which have come to define much of the politics of today’s radical left in Canada: anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialism. These three political tendencies, while overlapping and incorporating various contradictory elements, together represent the growth of a radical politics in a space outside of the “party building” of the sectarian left and the dead end of social democracy. Despite their limitations, movements based on these “anti” politics have grown out of a real process and practice of social contestation and mobilization, and they point towards ideas and activist practices which will have a significant role in shaping the form and content of new revolutionary movements born out of future cycles of struggle against exploitation and oppression. This journal is intended to provide a space to address and discuss unresolved questions and dynamics within these struggles in order to better learn from our collective successes and failures.