UTA #5

Upping the Anti #5

ant — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:42:11 -0400

Issue #5 of Upping the Anti is now being distributed. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the journal or to distribute the journal in your community or organizations, please email uta_distro@yahoo.ca so that we can add you to our list of local distributors. This issue of the journal is 212 pages long and we are selling single copies for $10 including postage. If you want 5 or more copies for distribution, the journal is $5 per copy, and we'll cover the postage.

Our mailing address where you can send your $10 in well concealed cash to for a copy of the journal is: Upping the Anti, 998 Bloor St. West, P.O. Box 10571, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6H 4H9. If you live in the US or elsewhere, please order our journal through AK Press as it costs us too much to mail it to you from Canada. Please continue reading this post for the full table of contents of this issue and the introduction to this issue.

Matthew N. Lyons on Not Just a Smear Tactic: April Rosenblum. "The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Anti-Semitism

ander — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:15:08 -0400

Not Just a Smear Tactic

Matthew N. Lyons

April Rosenblum. The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Anti-Semitism Part of All of Our Movements. Self-published, 2007. Download at www.thepast.info

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 going to be “some Zionist bullshit” and why it wasn’t going to address other forms of discrimination, such as “Zionist anti-Semetism [sic]” against Palestinians. Critics doubted the existence of any real anti-Semitism on the left, or they suggested that it was caused by “right-wing Jews” having “cried wolf too many times.” One charged that “whining about anti-Semitism is like whining about ‘anti-white,’ or ‘reverse racism.’” They added that “Jews are one of the wealthiest groups in the world with the most privilege.”

Death of a Dichotomy: Tactical Diversity and the Politics of Post-Violence

ander — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:08:25 -0400

Anna Feigenbaum

Ward Churchill. Pacifism as Pathology. AK Press 2007; Peter Gelderloos. How Nonviolence Protects the State. South End Press 2007

In a 2001 In These Times article 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 of tactics’ – or a turning point where the gap between tactics yawns larger?” Now, six years later in a post-9/11 climate, the ‘War on Terror’ continues, corporate power grows, and frustration has set in amongst many movement participants. As protesters are finding themselves disheartened, pessimistic, and often downright bored with ineffective demonstrations, questions about movement tactics are resurfacing. Specifically, many people are voicing a call for more confrontational direct actions in our struggles against globalization and imperialism.

Chris Harris on Black Power from the Inside: Muhammad Ahmad. "We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations,60-75

ander — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:01:07 -0400

Black Power From the Inside

Chris Harris

Muhammad Ahmad. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960-1975. Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2007

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 industrial complex. In Canada, African-Canadian people (the majority of whom are located amongst the lowest ranks of the working class) are confronted with two primary problems. First, a growing Black underclass is unable to compete for scarce decent paying jobs. Second, the Canadian ruling class – responding to the crisis of neoliberal globalization with their wars on drugs, guns, and gangs – is criminalizing Black working-class youth and expanding the prison industrial complex. In recent years, the Black left has responded to this crisis by trying to organize Black youth at the grassroots level, and by trying to build new mass organizations that can continue the legacy of militant
anti-racist struggle that characterized the Toronto-based Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bryan D. and Tom K.: Political Prisoner Roundtable with Ashanti Alston, Seth Hayes, Susan Tipograph and Sara Falconer

ander — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:38:10 -0400

You Can’t Jail the Spirit

The Movement to Free Political Prisoners

Bryan D. and Tom K.

All too often, when activists raise the issue of our movements’ Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War, it is done with a sense of guilt for how they have suffered. That is not what this roundtable is about. Though the lack of support that PPs and POWs receive from contemporary movements is unfortunate, this roundtable is no guilt trip. The image of martyred revolutionaries languishing forgotten in cages is not our focus here. Men and women on the inside and their comrades on the outside are not charity cases but revolutionaries with hard-learned experiences and present-day perspectives that need to be acknowledged by those of us with less experience.

M. Staudenmaier The Three-Way Fight

ander — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:09:08 -0400

The Three Way Fight Debate

For over a generation, the decline of anti-colonial liberation struggles inspired by socialism has coincided with the rise of new forms of anti-imperialist mobilization in Western Asia. Beginning in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, and continuing in the present with national liberation struggles led by Hezbollah and Hamas, these movements have mixed religious fundamentalism with the hopes of millions striving for a better life. It is thus not surprising that leftists in the West have had a difficult time figuring out how to relate to these movements. On the one hand, they seem to represent the strivings of oppressed people seeking to free themselves from imperialist domination. On the other hand, the religious ideologues of the Iranian revolution tortured, imprisoned, and murdered tens of thousands of leftists and radicals. The program of these new Islamic movements has often been avowedly patriarchal and politically regressive.

Caelie Frampton Student movements and the CFS

ander — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:59:33 -0400

Strength in Numbers?

Why Radical Students Need a New Organizing Model

Caelie Frampton

In October of 2006, 1,000 students gathered at a mass meeting at Simon Fraser University (SFU) to impeach seven elected student union directors who were widely perceived to be acting against student interests and to be supported by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).1 In the lead up to the assembly, the impeachment campaign involved classroom speaking, petitions, motions of non-confidence passed by 30 different student groups, occupations of student union space, and banner drops. The mobilization culminated in a court case that acknowledged the legitimacy of the impeachment meeting. Compared to these vigorous grassroots initiatives, the SFU component of the CFS National Day of Action four months later on February 7th, 2007 was dismal. Thirty people, mostly consisting of recently-impeached student leaders and their friends, stood around holding prefabricated “Freeze Tuition Fees” signs. Considering the recent spike in radical organizing at SFU, it was no coincidence that they protested alone. Having reclaimed their student government, many students at SFU were not interested in supporting a rally orchestrated by the national organization widely perceived to be linked to the actions of the impeached student officials.

Macdonald Stainsby Empire, Resistance and the Tar Sands

ander — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:24:46 -0400

Into a Black Hole

Tar Sands and Oil Production in Western Canada

Macdonald Stainsby

When I moved from British Columbia to Alberta recently, I discovered that the political realities of one province are largely unknown to those living in the other. In BC, oil is seen as a scheme hatched by mad cowboys that has little effect on the mountainous peace of the West coast. Similarly, when people speak of the Olympics in Alberta, it’s still in reference to the Calgary Games of 1988 – a stark contrast to BC, where the coming 2010 Winter Games are associated with rapidly increasing property values and social dislocation. Despite these differences, the economies of both provinces are said to be “booming.” The Albertan economy is growing faster than that of any other North American state or province, while BC is in the middle of a significant economic upswing. While sharp differences in political consciousness remain, especially at the local level, both BC Premier Gordon Campbell and Alberta Premier Edward Stelmach are supporting policy initiatives aimed at reconciling the political and economic differences between their provinces.

Michael Hardt: The Multitude and New Social Movements

ander — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:07:13 -0400

From the Perspective of Resistance

An Interview with Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt is the author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy and an editor of a new edition of Thomas Jefferson’s The Declaration of Independence. With Antonio Negri, he is co-author of Empire, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, and Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State_Form. He teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. Hardt was a keynote speaker at the conference on Empire held in Barrie, Ontario in May of 2007. In his plenary “Empire After Iraq” he critiqued political positions common on the left from the standpoint of their consequences for resistance. In this interview, conducted in July of 2007, Gary Kinsman asked Hardt to elaborate on some of the thoughts he presented at the conference. Tracy Gregory transcribed the interview.

In your talk on Empire, you focused on the importance of evaluating political positions from the vantage of their impact on organizing and resistance. Can you elaborate on this statement?

Gord Hill: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism

ander — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:41:49 -0400

Gord Hill is an activist from the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation in British Columbia. A long time organizer for indigenous sovereignty, he organizes with the Native Youth Movement (NYM) based in Vancouver and runs Warrior Publications. He is currently involved in the campaign against the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. In this interview with Tom Keefer, Hill explains why the NYM boycotted the Assembly of First Nations’ Day of Action on June 29, 2007. He discusses how the AFN and band council system were formed as a means of government control and assimilation of indigenous communities and the cooptation of grassroots movements. Hill also talks about the role of non-native supporters in struggles for sovereignty and the importance of forming broader radical anti-colonial and
anti-capitalist movements within First Nations communities. This interview took place in July of 2007.

Could you please introduce yourself?