May 26, 2024, marks the third anniversary of the death of comrade and intellectual Aziz Choudry. His work and activism have inspired and influenced many social movements around the world, including many writers and editors at Upping the Anti. We are proud to feature this memorial written by his friend and collaborator Stefan Christoff.

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Accounting for the full scope of lives lived by Aziz Choudry is impossible.

I remember well the warm smile Aziz would hold during quiet moments as we walked across the city in friendship. I can picture the long scarves that Aziz would wear beautifully while standing tall at street protests. I can still taste the delicious chai that Aziz would make at home and the deep emotional safety that I felt in the presence of Aziz, who could share empathy, even silently, through the presence of a generous spirit.

Before his tragic death in 2021, Aziz moved to South Africa where he briefly worked at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg. Since his death, the humanity that Aziz embodied for many continues to resonate in individual and collective ways across many parts of the world. Aziz was an activist, a critical scholar, 1 a prolific author, 2 a grassroots educator, 3 a social movement facilitator, a great cook, and most importantly to many, a dear friend. Aziz held meaningful spaces for many in innumerable beautiful ways on this Earth.

Aziz, born in south London (UK) in 1966, was an international activist who also sustained a profound focus on the critical importance of local community organizing and worked at the intersection of various movements for justice and against colonialism. Aziz was on the board of various organizations, including GRAIN, the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal and the Global Justice Ecology Project. Aziz wrote constantly, often focused on lifting up both the experiences and ideas of social movements. He was a trusted organizer, a friend and a voice of clear insight within a multitude of movements.

A major focus of his work was popularizing the learning that takes place within social movements. He wrote and spoke on the ways that grassroots movements for transformative change are spaces for critical action and social spaces within and from which critical theory often emerges. Today, intersectional analysis of systemic injustice and the importance of identity politics 4 (first termed by the Combahee River Collective) have gained popularity in mainstream political discourse. Aziz was part of a group of activist scholars who consistently lifted up the intergenerational struggles that created the space for such ideas to flourish—locating such politics in revolutionary anti-colonial movements across generations of activists involved in grassroots protest movements. These ideas are prominent within multiple collected works that Aziz edited with friends and comrades around the world, including these important titles: Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (2009); Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (2010); NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (2013); and, Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements (2015) .

Sustaining meaningful and trusted personal connections across the globe was an important element of the immense ​​efforts that Aziz made to support and construct international grassroots organizing networks, which have lifted up contemporary freedom struggles for “the majority of humankind” 5 and challenged the domination of corporate and state-driven, 6 capitalist, colonial power relations. The countless real friendships that he actively maintained, within the often socially intense landscapes of political activism are a remarkable feat. Aziz built up a heartfelt network of friends and comrades around the world, in horizontal fashions, across thirty years 7 of organizing, and “collective” 8 action. He clearly recognized that focusing, with tenderness, on “the social dimension of life” 9 was essential to sustaining any possibility of impactful activism. Many people deeply trusted Aziz, and rightfully so.

This text on Aziz is shaped by personal reflections written with the goal of sharing a few stories to illuminate a big life lived by a vibrant, beautiful and heartfelt person. The life that he lived remains present in many people given the generosity that was central to the relationships he built. A major legacy of his life and contributions is understanding that radical and revolutionary work can be a space for critical analysis and action, as well as care. Aziz was very careful to take the time to talk to people and to share ideas about how best to approach the questions of our time. In many ways, he broke down multiple doors within institutional contexts of academia, which for generations were hostile to community activist insights. There still remains a major gap between the streets and academic spaces; but through his determined critiques and efforts to introduce activist ideas into academic spaces, Aziz created space for many. He constantly worked to support frontline organizations doing community organizing work, often against the odds, like the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal.

Ephemeral moments: Sustaining love and critical thinking within creative grassroots action

Aziz thrived in spaces that were “off the map,” where political intersections around grassroots activism and art were explored. I was often with Aziz at events at Casa del Popolo 10 on St. Laurent. One such event was the the launch of Kaie Kellough’s celebrated book on Montreal, Accordéon, 11 and the local launch of Understanding the Crash, 12 a beautiful book of illustrated essays by NYC authors Eric Laursen and Seth Tobocman. 13 These works 14 detail how the 2008 financial meltdown deeply impacted working class people, particularly racialized communities, south of the colonial border. At the Understanding the Crash launch, Aziz gave an insightful talk to the audience where he offered reflections, connecting the demands of the 2012 student strike protests in Quebec to other international social movements. Anti-austerity strike actions in Montreal 15 called for an end to “student debt” 16 and stood against state-driven moves towards neoliberalism and the corporatization of postsecondary education. 17 Aziz underlined how local protest movements were occurring as part of broader collective networks of struggle against the global capitalist 18 fundamentalisms of Wall Street and Bay Street. He spoke about the link between local political activism “in the everyday” 19 and larger global movements that challenge the systemic violence of financialization.

These contemporary neoliberal processes of deregulations, advocated by the Chicago school of economics, 20 are rooted in the legacies of colonial power. Aziz situated these contemporary struggles for social and economic justice in relation to the ideas and systemic critiques of “Indigenous and other colonized peoples” 21 who “are often at the forefront of both the analysis of and resistance to capitalist globalization.” 22 Aziz also spoke on the essential role of artistic expression within social movements, as illustrated in Understanding the Crash.

I remember a community panel discussion that I organized in 2004, in the basement of the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University, with support from CKUT 90.3FM, 23 featuring Aziz and the late Arthur Manuel, 24 the celebrated Indigenous political activist, land defender, and author. I was blown away by the combined layers of analysis that the two speakers shared, from the intersecting reflections around systems of colonialism as manifested in our historical present to sharing tangible ideas on the ways to directly engage audience members in meaningful collective ways. A couple of days after that panel, I edited a recording of that talk and played it on an early morning broadcast on CKUT Radio. I remember getting email feedback on that 8am broadcast, with people asking if Arthur and Aziz had published books or articles that listeners could access.

In the following months, there was a series of protests calling for a boycott of Delta Hotels including at a location on Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal. The actions were supported by the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement, an activist collective organizing in the city at the time. The corporate hotel chain was directly investing in constructing new hotel units at a ski resort in BC (Sunpeaks) that was expanding into the traditional territories of the Secwépemc people (the nation that Arthur Manuel was from), 25 without the legal consent of the Indigenous people impacted. This hotel expansion was a violation of the Delgamuukw Supreme Court decision 26 and Indigenous sovereignty. I fondly remember Aziz joined some of those picket actions to support the Secwépemc people, wearing his signature leather jacket at the protests in those cool, windy, spring days in downtown Montreal.

Networks of resistance, local and global, as rooted in history

Aziz was indeed always international in building networks of resistance. 27 His work at the same time was also intensely locally linked to community organizations like the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) in Côte-Des-Neiges, Montreal, where Aziz was actively engaged as a board member for many years.

I write this text to also underline some memorable public works of Aziz, including many awesome books he either edited or wrote. There is the amazing joint photo book about Caribbean Quebecios networks of community activism that Aziz did with archivist Désirée Rochat, Caribbean life in Quebec: A Pictorial History of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. 28 Projects like this speak to the broad scope of Aziz’s incredible accomplishments, and to the major personal support role that he played in many lives and across many projects.

Aziz always focused on work around intersections between anti-colonial analyses of international systems of finance and politics, as they reflected and manifested in the local, propped up by legacies of colonialism. He thrived in supporting community groups, like the IWC 29 and many others, who addressed those intersections.

I first met Aziz in Montreal around the global Conference Against War, Imperialism and Racism 30 that took place at Concordia University in 2002, although I had been reading his articles on ZNet 31 for a couple years already. I distinctly recall feeling excited when a new text by Aziz was being circulated across activist email lists at the time. Aziz was one of the few activist writers that I remember fully taking the time to deeply read because of the historical arc of the writing and the ways he located the protest movements I was joining in Montreal within a larger trajectory of anti-colonial struggles and liberation movements around the world.

Aziz was often able to articulate broader meanings involved, giving important context to the protest actions that I was working on and invested in so deeply at a local level. The clarity and breadth of expressions of political reference points, Aziz made in his writing 32 was a big deal for a committed teenage activist stepping into serious organizing within anti-authoritarian activist groups, including the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC) 33 and the Peoples’ Global Action Network (PGA).

Aziz’s writing was often circulated and discussed on email lists and networks like the PGA. The PGA was a global network of radical activist collectives, movement organizations and individuals who were attempting to work in solidarity with “movements from the Global South.” 34 PGA came together “on the need not just to reform neoliberalism but to defeat capitalism completely, and to produce a resistance as transnational as capital.” 35 Texts by Aziz were often circulated and discussed on PGA email lists locally and globally. The PGA had emerged within Left networks globally through activist initiatives formed around the world to support the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico and to organize anti-capitalist globalization protests around the world in opposition to the policies of institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization (WTO). Chiapas, Mexico, existed as a point of resistance to this global neoliberal, colonial capitalist order that Aziz was writing against, a physical location that stood strong against neocolonialism. “A place off the map” 36 to western power. A place that, to the great surprise of colonial capitalist institutions, fought back creating a physical point of anti-colonial resistance directly on the map, especially after Zapatista armed rebels declared autonomy in 1994. Chiapas came to symbolize a geographical point of victorious rebellion that continues to inspire activists globally while also shaking the frameworks of what mainstream political power has deemed possible; a place where “there is no separation between who is governed and who is governing—they are one and the same.” 37

Aziz’s writing on corporate globalization, sweatshops, environmental destruction, and systemic racism that included the Zapatistas, worked to locate the opposition and rage that I felt while also providing a sense of meaning and power to the work that I was doing locally, connecting it to a broader global network rooted in history. Aziz referenced the autonomous Indigenous points of action like the Zapatistas, linking such points of contemporary territorial resistance to broader histories of anti colonial struggle.

Aziz was always critical of the gaps between the mainstream Left and the ways that this institutional discourse surrounding the anti-globalization movement ignored the historical arc of anti-colonial movements embodied by groups like the Zapatistas. His argument was reflected with what we were facing locally as activists in CLAC organizing to support the struggles of Indigenous groups and organizations like the Mohawk Warrior Society 38 and others.

In August 2001, Aziz wrote a stinging critique that spoke to the work that we were doing locally—targeting mainstream critics of globalization that failed to take the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, and corporate interests into account, work that failed to canter Indigenous voices. Aziz wrote, “Far too many times have I heard the history of globalization—and the resistance to it—compressed into the last two or three decades, and related in a way which downplays or ignores anti-imperialist movements in the South and especially the resistance of indigenous nations in territories claimed by Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the USA.” 39

In this text and more broadly in Aziz’s work, the effort was to explore the root ideologies of neoliberalism and free trade agreements that were being protested globally at the time. Aziz’s goal was not to simply critique the framing of the mainstream NGOs—such as OXFAM that were often the public facing image to protests—but to deepen our collective understanding of the colonial roots of the economic systems that drive contemporary neoliberal economics and free market fundamentalisms. Aziz, as always, encouraged us to look deeper.

Global activism as rooted in the personal: Café Sarajevo

Trying to navigate my involvement in these hyper active networks of anti-colonial resistance, while figuring out life personally was always a major challenge and although Aziz articulated a broader context and rooted our work in history, Aziz was also there on a personal level and that created a connection special to my life. A connection that went beyond the political—a connection that modelled how to talk to and hear people who are outside of your personal or political circles.

It was smoky inside Café Sarajevo. In 2004, you could still smoke inside across Montreal in a bunch of places, particularly bars. In Café Sarajevo there was a big painting on the wall, portrait style of a family member of the owner Osman Koulenovitch, Balkan clothing represented in the big old frame set in the spot just beside the bar where there were a bunch of different types of the drink rakia.

Aziz Choudry is sitting across the table talking with my father, George, whose family were all immigrants from the Macedonian region of the Balkans, a territory that crosses a couple countries now, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece. Aziz was of course a close friend from the activist world. I had learned so much speaking to Aziz, recording interviews with Aziz for CKUT 90.3FM campus community radio, on the many issues highlighted in this text already.

Also, at that moment, at Café Sarajevo, I was learning again. I was seeing Aziz connect with my father in a way that was real, but the conversation didn’t seem to be about ‘activism’, but more seemed to be about food culture and different cities. I could see what Aziz was doing, connecting with my father, something that I had struggled with.

Aziz was speaking to my dad in a way that seemed to make my father feel seen. Aziz was translating all sorts of cultural codes that I had struggled with. This was amazing to see. I was 23 years old and struggling to find a connection between my family, particularly between my father and my activist life. Aziz was illustrating in a small way, how to make it happen.

Thinking back today, to the many little lessons that I learned from Aziz, like this moment in Café Sarajevo, I think about how activism is always about the systemic, but also is intensely personal. After Aziz arrived in Montreal in 2003/2004 we became close friends. There were periods where we were in touch frequently, but other times I couldn’t manage to keep the connection. I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t figure out how to get my mental health together sometimes, the wear and tear, mentally, of a lot of frontline organizing around migrant justice, on campaigns against police brutality, in support of Palestine, was taking a personal toll. Aziz saw that and was always reaching out, but sometimes I couldn’t find the words, or didn’t know what to say. Always, Aziz kept reaching out, checking in.

I sincerely wish that I could have found more tangible ways to speak to Aziz about activist movement depression, about mental health tolls and about how Aziz was feeling, beyond the high level political analysis that Aziz shared.

Aziz has left an incredible legacy on this Earth and a social network of love, that is real and tangible in many parts of the world. Thousands of us are better for it. However, I, like many others around the world, collectively mourn the loss of comrade and beautiful friend Aziz Choudry.

Given Aziz’s passing, it is essential for us to address collectively within radical social movements the essential need to address mental health struggles that come with taking on systems of power. In the last months of Aziz’s life, I could feel strongly an effort by Aziz to reach out but also a deep sense of sadness and a lack of having the emotional capacity to really address openly the deep depression that Aziz was feeling. Aziz leaves us space to thrive as radical activists, as the space that Aziz created for the radical ideas of social movements remains. Aziz worked tirelessly to open space for the ideas of social movements. In return it is essential for us to continue to work to open space for the urgent need to address mental health struggles and break all the taboos surrounding the struggles of depression that are so common in our movements. There are no easy solutions to these questions, but the important point is to talk about these issues and to find room to try a multitude of tools to come to terms with this reality.*

I first heard of Unit 2 from someone I met at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2018. He was from Toronto, and I was going to move there in just three months. Naturally, I asked him where I should go to find queer hangouts in Toronto. The first place he mentioned was Unit 2.

My first time visiting Unit 2 was for the release of Issue 21 of Upping the Anti. I found myself at a dance party with nobody I knew, in a very intimate setting with nowhere to hide. I remember opening the copy of Upping the Anti I was given at the door, then sitting down on the sofa and pretending to read while I was actually looking at all these queer lefties dancing together. It was beautiful.

Unit 2 is a place where people come to feel connected. It’s a place where people come to perform, participate, and party. It’s a place people come to organize. Since 2008, Unit 2 has been holding space for community arts, culture, and politics to flourish.

Unit 2 describes itself as a “Do It Together space for 2SQTBIPOC and friends.” Located on Sterling Avenue, between Dundas Street West and Bloor Street West, Unit 2 is a small loft space within a larger building of studios. Sterling Avenue, unlike other streets in the neighbourhood, still has an industrial vibe as it used to have several factories and warehouses, some of which are still operating, like the Nestlé chocolate factory. Other buildings have been repurposed into commercial spaces, studios, breweries, a major art gallery, and a printing press. Some buildings are vacant. Unit 2 is home to two artists: Rosina Kazi and Nicholas Murray. The two have a band, LAL, and have held space in their home for several of Toronto’s grassroots arts, culture, and political communities to which they are connected.

Many others call Unit 2 home. Over the years, a handful of people have lived in Unit 2 alongside Rosina and Nic, whether on a long-term or temporary basis. They contribute to the space in terms of organizing, caretaking, training, and event planning. These are people who, alongside Rosina and Nic, have organized to keep Unit 2 alive and running for over 13 years. They have organized dance parties, community dinners, poetry readings, skill-shares, sex parties, vinyl nights, and low-key kickbacks. Truly, any kind of queer cultural event or performance you can think of has probably happened at Unit 2.

Long haul movement organizers have much to learn from Unit 2 in how it mobilizes its abolitionist values to hold a transformative kind of space. As an autonomous live-work space led by a group of artists spanning sexualities, genders, generations, ethnicities, and disabilities, Unit 2 is a rare kind of space in a gentrifying Toronto. Unit 2’s organizers intervene in mainstream narratives around what it means to exist as a brick-and-mortar community space within the context of gentrification and foreclosure of radical community-run spaces.

In this roundtable, you will hear from a few of Unit 2’s current core organizers as they reflect on the space’s history and its future transformations.

Rosina Kazi is the lead singer of the protest electronic duo LAL and dance music duo ROSINA. They/she are a queer/gender fluid/non-binary, culturally Muslim and Bengali-identified artist. Rosina helps run the alternative DIT (Do it Together) community and arts space Unit 2, a space dedicated to supporting queer and trans, Black and Brown folks, and friends. To support the Do it Together and Unit 2 space, please sign up at withfriends.co/unit_2 to donate.

Born in Barbados, Nicholas Murray is a composer and producer of electronic music and a sound designer for theatre. He is a founding member of the Indie Electronic Duo LAL. Check out LAL at lalforest.com or lalforest.bandcamp.com.

Brawk Hessel is a white settler and a genderqueer fag who is also a recovering addict, proudly mad, a careworker, and a performance artist. They are a collective member of both the Bricks & Glitter Festival and Unit 2.

Max ZB is an artist, musician, photographer, and organizer who is imagining a future with others. Max is currently working with Unit 2 and Bricks & Glitter.

You can get more information about Unit 2 at unit2.club or follow them at instagram.com/unit2communityspace. You can find Bricks and Glitter here (https://www.facebook.com/bricksglitter/).

What is your relationship to Unit 2 and what does Unit 2 mean to you?

Rosina: Unit 2 is my home. Our home. Being in the art scene and being part of all kinds of different communities, we wanted to create a space that allows dialogue and creativity between our different communities. We wanted it to be for Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks and our white working-class friends, and for disabled folks. I’m just not comfortable with the hierarchy and the toxicity in the capitalist system. I grew up in a Bangladeshi community, so my parents’ home was always a space of culture, parties, people, and food. We’re carrying on that tradition in our own way.

I know Unit 2 as a transformative space. People have transformed here. There was always someone to hold them, talk to them, and give them ideas about alternative lifestyles.

Nicholas: This was a place of living, first. It developed into a very beautiful work space because it was one of the few places where I actually work and live at the same time. I could make very loud music and rehearse here instead of having to go to another studio space. It was Rosina’s idea to make it a performance space.

In the beginning, it was really uncomfortable living in a space where there were often people that I didn’t know. I got into it when we started having cool art stuff here, where it was really experimental. Then the whole punk thing came in, and that was cool too because it was blowing my mind. So I warmed up to the idea of living in a space where the community lives because it represented a rebellion from all that was expected of me. It also spoke to the culture that I wanted to see happening.

I grew up in Toronto during the ’90s, so I always kind of lived in lofts. I also come from the rave and hip hop scenes, so I grew up going to many parties in lofts. There was a huge loft scene that I was a part of in the city. They were much more plentiful back in the day, so it was cool for artists to live in lofts. Lofts were often the only places artists could afford before they became gentrified artistic commodities. It is a space to be creative and experience creativity all around me.

Brawk: The first time I ever went to Unit 2 was 10 years ago for Faith Alexandra Marie’s art installation and cabaret around the themes of addiction and sobriety. The space has changed so much over the years that I almost forgot that it was at Unit 2, but those iconic double staircases stick out in my memory.

My relationship with Unit 2 grew through Daniel Mack. Daniel mentioned that the Bricks & Glitter (B&G) festival was just starting out and needed folks to join the organizing committee. I was totally excited by that because I always found Pride so alienating and overwhelming. I had just finished a Master’s in Sexual Diversity Studies and what B&G proposed to do and keeps doing is something that felt like academia can only theorize about, and I haven’t been back to school since. That’s how I got connected to Unit 2 and all the folks here. Since Daniel decided to step back last year, I’ve tried to fill his shoes with the administrative and caretaking roles.

Together, Unit 2 and Bricks & Glitter mean the same thing to me: generosity. I was so used to going into spaces and wanting to help, but feeling kind of useless because I didn’t have the language, the qualifications, or the clout. But with Unit 2 and B&G, if you show up, everyone is willing to lift you up and you learn how to participate together.

Max: There were already a lot of people existing around Unit 2 when I started coming here, so I jumped in with them. My relationship with the space came out of an appreciation of its accessibility. It was cheap. It was run by cool people. There was queerness around it. There was the opportunity to do whatever was needed in the space and to accomplish your goals, whether that is to educate or party, to celebrate or talk about queerness. It was very interesting because, being a home, there is a very specific dynamic where everyone is a guest no matter what. But it doesn’t feel suffocating or awkward. And I love that this is one of the only arts venues in Toronto that does dinners.

In a city where gentrification has made brick-and-mortar autonomous arts spaces so rare, what is the persisting relevance, or importance, of Unit 2 in bridging politics and the arts?

Brawk: Rent in Toronto is really fucking high and artists, particularly Indigenous, Black, mad, disabled, trans, and/or working-class artists really have to scramble. Unit 2 has to be not only intersectional, but also multi-use, by sheer necessity. Rose and Nic have helped countless artists and community members over the years: through community dinners, a food care program, cheap or pay-what-you-can event space rentals, and by offering up their home for folks to rest and heal.

Nicholas: There’s a certain level of freedom in terms of the low rent, the space itself, and the neighbourhood where most people go to their homes at night.

Unit 2 speaks to the idea of how space is important. In a sense, it rebelled against the idea that you have to go somewhere else to experience culture, as opposed to experiencing and making culture in your home. I really liked the idea of living with artists, but people generally do that out of need. The way people live with culture, in some ways, is based on their proximity to oppression.

This spot defies gentrification in a lot of ways, not only because of the Nestlé chocolate factory down the street, but also because it’s on toxic soil. There’s a mess of toxic goo underneath this building. This building is worth $2 million, but would be worth way more, given the gentrification, if we weren’t sitting on some of the most polluted land in all of Ontario. There was a factory that used to build automotive parts and power conduits right next door. This whole area is toxic as hell. That’s why it took so many years to clear that area of land behind the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). I feel like there’s a certain level of gentrification that is actually slowed down because of the pollution and that has allowed a place like this to still exist.

Max: I think part of just existing here is saying “yeah, fuck gentrification,” which adds energy to the space. It doesn’t affect whether gentrification happens or not, but it speaks to the intersections of where Unit 2 sits. It starts with Rose and Nic and the people who are attracted to the space who also think “fuck what’s happening.” Part of what it means to be oppressed people is you find other people who will help you, who might become your chosen family and uplift you. They’ll engage with you, your art practice, and your social activist practice.

But then, there’s the looming monster of capital, money, and rent that says “hey, actually, I don’t care that y’all have been rallying, this is now a condo.” It’s not hopeless, but it’s dystopian. It’s amazing to belong to a group of people who are all very against the dystopian system and going to resist as much as we can. We’re going to be here until we can’t.

Rosina: My father came to Canada in the 1960s, so they had no choice but to connect amongst themselves because art and politics go hand in hand. Growing up in that community, my experience was listening to music, reading poetry, and dancing—but then you fight, and then you eat together.

So many of these contexts inform what we do with LAL and the culture we bring to Unit 2. As artists, we have always been part of activism and we found ourselves through activism or different art scenes that were actually political. In the 1990s the art scene was hella political. Everything was underground, even hip hop was underground, and there was nothing mainstream coming out of the scene. It’s changed quite a lot. We’re in a time, now, where subversion is co-opted.

We were often the first people to show up, create energy, create a vibe, and then that gets taken away from us. We were able to maintain the history of warehouse culture because we have that old-school understanding. We don’t post much about Unit 2 on social media because you got to be careful. It’s not just “safety,” you got to be fucking careful because what you’re doing half the time is possibly illegal.

We’re from the ’90s weirdo Black and Brown culture, and we all had to share space because the scene was so small. If you were anti-police or anti-prison, you were deemed “crazy” or “radical.” So many of our friends are Black and Indigenous folks who organize. We’re not just artists who make really nice work about political things, we’re actually tight, and we work very closely. Often LAL was helping with the sound systems and on the stages at protests. So we come from a community where you may not like each other, but you have to share space.

What values lie at the foundation of Unit 2, and how might these values relate to abolition?

Max: Being present. The value of being present is especially relevant because we’re in a culture where there’s a lot of cancelling and discarding. People who are hurt don’t know what to do. All of it is valid, but not all of it is productive, and I think the most productive value in this space is observing how people who are present contribute and are willing to learn.

It’s the fact that anyone who has been here has mattered. Even if they just came a few times, anyone who’s been here has been part of cultivating the culture of Unit 2.

Brawk: Unit 2 is centred around collective values, with community care and togetherness at the core. For me, the circular mentorship model is where I see those values the most. We use a model we call “each one, teach one,” and vice versa, “teach one, each one.” 1 Each person has something to learn at Unit 2 and they have something to teach others.

It feels like no one is disposable at Unit 2. Anti-cancel culture feels like an important value there. During the first year of organizing Bricks & Glitter, there was somebody in the community who had a lot of issues with the way B&G was organized. Instead of sweeping it under the rug and labelling their critique as ridiculous, B&G took time to speak with this person and the collective actually encouraged them to protest the events. B&G got somebody to sit down and mediate the conversation. The festival was trying to find a way to include them and to invite them into the organizing process. It was a really pivotal moment for me.

I’m just so used to people dismissing one another, which then makes me feel like I always have to be on my best behaviour. I can bring all of myself here and if I make mistakes, it’s fine. I just have to remain accountable and I know that I’m not going to be X’ed out.

I always thought of cancel culture as a celebrity thing. Unit 2 made me think about cancel culture in the context of community, especially when in a small community, amongst people who have been cancelled already in an oppressive system.

Rosina: Often abolition gets pegged as taking down the system, but often we don’t apply it to a way of being. Some of my Indigenous friends don’t use the word abolition. That’s not a term that they use, it’s a way that they live. All the oppression, pain, lack of mentorship, and lack of resources often mean that people don’t know how to have alternative or transformative processes. There’s such a push to “X” people out. That’s not the way that we organize. Even in this space, I’ve had people tell me that they don’t mess with a specific person. If that person wants to come through, I literally go around calling and letting people know, just in case, that this person is coming. Whether you come or not, or you each go to one corner of the room, it’s up to you. It depends on what the issue is: if it’s sexual assault we have to talk about that. I put a lot of energy behind the scene into making sure people are okay.

Everybody has empathy. Within empathy, there’s a practice of what I call “circular mentorship,” this idea that we learn from each other regardless of our age or experience. There’s something to learn from everybody. We have elders. When I say elders, it’s not just older people. I know younger people who are my elders. In any kind of hierarchy, many of us are made to feel not important. I honestly believe every single person is important. Someone could fuck with you, but that doesn’t deem them less important. Every person holds values and stories that we all can learn. So I listen to people. True listening is crucial, not just an academic idea about the embodiment of the ideas. That’s why dancing is so important here. Often we’ve had people who would never hang out dancing together in the same room. This created a healing energy. Just before COVID, we started the community dinner series. We realized that people want to create intentional spaces and many of us don’t have a lot of money, which is so shameful in Toronto. Even during the first six months of COVID, when we couldn’t have dinners with a bunch of different people, we started getting food and supplies out to people on the streets. Out of that, we started hearing about the financial support folks in our community needed, so we started fundraising for Indigenous, Black, and other racialized folks around housing and survival. That was possible because we had a whole community actively participating, doing more than just donating $10. These were things empathy allowed us to do.

Nicholas: The idea of a big sound in a small space has been a common thread in my whole life. The first dance party I went to was at a community centre. They had their huge Cerwin Vega speaker set-up in a very small space, which planted the seed. Where do I go to hear the big sound in a small space again? There are not a lot of places for that.

The value system of big sound/small space naturally leads to creating spaces for those who don’t have any. It’s a kind of escapism; it was for people who were making really undanceable, unfriendly music whether it was just noise, droning, or punk. There’s always a lot of community activism that happens around that kind of music. For me, it was always about sound that didn’t really fit anywhere and people who weren’t totally understood.

One clear example of this was when David Jones 2 held a series of experimental music shows here. He had an artist, Luis Hernandez, come through. All he had were contact microphones and bricks. He would hit the contact mics on the bricks and create this totally otherworldly sound. It was incredible, extremely loud, and just mind- blowing for me to see. Though there’s a history of music in that style, it was buried at the time. I felt transported into this world, this other form of rebellion that was not based in tempo or rhythm. It was based on something different.

Rosina: In essence, Unit 2 is an anti-capitalist space. I don’t use that term all the time because I’ve seen more and more people claiming all kinds of politics without understanding how capitalism impacts us. How capitalism tells us that our ideas need to get bigger, more exclusive, better dressed, and more expensive. Some of the best artists that I’ve witnessed made something out of nothing, like in the hip hop scene we came out of and the Bangladeshi community I grew up in. But in this city, and many other cities, capitalism tells us: “You can start small, but the goal is to become bigger and more elite so you can have other people make art for you.” That shit is boring as fuck. It makes me physically sick to see some people sit back and get served while others are doing all the work.

What transitions are in store for Unit 2? What do you hope carries into the future and what do you hope might change?

Rosina: Because I don’t think we can be open to the public for a while due to COVID, we have been upgrading the space with new technology—professional cameras, lighting, sound—so there’s at least the option to make the space more accessible over the pandemic. I hope that people can record live performances, or even radio shows, in the space.

I also hope that the community lens continues and that Unit 2 continues to run as a cultural centre in the same space where it’s still accessible for people to stay when there’s an emergency.

On a bigger level, I hope the city gets its shit together. I’m tired of applying for grants to justify the work we’ve done for 20 years. I get upset about this because all these institutions are stealing our work, our community’s work. We need money, but when they hire us, they take our resources and our labour. It makes me mad. I hope that somebody with deep pockets will just donate. And let’s talk about this grant system, because we shouldn’t have to be dependent on it to make our art, we shouldn’t have to justify why we, as marginalized people, need resources. I hope that something changes, and not just in this city. We are being pushed out in all cities.

It would be beautiful to give the space to artists. We need to find a way to get that idea supported, so how and when we get there is still up for debate. Personally, for me, I need a break from Toronto. I don’t want to live in a warehouse where there’s construction happening 24/7. But Nic and I still need a place to live. So, there’s a little bit of room for adjustments.

Nicholas: It was a great experiment of understanding what we mean by community-building and fostering creativity. Being a part of that experiment on a community level was really beautiful. I’ve learned and grown a lot by seeing what has been done within this space. As amazing as it is, it does take a toll on your mind and body. Living in such an intense space really hurt my capacity for making art. On top of physical ailments and family hardships, I realized that I have to set boundaries in order to have a full and creative lifestyle.

Recording our new record was kind of the switch for me. I realized what it really means to be an artist and make a record in a concentrated way. I also think it’s powerful for Black people to see an actual Black person in a space like this. People aren’t used to seeing a Black person living in an artist loft. It’s pretty powerful. Black people need to continue to be present in this space for the future.

Brawk: Unit 2 is unlike any other arts space in this city where there are so many rules, where there’s a board and managers. Because the process is more circular and horizontal, as opposed to linear and vertical, Unit 2 has been able to welcome a lot of events that might be considered too messy or too distracting in other spaces.

I definitely have some fear of Rose and Nic leaving. Will we be able to carry on that tradition when they’ve taken a few steps back? I am not sure, but I have faith that we can keep building on those characteristics. Starting in 2020–2021, there has been an amazing team of folks doing wonders for Unit 2: installing new tech, training a tech team, reorganizing, deep cleaning, and starting a Withfriends fundraising campaign 3 to keep Unit 2 afloat.

I keep going back to the idea of generosity. Unit 2 is a QTBIPOC-centred space, and I’m white, so it’s not really up to people like me to envision its transitions, but I will be there to support the visions people have for what it becomes.

Max: What is the future? While I do agree with not fearing an end, I feel a sense of anticipation for when Nic and Rosina leave. People come here for them. This is a very critical pivot for both of them, not completely exiting the space, but also not living here permanently.

The tangible end is when someone says, “Oh, hey, the plot of land has been sold and you’re getting evicted.” Until then, queers need to be able to come here and leave with power. And if not, then the space isn’t accomplishing what it set out to do, with or without Rose and Nic.

With coordination and compassion, I believe we can easily pass leadership on to the next people. My understanding of the future is that whoever is here, Unit 2 is going to carry on some of the previous intentions, and that includes rehearsing, having dinners, performing, dancing, workshopping, educating, video recording, documenting, soliciting. The future is very hopeful.

Rosina: As Brawk said, Unit 2 is starting a fundraiser for the exact purpose of resourcing. We have a small team working to put together a campaign called “Sustain Unit 2,” and we’re starting with a campaign to cover rent, supplies, new equipment, and to cover labour over the next couple of years. Our goal is, hopefully, to raise $60-thousand to account for all the labour folks put in. I would love for us to raise rent for at least the next two years, which would give us time to catch our breath and figure out a long-term plan, whether that looks like going for more grants or getting the city to donate space for us.

Unit 2 has been able to be so many things because so many different people have helped out over the years. The energy shifts depending upon who’s here. We can shift how we work because we don’t say the work must be done a certain way. There is an interesting fluidity that allows people to work in whatever way that they can or want to. And how do we all support those ways? That’s the question that will have a huge impact on our future. *

The recent 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has captured the attention of the world, highlighting the importance of anti-war organizing and de-escalation on a global scale. While organizers on the Left have long rallied for an end to war in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and beyond, this distinctly European conflict has rekindled Cold War divisions between East and West, exposing both the authoritarian neoliberalism of Putin’s regime and NATO’s role in cementing US imperial dominance across the globe.

Before these recent events unfolded, Sakura Saunders sat down with Rachel Small and Simon Black in August of 2021 to talk about their respective anti-war organizing in Canada. In what follows, Sakura, Rachel, and Simon discuss Canada’s role in global hegemony, the power of workers to develop international anti-war movements, the importance of direct action as a method of intervention, and current work to bridge anti-war movements with struggles for a just transition away from fossil fuels.

Simon Black is a lead organizer with Labour Against the Arms Trade and a professor of Labour Studies at Brock University.

Rachel Small is the Canada organizer with World Beyond War. She has organized in Toronto with the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network for the better part of a decade.

Can you say a bit about both of your organizations?

Rachel: World Beyond War (WBW) is a global grassroots movement to abolish war and the military industrial complex and replace it with a just and sustainable peace. We have 23 chapters around the world in 12 countries, with tens of thousands of people across 192 countries who have signed onto our Declaration of Peace, including over 700 organizational pledge signers. We’re a relatively young organization, started in 2014, but we’ve been growing pretty fast. We maintain formal partnerships with 93 affiliates globally and generally work with groups, movements, and coalitions all around the world as long as they align with our vision of abolition.

Simon: Labour Against the Arms Trade (LAAT) is a coalition of peace and labour activists organizing to bring an end to Canada’s participation in the international arms trade. We organize for arms conversion—that is, the conversion of arms industries into socially-useful production—and for a just transition for arms industry workers.

So both organizations are war and weapons abolitionist groups. How do you align yourself with other abolitionist movements, be it prison or police abolition?

Rachel: World Beyond War is an abolitionist project, and we see ourselves as a sibling movement to other abolitionist movements. Movements to abolish police, prisons, and the military are all about building a future and a present beyond violence or state violence, and really, beyond coercive state forces. So we have a natural alliance there.

Abolitionist movements are inherently visionary movements that look beyond what we live in now—what’s assumed to be the way things have to be—and imagine other ways to relate with each other, at the community and city level, at the country level, and internationally.

It’s so important to imagine a future in which prisons, police, war, and colonization are irrelevant and unfathomable. And it’s not a utopia we’re imagining, but a process towards learning and relearning skills and practices of living together in a community and on a planet that are not rooted in violence.

As well, the institutions opposed by abolitionist movements are deeply connected. For instance, the first and primary form of warfare for Canada is colonization. And when it became harder for the Canadian state to pursue colonization through militarized means—attacking and killing Indigenous peoples in their communities—that war has continued as effectively through police violence, where we know Indigenous people are surveilled, overpoliced, and overrepresented in prisons. And there isn’t a clear-cut separation between the police and the military in terms of what equipment is used and how intelligence is shared. Violent state institutions work closely together, so our abolitionist movements need to work together as well. And I think people increasingly realize that, in the same way prisons and policing do not keep people safe (and never have), neither does the military.

Simon: LAAT is a relatively new organization. We formed in 2019 out of a grassroots campaign to push the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to oppose arms exports to Saudi Arabia, and to call for a just transition for arms industry workers impacted by an end to those exports. Our focus is on organizing inside the labour movement. The goal is for LAAT to resemble—in terms of the structure—a trade union with an elected executive and a dues-paying membership. As such, I think it’s too early in the life of LAAT to move beyond the core demands of ending Canada’s participation in the international arms trade, arms conversion, and securing a just transition for arms industry workers. While I may think through our relationships to other social movements, those relationships will be something that’s ultimately determined by the membership of LAAT.

That said, part of our work in the future is raising awareness among rank-and-file trade unionists about how settler colonialism and extractive capitalism are reliant not only on the projection of military might abroad, but on the use of military force within so-called Canada: whether it be the RCMP or the Canadian military that violates Indigenous sovereignty and rights.

What are your short-term and long-term goals?

Rachel: Long-term, WBW is working towards a horizon of abolition, and we carefully evaluate new campaigns and actions to make sure they bring us in that direction. The horizon perspective is an analogy I’m borrowing from prison abolition movements: making sure that as you advocate for prisoners and push for certain reforms, you’re not accidentally advocating for more jails. In our case, this means working to help people here and now who face military violence, while making sure our actions aren’t co-opted or spun to advocate for “better weapons” or “safer wars” and so forth.

Currently we’re working on a number of more short-term campaigns focused on ending the most egregiously violent ways that Canada participates in militarism. So, like LAAT, we’re working to stop Canada from sending arms to Saudi Arabia where we know they’re being used to commit war crimes in the horrific war in Yemen, but also against civilians in Saudi Arabia as well. We’re also trying to stop Canada from purchasing 88 new fighter jets whose only purpose is to drop bombs in US- and NATO-led wars. These are winnable campaigns, so another short-term goal of ours is to show ourselves that we have power: that we, as part of a broader movement, can affect change against the military industrial complex.

And we’re working to challenge the narrative of Canada as a peacekeeper or a legitimate state and to broaden the public’s understanding of colonization as an ongoing war.

Simon, are there any groups of workers that you work with who are assembling weapons? How are you working with these groups to stop weapons production?

Simon: A good example is the campaign to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia. The bulk of current exports to Saudi are light armoured vehicles (LAVs), which are manufactured in London, Ontario, at General Dynamics Land Systems Canada (GDLS), a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a massive defence company, which is really part of the military industrial complex that spans the Canadian-US border.

The workers at General Dynamics are unionized, represented by Local 27, Unit 66 of Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union. The logo of Unit 66 is a red Canadian maple leaf superimposed on a light armoured vehicle, with “Unifor Local 27 Unit 66” in a military font. It’s clear that these workers take pride in the work that they do and closely identify with the product they are making. The union’s website has photos of LAVs doing combat exercises, seemingly in far-flung locations—definitely not Canada judging by the terrain. So there’s this interplay of militarism, imperialism, nationalism or patriotism, and pride in one’s work right there in the logo and on the union website. As Rachel has mentioned, these LAVs are being deployed in the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. So how do we begin to raise consciousness among the workers about this reality, how do we begin to foster an anti-militarism, anti-imperialist politics? It’s not easy, but we’ve tried to make connections with these workers through three entry points.

One has been to push the Canadian Labour Congress to very publicly condemn arms sales to Saudi, which they now have done. But this isn’t just a condemnation from the CLC, but a statement expressing the need for a just transition for arms industry workers, so that the workers at GDLS feel confident that the broader labour movement doesn’t just want to end arms exports, but wants to ensure workers’ livelihoods are secure, and that the labour movement will mobilize for public investment in arms conversion for green peaceful production. The second entry point has been to pressure the leadership of Unifor to take a similar position. This has been less successful. Unifor has taken a principled position around arms exports and imports from the State of Israel, supporting a two-way arms embargo in solidarity with the Palestinian people. But this stance is inconsistent with their silence around arms exports to Saudi Arabia. And that’s because they are very narrowly trying to protect the interests of their members in London. So, we’ve been unsuccessful in making the case to Unifor, despite contact with the national leadership. The third entry point is with the rank and file. We’ve spoken to Unifor members at the plant in London and hope to do political education around what a just transition could look like for them. But workers are not stupid. They know that without the backing of their local and national union, and without a commitment from the state, the idea of a “just transition” is little more than a slogan.

In the absence of a state committed to some form of planning, to an industrial strategy or even nationalization, and to the conversion of arms manufacturing to socially-useful production, a just transition for arms industry workers is a limited vision. In this limited vision of a just transition, we are talking about measures to assist workers in the arms industry to access new job opportunities in clean energy, green transportation, efficient buildings, conservation, and green infrastructure. So this looks like robust social programs that support workers in retraining or public investments to create good jobs to replace ones that are lost, and not arms conversion. But we have a stronger vision than this and know that General Dynamics is not going to turn around and say, “enough with the highly profitable production of weapons and the military industrial complex, we are going to make solar panels or high-speed rail infrastructure.” So what LAAT can do is political education to build support from the ground up to put pressure on the leadership of the local union, and the national, to at least start these conversations about a just transition and arms conversion. Without the support of Unifor, this political education is informal and can happen in community spaces but not at the union hall, where it should be happening.

And what would, or could, they be manufacturing instead?

Simon: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Lucas Plan, but it was a document produced by workers at Lucas Aerospace in the UK in the 1970s. Lucas was an aerospace and weapons manufacturer supplying the British military. The workers were faced with layoffs and the closure of a number of plants. They formed a committee, which brought together union shop stewards from across the workplace and met with the communities in which Lucas’s 17 plants were located. From this process they determined what the community’s needs were and how they could use their knowledge, skills, and experience to meet these needs. And they worked to develop an alternative corporate plan for Lucas from the bottom up, from the shop floor. The workers came up with wind turbines, hybrid power packs for cars, all sorts of green technologies that were relatively unheard of in the 1970s. So when you speak to workers in General Dynamics, and you talk about the climate crisis, they immediately turn to thinking about these kinds of products as well. The plant that used to be next door to General Dynamics was Electro-Motive Diesel of General Motors, which produced railway diesel locomotives. The company was taken over by Caterpillar, and despite a Unifor campaign to keep the plant open, it was shuttered and moved to a right-to-work state in 2012. Workers at General Dynamics know this history and know that there are alternative products, such as high-speed rail, that they could be producing. But there’s also a history of an employer closing up shop and leaving workers high and dry. This then leads to the question of public investment, and of public ownership, and production for social need, not production for profit. These are the sorts of questions that we need to be raising with arms industry workers in London and elsewhere.

Rachel: Another important question to ask is “what are the actual advanced vehicles that Canada needs?” We have a shocking lack of planes and on-the-ground vehicles that can effectively fight forest fires, which is not a hypothetical security question based on some imagined future NATO war, but rather these vehicles are needed right now in Northern Ontario and BC. These are not so difficult to build; there’s just a lack of political will, funding, and factories dedicated to creating the machines we need. And this is linked to a broader internationalist politics about what Canada could be exporting. Canada could be exporting search-and-rescue vehicles, tools the world will need to confront fires, droughts, and flooding, the known impacts of irreversible climate change.

But rather than work proactively to mitigate climate change, the Canadian state uses the climate crisis to justify increasing militarism by emphasizing the so-called war on our borders, i.e., the coming climate refugee crisis. We must challenge this racist militarist narrative.

The anti-war movement has long roots within imperialist countries like the United States and Canada, from resistance to World War One and the Vietnam War, to mobilizations against the invasion of Iraq. How has your work built upon this history?

Simon: Our organizing around Canada’s role in the international arms trade is an entry point into building or revitalizing a kind of anti-war, anti-militarism, and anti-imperialist politics within the Canadian labour movement, which has become pretty moribund. There hasn’t been much anti-war organizing within the Canadian labour movement since the mass mobilization against the war in Iraq, which provided a lightning rod for this organizing partly, I think, because of the widespread public opposition to the US-led invasion and occupation. But unions were only one part of that organizing, which included anti-war activists within the labour movement and from outside the labour movement who pushed unions to organize and mobilize their membership to oppose the war.

Using the arms industry and the arms trade as an entry point into building that kind of politics in the labour movement is something that we need to do. And part of that work is teaching trade unionists about their own history, their movement’s own history, and the role that unions have played in anti-war efforts, and how that role could be built upon and reinvigorated.

Rachel: WBW is a pretty young organization, but one of the real joys of my work is getting to organize with people whose entire life has been struggling towards the end of militarism. Some folks have been a part of anti-war movements for over 70 years. For instance, we just marked the 76th anniversary of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing and I worked with Setsuko Thurlow, herself a survivor, who has spent her entire life working for nuclear abolition, as well as with Alice Slater, who watched the bombing as a breaking news update in a New York movie theatre when she was a kid, and has been working nonstop for nuclear disarmament ever since. It’s important to work with that historical memory and to build upon the existing movement connections. Some of the direct actions that we’ve organized—like recent actions where we spilled gallons of red paint on the places that benefit from and perpetrate the arms trade—takes inspiration from this legacy and the work of other organizations like the Plowshares movement.

But I’ve also noticed that people who have been organizing in the anti-war movement for 40 plus years are really excited about trying new tactics and about learning from, for example, the environmental justice movement and the approaches that have been used in police abolition organizing. People feel like we can’t keep just doing the same things that we’ve been doing for decades; we need to constantly be evolving and changing, and that includes expanding the tactics that we can use, or in some cases, looking back to the tactics that were used 30 years ago and reimagining how we might use them in different ways now. Sending letters and petitions to decision-makers and organizing big city marches are classic movement tactics that have been used for ages and will continue to be used, but how they can happen and look now is really different than even 20 years ago. And then we are also thinking about how we escalate beyond that in ways that draw on movement history, from sit-ins and citizens’ arrests to boycotts and fasts, but also drawing on newer approaches, whether that’s through high tech tools like drones, projections, and online disruptions, or just different approaches like a rejection of respectability politics, or a deep commitment to decolonization and a solidarity that centres those most harmed by the war machine.

I also think several other movements on Turtle Island, while they may not all talk explicitly about war, are aligned with our organizing. For instance, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement is an anti-war movement that confronts the war machine and the military industrial complex. So, we’re in an interesting phase right now where, on one hand, we have access to all this movement history, and on the other hand, like any movement we have to reinvent ourselves, and we have to connect the dots so people see how climate justice, anti-racism work, and international solidarity movements are a part of a common struggle, and need to include an analysis of anti-militarism.

What is the role of unions and working-class people in the anti-war movement?

Simon: Because of their position within the social relations of production, under capitalism workers have tremendous—but often unrealized—power. It’s simple to say, but if workers refuse to fight and if workers refuse to produce weapons of war, then there can be no war. It’s not the ruling class that fights wars, and it’s not the capitalist class that is on the shop floor, manufacturing a light armoured vehicle at GDLS or a laser-guided bomb at Lockheed Martin. But the history of anti-war struggles within both the working class and the socialist movement and broader Left is a complicated one. There’s a history of working-class militancy and trade union militancy around war, but then there’s also history of capitulation to war and participation in war.

We, as an organization, are not pacifists in our orientation, and of course there’s a rich history of workers in the Global South fighting in wars of liberation from colonial powers. But the history of workers in the anti-war movement in the imperialist core offers only glimmers of hope in regard to working-class resistance to war.

So you have this kind of history of both rank-and-file workers and unions taking action, say against the Iraq War in 2003, and then also a history—a less valiant history—of unions and rank-and-file workers being very much caught up in patriotism and nationalism. But I also think it’s important to contextualize this history with concrete examples that demonstrate the barriers to labour resistance to the arms trade and war more generally.

International Longshoremen’s Association Local 273 is a union of dockworkers in Saint John, New Brunswick. In the 1970s, there was a campaign to stop the export of nuclear power components to the military junta in Argentina. It was to be used in the CANDU nuclear reactor Canada had sold to Argentina in 1973. There was a concerted effort by peace and solidarity activists to get the dockworkers on board with that campaign and refuse to handle these materials and declare them “hot cargo.” At the time, the military junta was torturing, murdering, and “disappearing” thousands of leftists, journalists, trade unionists, and feminists. The NO CANDU campaign aimed to pressure the Argentine government to release 17 political prisoners, most of whom were trade unionists. Port workers later refused to cross a picket line at the Saint John harbour when workers were supposed to ship a load of heavy water to Argentina for the CANDU nuclear reactor. Heavy water is a component necessary for nuclear reactors. As a result of this pressure, 11 of the 17 political prisoners were released and three sent into exile. Local 273 were later honoured in 2010 by the government of Argentina for this act of solidarity.

Now if you fast forward to 2018, peace activists gathered outside of the port of Saint John when a Saudi ship was in the port to collect light armoured vehicles—that are manufactured in London—to take them to Saudi Arabia. A ship from a Saudi national shipping company came into port and peace activists put up a picket, and in the morning of December 22, the dockworkers, members of Local 273, refused to cross the picket line. And for one day, and one day only, those armoured vehicles weren’t loaded onto that ship. As a result, the local was taken before the Canadian Industrial Relations Board by the company that operates the port of Saint John and hit with a very heavy fine for engaging in what was effectively a political strike, which under Canadian labour law is illegal. No other union ran to Local 273’s defence. There was no solidarity campaign launched by the CLC or the New Brunswick Federation of Labour. Another example is what happened in the port of Prince Rupert in BC around Palestinian solidarity. But again, that union has now been hung out to dry. Workers there were given three days off of work, without pay.

Looking to examples like the port of Genoa in Italy, where dock workers have refused to load arms onto Saudi ships, is important. But we also need to realize that in places like Italy or France, labour laws are much more progressive, and that there are serious institutional constraints on Canadian workers and unions engaging in these kinds of militant actions. Pushing for labour law reforms that allow workers to engage in legal solidarity strikes and legal political strikes that would then empower workers to actually win bigger and broader campaigns that throw sand in the gears of the war machine has to be a priority for not only labour, but the anti-war and peace movements.

So historical context is important for understanding labour’s role in the anti-war and peace movements. The labour movement has been in a 40-year retreat in terms of its power, with neoliberal governments and employers beating back the gains that were made in previous decades, including undermining and constraining workers’ right to strike. So there are serious constraints on unions, and on the rank and file of any union, in terms of engaging in militant action around the arms trade or around the war industry, more generally, that have to be confronted. And part of what we in LAAT want to do is rebuild the power of labour so that workers can push back against the legal constraints and the internal constraints—the ideological constraints within their own unions—so that they are emboldened to take action, and know that they will have the support of the broader labour movement if they do.

Rachel: The response to some of the actions to interrupt weapons transfers that Simon and I have been working on has been, frankly, much bigger than I expected and had an international media pickup. People have forgotten that the military industrial complex—or even Canada’s arms deal with Saudi Arabia—isn’t something that just happens in Trudeau’s office or on the ground in Saudi Arabia, but rather happens on a nondescript suburban street in Hamilton when a trucking company picks up this or that, and it happens in a software office in Ottawa in a computer company that works on a number of things, one of which is the software for a drone product. That workers across Canada who ship supplies, who build electronics, and so on, are also a part of war campaigns and can end their part in this industry at any moment needs to be explored.

It’s fundamentally empowering to realize, on one hand, that what is happening in our own local community is literally killing people in Yemen, but on the other hand, the power that we can have to stand up to it.

What is Canada’s role in the perpetuation of war?

Rachel: The Canadian military is currently involved in a couple dozen missions, with troops on the ground everywhere from the West Bank—where they’re suppressing protests against Israel’s violence—to Ukraine and Latvia where Canada’s deployment of hundreds of troops on the Russian border is about escalating tension and conflict. Not to mention Canada’s missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of these missions can be called “defence” by any stretch of the imagination. As well, Canada’s role in supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia is war profiteering. If you build up an arms industry that relies on increased weapons sales to remain viable and to turn a profit, then you are banking on continued global conflicts.

Interestingly, public surveys repeatedly show that while people are in some ways sympathetic to the military, when you ask what the military should be doing, overwhelmingly people say disaster relief and peacekeeping. But that’s not what military efforts are focused on, and it’s certainly not where military spending is. And when you ask the Canadian public about their priorities on federal spending, the military is always at the bottom. So, the image of Canada as peacekeeping is reflective of what Canadians want; it’s just not what the Canadian military is doing.

Simon: The myth of Canada as peacekeeper no longer has the hold on the public imagination that it once did. When was Canada’s last major peacekeeping mission? Because Canada isn’t actively involved in peacekeeping, or engaged in “humanitarian intervention”—which is actually imperialism by a different name—the true nature of Canada’s role in the world is on display.

It has become increasingly hard for Canada’s ruling class to defend arms exports to Saudi Arabia and defend its support for the State of Israel as it bombs the open-air prison that is Gaza. With the fig leaf of peacekeeping gone, this provides the anti-war movement with a unique opportunity to raise awareness of Canadian foreign policy, Canada’s role in the world, and what a progressive foreign policy might look like. We can push for reforms, such as respecting commitments under the Arms Trade Treaty, signing the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty, a moratorium on the purchase of new fighter jets, and of course ending arms exports to Saudi Arabia. These are not particularly radical demands, but I think there is a growing political space to advance them.

Rachel: I echo what Simon said about peacekeeping being imperialism with a different name. For instance, Canada’s role in supporting the US overthrow of the democratically-elected Aristide government in Haiti was actively portrayed as a peacekeeping mission. In this case, “keeping the peace” meant keeping the people of Haiti from exercising their right to self-determination.

There are, of course, different models of peacekeeping that involve people who are not armed, but trained in things like disaster relief and meeting people’s immediate needs. These forms of intervention are much more aligned with our goals as an organization, but this is not what Canada has been involved in historically or in the present.

How do you choose your targets for campaign pressure? Do you act differently to pressure weapons manufacturers versus governments?

Simon: We distinguish between a primary target, a secondary target who can put pressure on that primary target, and in some cases a tertiary target who can pressure both. Considering we’re an under-resourced grassroots movement built within the labour movement, our first target is not weapons manufacturers, or the government, but unions, because unions have the resources that we don’t have: a wide base of membership, large working budgets, and communications operations that can mount more powerful and coordinated pressure campaigns.

So we encourage unions to add their names and resources to campaigns. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t engage in direct action in partnership with other civil society organizations like WBW to directly pressure businesses and elected officials.

For instance, in London, Ontario we worked with WBW and People for Peace to block the rail lines outside of General Dynamics. And we’ve worked with WBW to blockade a shipping company in Hamilton, which has a contract with General Dynamics to ship light armoured vehicles on flatbed trucks to the port of Baltimore, where they are loaded onto Saudi ships. So we do engage in campaigns targeting weapons manufacturers and businesses in the logistics chain, and we also push unions and labour federations to join our campaigns. And we put pressure on the government. We’ve held actions outside Liberal MP constituency offices as part of the campaign for “Canada Stop Arming Saudi.”

LAAT also engages in a broad spectrum of actions from letter-writing to the Prime Minister, to working with big coalitions of civil society organizations. As a small organization we choose targets strategically to maximize our resources and punch above our weight.

Rachel: At WBW we split our time between organizing using a direct action model and public education campaigns. As an organizer I’m focused on direct action, and our orienting framework is to ask: what are the concrete improvements in people’s lives that we can win, and how can we build people power through our organizing efforts? Other important questions in this work are: how are we skilling up in our movements, how are we, every time, expanding the circle of people who see themselves as agents of change, and when we’re organizing in solidarity with others, how do we make sure we’re in our lane? What we’re working on is our struggle, never speaking for others, but we’re building power here because the military industrial complex has power here.

Concretely, it doesn’t have to look like civil disobedience, but sometimes it makes sense to be literally standing in front of weapons shipments because that’s a space where we have power and where we can actually interrupt the war machine in a concrete way.

Even this week, with our actions that involved painting blood red tank tracks on Liberal constituency offices, and leading up to the CEO of GDLS’ house, and the weapons plant itself, we may not have been able to directly interrupt the flow of weapons to Saudi Arabia, but we did disrupt the Trudeau government’s narrative that Canada has nothing to do with the violence in Yemen. These actions also actively build up people’s willingness to confront power.

At the same time, as an organization we’re not opposed to meeting with politicians, launching petitions, and doing more traditional advocacy work, but we only engage in these forums when it’s strategic and so long as they don’t betray our own values.

What are the connections between anti-war organizing and other movements for climate justice, decolonization, and beyond?

Rachel: Across movements in Canada, there’s an increasing awareness specifically around the connections between climate justice movements and anti-war movements. The Canadian military is an outrageous emitter of greenhouse gasses—by far the largest source of all government emissions—while at the same time exempted from all of Canada’s national greenhouse gas reduction targets. So, many of the targets for greenhouse emissions that Trudeau will say they’re on their way to meeting exclude the federal government’s biggest emitter, which is military and security.

But beyond that, if you look deeper, there’s devastating extraction of materials for war machines, so everything that’s being used on the ground in a war zone started at, for example, a uranium mine or rare earth element mine. Then there’s the toxic mine waste that’s produced at those mine sites, as well as the terrible destruction of ecological systems caused by the war initiatives themselves. So at a very basic level the military is incredibly ecologically destructive, but also the Canadian military is used to attacking those who are taking a stand at the climate front lines, everywhere and—notably—within Canada itself.

I feel like we’re only glimpsing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what military surveillance actually looks like. We know that military surveillance happens in conjunction with police surveillance, which collaborates with immigration and also works with CSIS, which also works directly with fossil fuel companies, and in some cases they’re all sharing information. And so much of it is about criminalizing or causing violence to Indigenous communities.

Usually we’re talking about this in the context of land defence, often at the site of a mine or pipeline. But even in Toronto, just a few weeks ago, watching the way that encampments—whose residents are disproportionately Indigenous people on their own land—were evicted by police, it looked like a paramilitary operation. I’ve seen a lot of Toronto Police operations and this looked like something different: they are increasingly acting in military formations, with militarized tools. It reminded me of watching military operations in Guatemala, which I’ve witnessed in person, the way they were marching in formation with their weapons out; it was very striking.

There are many examples of the ways that Indigenous peoples are attacked and surveilled by the Canadian military; militarized police forces are enacting terrible violence from coast to coast against racialized communities, especially when they stand up to resource extraction or when they stand for climate justice. In 2016 natural resources minister Jim Carr said that the military might be deployed to stop protests against the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline—which is set to cross Secwepemc territory without consent. So he was straight up threatening that the Canadian military would be used to force sovereign Indigenous nations—at the barrel of a gun—to allow a pipeline to take over their territory. Police have continued to enact that violence and that colonization. I think it was really notable that the military was threatened in that way domestically, and reflective of the role it plays overseas. For climate movements to succeed, we need to get beyond just the conversation of the military as a direct barrier because of its emissions, but talk about it in terms of the ways that it is used to suppress dissent and defend the fossil fuel industry at all costs. *

How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It’s a bold title. A title that sells books, certainly. And while (spoiler alert) we are not taught how to blow up a pipeline in this 160-page book, Andreas Malm does have some things to say that many climate activists might find explosive.

A Swedish eco-socialist, activist, and historian of our collective trajectory toward ecological collapse, Malm is perhaps best known for writing two weighty historical books called Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. In an interview for the LA Review of Books, Malm describes how, after the summer of 2018, when Europe was swept with wave after wave of unprecedented extreme weather, he told his publisher: “I can’t really do this historical stuff any longer.” 1 He felt he needed to write something about right now, something that addressed the extreme emergency of the present moment. Enter: How to Blow up a Pipeline, a compact treatise on the climate movement’s fetishization of pacifism in the face of looming existential threat, and a plea to explore more of our options.

Malm is a powerful storyteller. Though he is largely an academic now, he has a long history of involvement in direct action protesting fossil fuel extraction. Throughout this book, he paints a moving picture of many vibrant mass interventions he has been right in the middle of, from mobilizations outside the first COP summit in 1995, to Extinction Rebellion actions in his hometown of Malmö, to numerous action encampments run by the German climate movement Ende Gelände. While many of the moments he illustrates are clearly cherished memories of his personal history as an activist, Malm’s dissatisfaction is palpable. Something is missing, and he’s ready to get to the bottom of it.

Confronting Lanchester’s Paradox

In 2007, journalist John Lanchester wrote an essay in the London Review of Books called “Warmer, Warmer.” The opening paragraph reads:

It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds at a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each, every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? 2

Malm calls this “Lanchester’s paradox,” which can be summarized as follows: despite the magnitude of what’s at stake, the ubiquity of potential targets, the facility with which acts like this could be carried out, and the widespread knowledge of the problem, why have climate activists not yet turned to sabotage?

To answer this question, Malm explores how the contemporary climate justice movement came to be rigidly committed to the principles of strategic pacifism, which is the belief that transformative wins can only happen when activists commit to one central “action consensus”: that we will commit no violence of any kind, including damaging machines or infrastructure. Strategic pacifism differs from moral pacifism: the latter represents the belief that violence is wrong while the former argues that nonviolence wins.

Malm concedes that this historic commitment to non-violence in the climate justice world has many tactical advantages, both when it comes to recruitment and media representation. Indeed, as it relates to movement-building on a mass scale, there is a strong argument to be made for non-violence: it is the most accessible to the largest number of people. But, he asks: “Can we be sure that [this approach] will suffice against this enemy?” (24). In other words, while non-violence may be a necessary component of a good climate justice strategy, should it be the only component? Years down the road, when we look back at the current wave of climate activism, will we truly be able to say that we’d done all we could?

There are other options, Malm argues. He walks us through a brief historical survey to demonstrate that the idea that “only peaceful activists win” is patently false and ahistorical. “Strategic pacifism,” he says, “is sanitised history, bereft of realistic appraisals of what has happened and what hasn’t, what has worked and what has gone wrong: it is a guide of scant use for a movement with mighty obstacles” (61). He offers many examples—the abolition of slavery and the US civil rights movement, the suffragette movement, the end of apartheid in South Africa—where the wins were won through strategic collaboration between a nonviolent mass movement and a more confrontational radical flank.

Other reviews claim that Malm is saying we should turn away from nonviolent struggle entirely, that only the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure via a vanguardist sub-movement will solve the problem of climate change. 3 I feel that this is a misrepresentation of his work. Malm is not advocating that we halt or even de-prioritize peaceful mass mobilization. This mode, he says, should always (where possible) be our first resort, because “the festive atmosphere in a square taken over by protesters has more to speak for it and less to scare people away than a mayhem of stone-throwing” (115). But Malm asks: shouldn’t a peaceful mass mobilization have “appendages”? Essentially, he is calling for a diversity of tactics. He is calling for us to be suspicious of tactical conformity.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline revolves around two central questions: 1) Does the climate justice movement possess a radical flank? and 2) Is the “disruptive commotion” that is needed to alter the course of climate change possible without one? That is, can we win without sabotage? From Malm’s perspective, the answer to both questions is no. No, there is not yet a radical flank, and no, we can’t win without one. I’m not a climate activist—my home is in the mining justice movement, which is adjacent but distinct—so I can’t speak to his assessment of whether there is militant activism in the climate movement. But a few things in Malm’s analysis stood out to me as important to anti-capitalist and environmental justice movements more broadly.

Whose Infrastructure?

One of the most evocative stories that Malm tells is about a 2007 project of small-scale targeted disarmament in Östermalm, a wealthy neighbourhood in Stockholm, Sweden. In the middle of the night, for weeks, a group of activists would quietly and systematically render up to 200 SUVs unusable by releasing the air from their tires. Activists left leaflets on the SUV windshields saying: “We have deflated one or more of the tyres on your SUV. Don’t take it personally. It’s your SUV we dislike.” Members of this night-time brigade shared knowledge widely of how exactly to deflate an SUV’s tires without risking the safety of human beings, as a way of mobilizing others to the project. Wealthy people across Stockholm fumed. One counterforce blog popped up, threatening to deflate the lungs of these activists, stating: “The air in my tyres is private property—deflation is an assault on democracy” (83). Sales of Volvo SUVs dropped by 27% in the second half of 2007, when they had been steadily rising in the first half of the year. Lanchester would have been proud.

In telling this story, Malm begins to lay out some thoughts on what we must consider in introducing sabotage to the climate movement’s activist toolkit. Sabotage doesn’t have to be literally explosive. It “can be done softly, even gingerly” (79). What matters most is the choice of target. Malm argues that, for some reason, targeting the physical infrastructure of the rich is an underexplored strategy. Many critiques have been made against the liberal effort to save the world by “greening” the consumption practices of everyday people. But he points to a distinction made by Henry Shue between luxury and subsistence emissions. Poor people generate subsistence emissions because no other alternative exists. Luxury emissions, such as those created by yachts, private planes, multiple mansions, helicopters, and other such extravagances, are generated for no reason other than to flaunt wealth and create ease for the rich on the backs of the poor. Malm understands why activists might be hesitant to engage in property destruction when it comes to infrastructure that, when damaged, could seriously impact the lives of the working class. But, seriously: why has nobody started destroying luxury yachts?

Whose Despair? Whose Violence?

Malm concludes his book with a short chapter on the present trend of “climate fatalism,” wherein some—most publicly, Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen—maintain that we are past the point of no return when it comes to climate change, and that we should simply accept our fate. While slightly disconnected thematically from the rest of the book, I found this chapter quite moving. In it, Malm examines the privileged despair of bourgeois thinkers who realize that “they are the problem,” feel bad, and then feel better by deciding there is nothing to be done. He then contrasts this with the particular kind of vanguardist nihilism displayed in works like Deep Green Resistance, which rejects the possibility of mobilizing the masses around ecological issues and encourages people to stop trying, instead focusing on building small groups of “reliable” militants. We must go down neither of these paths, Malm argues. While the possibility of winning at a mass scale is by no means certain, we must hold on to the idea that it is possible.

As an ageing millennial who has been entangled in social movements since I was just a little older than many of the so-called Thunberg generation, climate despair hits me a little differently than I imagine it might for those just awakening to the injustices of our time. I’ve done my share of reckoning with the end of the world as we know it. Given what I know about how capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism work, it’s no surprise to me that the ruling class has fought tooth and nail against every climate change prevention measure that could potentially re-configure the current balance of power and wealth. It’s no surprise to me that we haven’t won yet.

What does keep me up at night, however, is the idea of activists giving up. I hate the idea that we might collectively resign ourselves to the fact of our sure demise before we exhaust all possible strategies. Lanchester’s paradox grips me, just as it does Malm. I, too, would like to know what is stopping us from pursuing tactics outside of strategic pacifism when there are so many options available to us. I, too, want to know: will the fetishization of nonviolence be the end of us?

This question of “why” is ultimately where I think How to Blow Up a Pipeline falls short in its analysis. While Malm does a beautiful job of illustrating the fact of Lanchester’s paradox, and the tactical argument for a radical flank in the climate justice movement, I wish he had spent more time exploring why things are the way they are in our environmental justice movements today. We are back to the question of luxury yachts, and why they haven’t been blown up yet. What is blocking us from militancy? What is keeping us stuck in strategic pacifism?

Malm does nod to a few theories. Can we simply blame things on the widespread demise of revolutionary politics? Is it possible that Americans, specifically, are less likely to riot than the French because the United States is more enveloped by capitalism and thus more organized by an already-violent social formation? Or is it simply that most successful social movements in recent history stemmed from a feeling of ¡Ya basta!, or “enough is enough”? Can we generate the collective militancy we need around a problem that isn’t yet as bad as it will eventually be?

It may be that any mass movement for climate justice will err on the side of centrism due to the range of people involved. If this is the case, then the question of a radical flank is both the explanation and the solution. Fundamentally, the issue here is one of class consciousness. The problem is a general unwillingness to recognize the extremely wealthy as the enemy. Malm says: “It is the rich that drive the emergency, and a climate movement that does not want to eat the rich, with all the hunger of those who struggle to put food on the table, will never hit home” (127). In this equation, the radical flank that Malm argues we need right now is simply “those who dare to speak the name of the enemy” (128). If this is the case, then I don’t need to hear Jonathan Franzen’s take on climate change. Jonathan Franzen is not on my side.

While I am not intimately familiar with the inner workings of the climate justice movement, I have a feeling that Malm is probably missing some activism in his survey of what is out there. While he takes a global view on the impacts of climate change, and on the legacy of militant activism from which we should learn, most of the climate organizing that he covers is European and North American. This is not the full picture. We can also take support from existing work on the question of violence, specifically the question of how violence is defined, by whom, and to what end, which has a long history led by thinkers like Fanon, Mbembe, Gelderloos, Agamben, and others. Malm doesn’t really delve into this conversation, which was an understandable sidestep if the ultimate goal was a short book like this one. But it seems to me that if the problem of strategic pacifism in the climate justice movement is driven by a refusal to acknowledge structural antagonisms, along class lines but also imperial and racial ones, then it’s important to question the definition of violence itself, and this has been done before.

The Extinction Rebellion Action Consensus states that “non-violence is essential” to their campaign but acknowledges that “using non-violence is a privilege that is not available to everybody.” 4 Malm says: “Pacifism has perhaps never existed as a real thing. What exists is the ability, or not, to distinguish between forms of violence” (128).

What will help us get to these understandings of violence? It’s hard for me to believe that the only thing stopping people from turning to sabotage is the absence of a well-written book with a provocative title and a compelling argument. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a beautifully painted portrait of a problem, but it doesn’t offer us a way out. Something is blocking us from escalating our tactics, and until we figure out what that is, we will remain married to a theory of change that limits us in profound ways. The mainstream climate justice movement needs to learn discernment. It needs to learn to tell the difference between the violence of individuals and the violence of the state, of the wealthy, and of corporations. It must abandon its conflation of property damage with violence against living beings. The climate movement needs to decide: whose violence matters more to us, and what is violence, anyway? Then, perhaps, we can begin to talk about what to do with those luxury yachts. *

With climate and environmental movements still dominated by white activists and non-profit staff, there has been a growing movement of Indigenous-centred organizing addressing climate change, fighting pipelines, and engaging in militant forms of direct action. While mainstream environmental movements remain centred on a single-based issue, Indigenous organizing has focused on decolonization, land back, and sovereignty with the struggle to fight climate change and fight for a just transition.

Exploring the role of white and non-Indigenous settlers in building power and support, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger offers insight into the current struggles against environmental devastation.

This interview took place on October 17, 2021, and was conducted by Lana Goldberg. Many thanks to Amelia Spedaliere for transcribing the interview.

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, which is located in the Treaty 8 territory of Northern Alberta in Canada. She is Dënesųłiné, which names the sub-Arctic and Arctic people, and Treaty 8 is the largest contiguous treaty area in the country. She is currently the Executive Director and co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action, Canada’s only Indigenous-led climate justice organization, which was founded in 2015. She currently lives in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan, Treaty 6 territory, also known as Edmonton, Alberta. She has two children, two dogs, and two birds.

We crossed paths a number of years ago around 2013 when you were focused on your anti-tar sands work on behalf of your community and I was organizing against the Line 9 tar sands pipeline in Ontario. Since then, you’ve transitioned into working at Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) where you are now Executive Director. Can you tell me a little bit about the development of ICA?

I was doing a lot of work on tar sands issues because the tar sands continues to be the largest industrial project on the planet, and it occurs on my family’s traditional territory. I have a background in treaty land entitlement and specific land claims research and I was taking a course in Greenland on Indigenous people and international economic systems, where I studied the abrogation of Indigenous rights within the international system using the tar sands as an example. I remember feeling very upset about the lack of action around how, basically, they are killing us, the land, and the animals. Our people are dying. I felt I had to do something, to draw awareness around these issues to help my family and community.

So I took on the role of getting the word out about the tar sands and what was happening in the region. It was not just about the environmental impact, but also Indigenous rights. That’s when I started getting involved with the environmental movement, working alongside organizations like the Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Forest Ethics (now known as STAND), with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), and Honour the Earth. IEN and Honour the Earth were the only Indigenous environmental groups out there at the time. And they were the most under-resourced. These Indigenous groups were not only trying to tackle greenhouse gases, but using a justice framework to talk about environmental injustice. They were talking about human rights, Indigenous rights, treaty agreements, and so on. When I started doing this work, Indigenous peoples and Indigenous rights were very tokenistic in the environmental scene. Indigenous people were used to putting a human face to the story as opposed to addressing systemic issues. It was a way to break peoples’ hearts, but not actually support Indigenous groups to lead these struggles with the same type of resources that other organizations had.

I started working directly for my First Nation and began to understand the challenges of what it means for a community as a whole to participate in environmental movements. When I took on this role, I wasn’t just getting requests to support my community, I was getting requests to support other Indigenous communities dealing with the same issue. In consultation with other Indigenous activists, one of the things that really came to light is that there was no organization like IEN in Canada, supporting the broader Indigenous movements in the country in the same way that IEN was in the United States. And IEN has tried to work in Canada, but they struggled without having a central office and also the roots of their organization are rooted in the American political context.

The few of us that were very public spokespeople were also really tired. And we realized there needed to be a way to build a movement of Indigenous leaders. And that meant that we had to really remove ourselves from the white environmental-industrial ENGO [environmental non-governmental organization] complex and we needed to start by working with the community. And what does that look like? That means holding and bringing our folks together—for ourselves, by ourselves—to build a greater network and movement of individuals. In 2015, when there was a growing international movement to address the global climate crisis, we got this project off the ground. There was an urgency because we were getting so many demands and requests to organize around Canada’s new climate policies and provincial climate policies. We had to say to government agencies, “You don’t speak for all Indigenous peoples and you are not upholding your fiduciary obligations to consult and get the consent of all of our communities in these policies that are being developed. We need our people to be looked at as experts.” Often the response would be, “Well, we don’t know who to talk to.”

No one was talking to our communities. Not the ENGOs, not the federal government, not the provincial governments. They were only talking to environmental organizations when it came to climate policies and environmental policies, and the few voices of Indigenous communities that were loud enough to get through the colonial regulatory system. Think of the communities in the tar sands zones: only if you are deeply impacted—if you’re dying—do they care about including you within the development of policies that deeply affect the communities.

We held our inaugural meeting in January of 2016 in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan, or Edmonton, and we brought together about 150 Indigenous peoples from across the country. And we had presenters like Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Winona LaDuke, Tom Goldtooth, Art Manuel, and Ellen Gabriel: amazing speakers to talk about everything from Indigenous governance and policy-making to climate policies and regulations at the provincial, national, and international levels; speakers to emphasize that Indigenous rights and communities are integral and important to developing climate policy not just for our own communities, but for the country and the world at large.

After we left that meeting, we thought we would walk away with some version of a Declaration of Canadian Indigenous Leadership on Climate. But we were really humbled by attendees who said, “If you ask us to sign on to this declaration, you’re going to be no different than these ENGOs. The reality is we want time and we need free, prior, informed consent.” Prior informed consent was a big piece of the struggle because we were obviously giving resources to communities for free, but the demand for prior information was really critical to these communities. Attendees also said, “We need more workshops, more training, and more resources to understand the depth of how climate policy intersects with our rights. We need to understand where we should be stepping up and how we should be speaking up. Who is telling our young people, who is telling those in chief and council, how are we building a network of people to understand things, who’s advocating for us at the national levels, is it just the IPOs [International Political Organizations]?”

That first meeting, we took a step back and we said, “Ok. We need more than just gathering spaces, we need a social movement vehicle and a mechanism to support this movement of individuals to drive this forward.” We wanted a change so that governments could see the folks in Red Earth Shoal Lake, which is on the border of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, a community that organizes culture camps in their amazing Woodland Cree language. Imagine if we valued this cultural work as part of critical infrastructure to climate policy and climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. What if we looked at the Guardians Program as a necessary component to developing conservation methodologies to meet the sustainable development goals?

Not only that, but what if our communities saw themselves in these climate policies and they didn’t have to be dying, disenfranchised, and impoverished, but they became an empowering story of the power of our communities as opposed to the injustices that we had. We wanted to move away from this frame of poverty porn to the empowerment of our communities. This really was where we focused on this idea of “let’s bring together a steering committee of Indigenous leaders, let’s come together, let’s figure out what this organization could do.”

In January of 2017, we had our inaugural steering committee meeting and brought together some incredible folks in Winnipeg where we discussed how to build resources through a climate change toolkit program and how we can amplify Indigenous climate solutions. We wanted to build a network and host an annual gathering and importantly, build on a framework of sovereignty and self-determination. ICA has no interest in being in meetings with government agencies; what we do have an interest in doing is holding the door open for our communities to enter into those spaces and giving them the resources, skills, and knowledge, that allow them to be powerful, seen, and impossible to be ignored.

In 2017, I quit my job and said, “Ok, I guess I’m going to do this.” The national steering committee asked me to step into the role of Executive Director and for the last five years, I have been working to build up ICA’s team, build the infrastructure, and try to meet that vision and mission that was handed down to us by the steering committee. And this whole project is community-led: it’s not my vision, it’s the vision of our people.

That’s a huge accomplishment to have created the first Indigenous-led climate organization in Canada. It’s been amazing to witness its growth and prominence in the environmental justice scene. You mentioned the problems you saw with the traditional NGOs and I agree that the environmental and climate movements have historically been liberal and very white. They seem to be making more of an effort these days—perhaps because of criticisms that have been mounted—to address these issues. What are your thoughts on them now? And how do you navigate working with them?

I don’t want to say that they are our enemies, because they’re not. The environmental movement isn’t our enemy, but they aren’t our co-conspirators either. That’s the reality. Some of them are our allies and some of them have been—historically and presently—harmful to Indigenous rights movements. Have there been improvements over the last decade? Absolutely. Do I think that it’s because of their desire to change? No. I think the reality is that the Black and Indigenous rights movement, and the people of colour movement have become undeniable and impossible to ignore. White supremacy and colonization are being deeply challenged systemically, and globally, but many organizations haven’t taken heed of the advice, which is that priviledged people need to step back and we need to redistribute resources.

This is where I see failures to address these issues: traditional ENGOs are not actually stepping back, they are just absorbing BIPOC movements. What they’re doing is hiring all these Black and Indigenous and marginalized folks to join their teams to help them build their programming for these groups. But it’s still a white board, it’s still a white organization with deep white supremacist, colonial roots and it doesn’t serve to redistribute resources and power to the racialized groups that have been doing this work on their own. It doesn’t give credence and credibility to these groups that do it independently, that practice self-sovereignty from a self-determined place. NGOs have been waving the Black Lives Matter flag and, when Black Lives Matter says, “Resource us here,” they’re like, “Oh, we’d so love to do that, but you’d be better off if you just joined us and if we just absorbed you into our movement.” The same thing is happening with the Indigenous rights movement. It is the brain drain that we talk about in the Indigenous communities; you get your credentials but you don’t become a teacher in your community, you go teach in the cities because they have Indigenous staffing quotas. And we’re not actually keeping our people in our communities, in our movements, because these other groups are trying to suck them up to justify their work, to justify that they are down for the cause, that support decolonial frameworks. If they were truly for decolonization and the redistribution of access to resources—and I’m not just talking about just wealth, I’m talking about access to decision-making powers—then they would learn to step back and support groups to do it independent of them.

Could you talk more about the role of capitalism and colonialism in the climate crisis: how they intersect and how they are driving destruction?

Colonialism, capitalism, and extractivism have deep roots in white supremacy and are all at the root cause of climate change. It was a way to justify the suppression of other folks based on the colour of their skin, particularly in the Americas, through the stolen labour of African folks and the exploitation, murder, and genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This was all predicated on systems of deep white supremacy, colonization, and extractivism, whether it was the extraction of human bodies from Africa or the extraction of goods that were shipped back to Europe to build the colonizer’s economy, and then forced upon the original inhabitants or the Indigenous peoples here. This is all a part of the same structures that led us to this great imbalance that we are in now.

Climate change has happened largely because of this separation and this imbalance of humanity from the earth, from the land. And the deep values of Indigenous communities—our languages, culture, food systems, entire identities—are totally enmeshed with the places in which we come from. I am K’ai Taile Dënesųłiné which means “people of the willow, people of the land.” The Chief of my nation once said, in reference to the expansion of the tar sands, “If they destroy the Athabasca Delta and then the entire Delta, who are we?” We are K’ai Taile, which means people of the willow, and the willow is a representation of the Delta. If they destroy that, then who are we? That is how deeply ingrained we are. We’ve had meetings in our communities to talk about relocation, and people say, “We can’t move anywhere else. This is who we are, this is where we come from. If we move somewhere else, then who are we? We’re no longer K’ai Taile.” And so when you think of these deep value systems that many Indigenous peoples have, when you have that deep relationship with land and knowledge where you don’t take too much—you leave berries for the bears, you never shoot a cow moose during mating season—there are so many rules that are built upon relationship with the natural world. Through the relationships, like the kinships that we have with plants and animals and river systems, to mountains, to valleys, to all of the entirety of ecosystems are completely interdependent. When you impose a structure of colonization and extraction, taking without that built-in reciprocity, it creates an imbalance.

When we began visiting communities and talking about climate change within the scientific framework for example—GHGs [greenhouse gases] being out of balance, or the water table—we would ask the community when they first began to notice climate change. A lot of the communities appreciated the scientific knowledge of climate change, but the Elders in these meetings would describe how the berry season has been different, or they would say that they don’t see moose visiting the lands, or that they have seen grizzly bears for the first time. It wasn’t just some random occurrence: this was about global climate change! Elders would talk about the beginning of climate change “when the white man came.”

That is when the narratives of climate changed for us. As a team, we wanted to articulate the reality that colonization caused climate change for the peoples of the Americas. It had to do with imbalance: imbalance caused by forced disconnection from our lands, when colonizers ripped our children out of our communities and out of their homes, to try to assimilate us, to rip our languages out of our mouths, the mouths of our children, to force us into economic systems like capitalism. That is when the climate changed for us, that is when the disruption began.

This is a powerful articulation because at the same time that we talk about colonization, our communities are advocating for the languages that were stolen, for those land practices that colonizers tried to demonize. Our people are standing on the front lines to stop pipelines, to stop mega hydro dams, to stop fracking, to stop tar sands, to stop all of the destruction because we are trying to restore that balance.

To counter the impact of colonization, capitalism, extractivism, and white supremacy, Indigenous peoples’ movements have to restore our balance and our relationships with the natural world. In those struggles, we have held the knowledge for thousands of years that allowed us to safeguard 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. We cannot tackle the climate crisis simply from an accounting of carbon in the atmosphere. We have to address the root causes of climate change and centre Indigenous-led solutions grounded in our value systems.

Let’s get into that. We’ve seen the demand for land back figure prominently in grassroots Indigenous organizing in the last few years. What does land back mean to you and how do we move forward as a country to address the ongoing colonialism?

Land back resonates with our communities because it’s the root. Every community has an association with the land, the place where we are. I think there’s a huge language barrier in articulation because it’s more than a spoken language barrier, it’s a deeper, spiritual language barrier. Allow me to tell another story. I remember my dad teaching me how to track animals. We were walking between trees through the snowand I kept asking my dad a million questions. Then he turned to me and said, “SHH! LISTEN!” I asked, “Listen to what?” and he said, “Shhh! Just listen!” So I stopped and listened. Listened to the land, to the way that the wind blew through the trees. This is not a language from another person, it’s the language of the land. Unless you are taught to listen like that, there is no way to understand.

And so when we talk about land back, it’s not about owning the land, it’s about land back. The land tells you things if you listen to it. It’s about the articulation and the power that land has in changing the ways in which we are in this world. Land needs to be restored for those who can hear it, those who understand these languages. Indigenous peoples are the ones who can provide ways to manage lands sustainably. We have relationships with the land that can move us forward in reciprocity and symbiosis.

So land back is literally land back. It is about farmers and landowners giving the land back, but it’s much deeper than that. It’s about deconstructing systems that tried to take away our language and the relationship we had with the land. It’s water back. It’s our schools back. It’s our health system back. It is everything back. But it does start with the land. It starts with restoring the relationships and languages that we have lost at the hands of colonization. From a land back perspective, it’s about our abilities to push forward our systems of governance, about deciding what’s best for our communities, our river systems, our water systems, our moose, our bison, our caribou, our salmon, our frogs, whatever the relationships we have in our ecosystems.

Land back is not for anyone, it’s for those that can hear the language of the land. It’s about ensuring these systems exist so that our communities can begin healing, so that our healers and our leaders can help mend those wounds of trauma because so many of us have been forced to live in cities because of capitalism and colonization. Land back provides spaces that are safe from the systems of capitalism and colonization. This allows us to go back to places where we can connect with nature. It gives us spaces of our own to govern and manage with our own decision-making processes.

There are experiments where Indigenous folks are working with landowners and farmers, they’re not giving the land back wholly but they’re building the steps to allow Indigenous peoples to freely utilize their lands and territories for hunting, fishing, and trapping purposes, to honour the treaties. This is a really smart step towards land back. But in a more radical sense, land back is about reclamation. That’s what we’re seeing in Wet’suwet’en and other strong frontline movements. There is not one proper way to do this: it might be done through cooperation or force. We need to have humility and know that we don’t have the answers to everything and also that there is not one pan-Indigenous framework that’s going to work for every community. There are close to 750 different Indigenous communities in Canada, with over 635 First Nations, 50 Inuit settlements, and a number of disputed Métis settlements. We’re talking about many individuals, unique communities with their own identities, I have talked about mine, ts’ékui Dënesųłiné, just think of that times 750 in this country. And each community has their own issues and challenges that are unique to their ecosystems, biomes, political and economic infrastructures, and all of the other pieces that play a part in the socio-economic impacts of colonization. And so each community is going to have a different articulation of what it means to have land back, what it means to decolonize, what it means to fight back, and what is necessary to move forward.

A recent report from IEN revealed that Indigenous resistance staved off 25 percent of US and Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. This is quite significant and of course a lot of this is being done through direct action. When considering direct action, what is the practical way forward to elevate land back in order to ensure that Indigenous communities have sovereignty over their own land and decision-making? How do we get there?

Direct action is an incredibly important aspect of the struggle because colonial structures have been in place for so long, particularly with regard to the economic systems and regulatory permitting systems: structures that were all created long before Indigenous people were even granted the rights to legal counsel. For example, the Natural Resources Transfer Acts (NRTA) is a system that the colonial government of Canada gave to the provinces to determine how the lands or the natural resources would be utilized and how their economies would be built in each province. No Indigenous person had anything to do with the NRTAs. And so there was a clear violation of treaties from the very beginning.

There is a need for direct action because colonial governments have given corporations precedence over Indigenous rights—whether it’s a real estate owner, or a pipeline, or a mega hydro dam, or a federally-owned pipeline. Canada is violating human rights and the rights of Indigenous communities by not upholding and adhering to the treaties and the foundations of this country and it requires us to challenge those legal structures. Direct action or civil disobedience is when you are actively disobeying the laws. But whose laws are we disobeying? That’s the question we have to ask ourselves because the biggest form of “civil disobedience” came from the British Crown when they arrived and declared these lands their colony. They arrived and disobeyed the laws and governance that had been here for thousands of years.

As we fight against systems of colonization, civil disobedience plays an important role, but we’re not being disobedient, we’re not breaking laws: We are upholding our own laws. Whose laws are broken when Indigenous peoples fight back? It is colonial law that has broken Indigenous laws and governance systems in the first place. We have to, as a society, deconstruct the existing legal systems and start to decolonize our frameworks, our minds, and the way that we see things. Even within the context of climate solutions, we have become so narrow in our focus that they are only considered viable if they also support the capitalist economy. It’s become an economic discussion as opposed to an actual environmental discussion.

We have to challenge this economic determinism in our movements because it is a fabrication of the system of colonization that has no place on this planet. I’m an anti-capitalist. And that means we have to reframe the discussion. If we’re not beholden to these systems of capitalism, what are we beholden to? What laws and governance systems do we we want for our people, for our communities, for the land, for the relationships that we have? How do we move forward? Who are the leaders? Who are the ones guiding and holding those values in the community? Because we can’t be in a community with people unless we all hold those same values, and these systems must be in place to more forward.

There are important questions people need to ask themselves to understand power and their place within it. Where is your power? What is your privilege? What do you have access to? How can you deconstruct your own systems? How do you decolonize that? How do you redistribute your power and privilege? How can you learn when to step back, and when to step forward? We live in a white supremacist society and white revolutionaries need to learn how to use their priviledge in a co-conspirating way with communities and allies.

If you are an ally and you are a non-Indigenous person in this movement, do not come forward with the ways that you think land back should be done. It is not your place to determine what is to be done. That’s why I say check your privilege, because a lot of white allies have a vision of how to move forward and some communities aren’t ready. Some communities haven’t done the healing that they need to do. Some communities need resources to heal so they have leaders that are healthy in their mind, body, and spirit, so that we can build that relationship with our languages, with our culture. This requires patience. We have to allow communities to determine what’s best for them and when it’s best for them. We have to meet them where they’re at. And so while we want to rush to the finish line and be like, “Yes! Land back for everybody!” some communities might not want that right now. We have to be careful about not forcing our radical ideologies on other folks. We have to work with the communities, meet them where they’re at, and trust their processes as they move forward.

Lastly, we need to support things that don’t necessarily seem like they’re part of the equation. For example, when we’ve held gatherings with Indigenous folks, sometimes they have unusual requests like a SIM card so they can stay in touch with their family. You’ve got to think about the lived realities of these communities and you need to listen and be prepared to meet those needs. You cannot have a preconceived notion of what those particular needs might be. There might be needs that you’ve never thought of before and you need to be willing to shift and meet the needs of communities as they move and transition into being the sovereign, autonomous nations.

Do you agree with the politics of a just transition, especially given that non-Indigenous workers are pitted against Indigenous workers? What is the role of the government in the development of a just transition? How do we build a working-class, Indigenous-led climate justice movement that can lead us to some sort of structural transition so that we can live in a way that respects Indigenous rights and people can have jobs that are not destructive?

The anti-capitalist in me says it’s not going to be possible within the confines of colonial-capitalism, but the reality is we need a just transition. We need to advocate for clean jobs, although defining “clean” jobs is problematic. Often, when we think about clean jobs, we think of solar panels, wind farms, and even clean coal. Ugh. The reality is that Indigenous communities have been engaged in clean economies for thousands of years but this isn’t valued in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, unless there is a return on investment, unless you can commodify and accumulate wealth away from the masses, then it is not considered viable. We have to challenge what a just transition looks like and what it upholds. Are we upholding the status quo of predatory capitalism? Or are we moving towards an economic system that redistributes wealth and creates a just system, and not simply a green one.

I think that Indigenous communities and those that have been on the front lines of environmental racism should benefit the most from these transitions. They should be leading them. If your community has been the site of a toxic waste dump, as those industries shift, you deserve reparations. The profits must go back to the impacted communities, and the people, not the corporations, should be leading the transition.

Phasing out fossil fuels is part of the just transition dialogue. We’ve got to get ourselves off of fossil fuels. It’s so paramount at this point, not just for the environment, but from a human rights and an Indigenous rights perspective.

The federal government is also talking about a “just transition,” but they aren’t using the foundations of a justice framework. And you can’t have true justice being given from a colonial system that was actually created to oppress others. A just transition cannot be led by the oppressor. A just transition can only be driven by the grassroots and those communities that have been disenfranchised and oppressed. If we allow the federal government to lead a just transition we are at risk of them replicating those same systems of harm. We have to allow Indigenous peoples and oppressed peoples to define what those systems of transition really are. We also have to broaden our scope of what viable economies are by looking beyond the present, to what existed for centuries before colonization. Once we’re able to undo the legacies of colonialism, we can start to actually move towards a just transition. *

Has queer theory run out of steam? Amid global rising fascism, planetary refugee crises, and crumbling US empire, queer theory is struggling to find a point of intervention in global issues because its first emergence was in 1990s North American anglophone academia. Prominent queer theorists David Eng and Jasbir Puar recently edited a collection foregrounding the future of queer theory: the reconnection between queer theory, materialism, and Marxisms. 1 Their point is well-taken, but the call for reconsidering Marxisms is not a new venture. Queer Marxist critiques of post-structuralism and post-modernism have always haunted queer theory, operating under the shadow of the queer theory proper that deconstructs everything. 2 This systematic neglect of the body of work on queer Marxisms within queer theory signifies a much larger problem, one that Bogdan Popa is able to clearly pinpoint in their new book De-centering Queer Theory.

The Argument

By “decentering,” Popa suggests that queer theory is just one of many approaches to sexuality. It emerged out of US academia and bears the legacies of Cold War anti-communism. Therefore, if we look elsewhere, beyond the Western canon, we might find different understandings of gender and sexuality.

This book is of high relevance to scholars and activists interested in post-socialist transitions and anti-gender, anti-queer ideology in Eastern Europe, as well as students of film. As a Romanian scholar, Popa engages with anthropologists of post-socialism such as Katherine Verdery and Christina Klein as well as an archive of Romanian socialist films. The second part of this book especially draws on film theory, aesthetic theory, and cultural criticism. This book challenges queer theory from the standpoint of post-socialist Eastern Europe and proposes an alternative to a post-structural concept of gender, body, and sexuality. As someone who is queer and spends most of their time living in another formally socialist country, this book grabbed my attention immediately.

Cold War Gender and After

In the first four chapters of De-centering Queer Theory Popa contests that anti-communist sentiments are built into social constructivist understandings of gender and its descendant, queer theory. This anti-communist sentiment sees socialist people as sexually patriarchal and inherently repressed; such an understanding is the product of Cold War knowledge formation in the US academic and discursive landscape.

To expand on this point, Popa juxtaposes a Marxist understanding of gender with a Cold War understanding of gender from the 1950s until the 1980s. Popa argues that Cold War theories of gender derive, in part, from the work of John Money. For Money, gender is a marker of individual independence through which intersex people get to choose their destinies (78). Money argues that one’s sociocultural condition impedes one’s understanding of sex (76). Popa critiques this social constructivist understanding because it reduces liberation to one’s ability to achieve a gender and sexual orientation against social-cultural barriers (76). We see in our daily life how the “coming out” narrative exemplifies such reduction. That is, queer liberation becomes one’s ability to announce one’s sexuality and gender identity against social norms, not as a collective struggle against interlocking structures of power.

These critiques of John Money are not new. Trans scholar Susan Stryker has voiced similar concerns that gender is a Cold War era social scientific technology to correct, shape, and control bodies. 3 Feminist scholar Jasmine Repo has also proposed that gender is a biopolitical tool for neoliberal governance, instead of a category through which we mobilize our liberation. 4 We can also see how social constructivist understandings of gender and identities influence LGBTQ+ movements: we have “true selves” waiting to be discovered against social norms, and, therefore, the discovery is transgressive. While this might be the experience of many queer people, including myself, such narratives do not question if the “true self” is already the product of neoliberal power. That is, the various identities we embody and achieve against social norms are no more “true.” Identities are one of many frameworks that teach us how to think about the self and society, a framework already embedded in the histories of Cold War social science knowledge production.

Popa’s argument in the first part of the book, however, is innovative in two ways. First, they situate John Money’s Cold War gender within the emergence of the social constructivist tradition in US academia. This tradition arose from the post-World War II US rivalry with the Soviet Union. The purpose of social constructivism is to offer something that challenges and competes with a Marxist understanding of the body and sexuality. Socially constructed identities replace Marxist social processes such as class struggle, and individuals achieving their identities substitute for the collective and vanguard role of the proletariat.

In Eastern Europe, however, a different theory of the body was at play during this Cold War rivalry. In this theory, what Popa calls “productivism,” political bodies in socialism were neither individual territories of freedom nor subjectivities confronting the pressures of a particular ideology. Rather, productivist bodies are de-gendered, producing the social and its futures, unlike social constructivism that puts emphasis on the social as constructing a given body and personality (47). One might see some similarities between productive bodies and performative theory. Performativity focuses on how, through our everyday acts, we can subvert the socially-imposed norm. But for Popa, this subversion is not an individual move toward the “true self.” Rather, it should be a collective, de-subjected, and productivist process. Popa’s conception is potentially useful for social movement building because it invites us to organize toward a future where the framework to understand our bodily differences is not identity. Bodies do not achieve individual freedom from the existing society, but accomplish liberation by actively building a new society. However, Popa stops short of telling us how. I can only speculate that, given how profoundly identity politics have structured our sense of difference, Popa is not able to propose a concrete alternative.

Their innovative approach shines through in chapter four when Popa specifically engages with queer theory. While queer theory tries to destabilize social constructivism and offer a new political language of change, it fails to break away from the anti-communist sentiments in social constructivism. Popa carefully re-reads Mario Mieli, Gayle Rubin, Joan Scott, and Hortense Spillers, showing how white North American feminist concerns cannot be detached from the legacies of the Cold War, anti-communism, and ambivalent relations with Marxism.

Counter-Fetish and Trans Future in Eastern Europe

The second part of the book (chapters five to nine) provides alternatives to understand gender, the body, and sexuality. Three words are crucial in this section: abolition, counter-fetish, and de-contextualization. Popa’s abolition goes beyond the abolition of gender to that of racial capitalism. In the chapter “Abolition,” Popa proposes that both queer scholar of colour José Muñoz and socialist realist films share a similar concern with how to reappropriate commercial objects to do something else. What differentiates Popa from Muñoz is their innovative staging of a conversation between two worlds: socialist Romania in the 1960s and the capitalist US in the present. Abolition, for Popa, is a dialectic process that involves future-making in the present: it is more than simply resisting capitalism.

Counter-fetish refers to objects that become alternatives to commodity fetishism. In chapter six, Popa introduces socialist counter-fetishes through Muñoz and Fred Moten. For Muñoz, a commodity is full of potential to disrupt capitalist commercialism. For Moten, commodities have little value. He finds counter-fetishes in Black musical and philosophical traditions, genres outside of commodities that can therefore interrupt capitalism. A Black queer utopia emerges from jazz, for instance, unsettling time and value. Like both Moten and Muñoz, Popa foregrounds a socialist counter-fetish through art: socialist film. They analyze The Cruise, a Romanian socialist film, to demonstrate a hierarchy within the working class. Darker-skinned people in Romania are doing the hard work to produce objects of use-value, but also provide us with a queer possibility in the songs the darker-skinned workers sing and perform (174).

De-contextualization comes from art critic Boris Groys. The concept denotes taking a material object out of its context, giving it a transformative mission. Popa takes socialist realist films and Eastern European Marxism to serve our contemporary desire for liberation. In the chapter entitled “Trans,” Popa proposes a queer post-socialism that bridges the Cold War divide between Eastern European Marxism and queer of colour critique. The bridge is possible because both trans people and communists are considered monster aliens threatening the white, ordinary Americans/Canadians living their lives (205). Such connections can only take place when we decontextualize Eastern European Marxist understanding of “productive bodies” into queer and trans critiques and politics.

Popa ends the book with a note on trans futures in Eastern Europe. At a time when anti-gender, right-wing populism converges with anti-communism, Popa’s salient intervention urges both trans and queer activists and scholars in North America to consider the different trajectories and histories of gender and sexuality in post-socialist countries, such as Romania. De-centring queer theory, for Popa, is to re-consider a different itinerary of “queer.” In Popa’s reading of Romanian socialist realist films, Marxism and a theory of the body have not been separated. 5 Rather, the body becomes something else in the cinematic rendering of revolutionary struggles.

The Implications

This book makes an intervention in cultural criticism and theories of gender and sexualities. Popa invites us to always reflect on the geopolitical conditions of theories and actions. If we take the Marxist productivist body seriously, we need to understand that the conceptual language we use today is inadequate. We do not have socially constructed identities that we can achieve, but we can construct new possibilities collectively. If we think the individual body is the site of struggle, then we might follow a post-structural line of inquiry to consider agencies on all levels. If we follow a productivist lens, then we come to understand that words such as agency, for example, are already conditioned by capitalist modes of production. Bodies do not have agency in the social constructivist sense: bodies constitute a collective entity and a political device to produce anti-capitalist societies (48). Learning from Popa, we might ask ourselves if we are ready to work and produce a communist future. If so, are we ready to start rethinking a new conception of the body not as the site of agency? That is, queer bodies contribute to liberation not through achieving differences against norms, but through building new norms whereby differences no longer matter.

While Popa does not set out to provide praxis based on their reading of a Marxist conception of the body, as readers, we might speculate on a different framework of collectivity. A collective is not the total sum of individuals within it; rather, individual bodies dissolve into making a transformative future. Popa’s reading of the Marxist body emphasizes forging unity, and the possibility of losing oneself in revolutionary struggles.

This book offers rich background to understand populism in Eastern Europe. We cannot forge a queer left position in post-socialist countries without considering the end of the Cold War and a denial of socialist histories. On one hand, right-wing populism views European gender and sexuality equality policies as communist doctrines; on the other, liberal LGBTQ+ advocacy paints socialism as anti-queer and sexually repressive. Popa is writing during this time in their home country of Romania, and the region of Eastern Europe more broadly. Such a divide makes it impossible to discuss queer socialism or trans communism in ways that do not become an intensive debate about how terrible socialism was, derailing the real goal of liberation.

Lastly, this book asks us to de-Cold-Warize our imaginations, as a complimentary aspect of decolonization and abolition. We first need to separate Marxism as analytic, socialism as political theory, and state socialism as governmental entities. We need to understand that our political movements and theories are partially the product of Cold War social science. Therefore, to de-Cold-War is to see socialist histories 1) as part of the human history of emancipation, not as an anomaly to forget; and 2) in the terms of those who struggled to build collective communism, not from the standpoint of a distanced observer who simply judges and critiques other people’s attempted transformations. *

Notes

From 2015 to 2016 two organizations launched in Toronto with the aim of revolutionizing the way people eat, although they went about it in very different ways. One was the Berry Road Food Co-op (BRFC), which aimed to empower Torontonians to eat more ethically, the other, Uber Eats, which aimed to empower Torontonians to eat more conveniently. Five years have passed and only one of these organizations remains: only one of these “revolutions” has proven successful.

Uber Eats can attribute its success to the logic of capitalism. In its pursuit of capital, our modern food supply chain compartmentalizes and optimizes each step in the preparation of a meal, from growing to processing to packaging to cooking. Uber Eats simply adds another step (delivering) to this chain of alienation, further limiting human connection and making it nearly-impossible to follow one’s meal as it is ushered through the increasingly complex food system, from farm to table, or, in today’s culture of appified eating, from farm to couch. Eating itself has fallen prey to alienation, with shared meals largely a thing of the past. “The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest. . . casualty of capitalism,” writes Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. 1 A food system meant to maximize profit has no use for many things that have been considered, up until recently, integral to eating: tradition, culture, ritual, and community.

The decline of Toronto’s food co-ops, such as the BRFC, is also a symptom of today’s delivery app economy. Food co-ops build their politics on care, interconnection, and togetherness; delivery apps, on disconnection and detachment. Food co-ops prioritize eating together; delivery apps thrive when we eat apart. Food co-ops urge us to consider the intricate web of people and communities who participated in the preparation of our meals; delivery apps make invisible these very connections. The parallel fall of Toronto food co-ops and rise of the delivery app economy suggests that our present moment is grounded in a food politics of alienation, yet the past few years have gestured toward a more hopeful future, the potential for a food politics built on solidarity.

The Decline of the Toronto Food Co-op

The BRFC incorporated on August 30, 2016, 2 joining the West End Food Co-op (WEFC), the Karma Co-op, and the Bathurst Wholefood Co-operative as one of Toronto’s only food co-ops. Essentially, food co-ops are not-for-profit, cooperatively-owned grocery stores, but more broadly, they are places where consumers can exercise food sovereignty, a term coined by international farmers organization La Via Campesina that refers to the right of people “to define their agricultural and food policy.” 3 At their core, food co-ops are about this “right to define” local food systems: about consumers having a say over the kinds of food available within their communities and how it has been sourced, priced, and so on. In practice, this means that the food on offer has been grown, harvested, processed, and distributed in ways that reflect communal values.

It is important to flag that food sovereignty is not a neutral concept equally applicable to all Canadians. For some, food sovereignty is a more urgent matter, and unsurprisingly, these are the ones who have been fighting for it the longest and hardest. Indigenous peoples are routinely denied food sovereignty due to colonial food policies, such as those that restrict hunting and fishing, reducing their access to traditional foods. Indigenous peoples are also more likely to experience food insecurity, most directly because nutritious food is often inaccessible or prohibitively priced in remote areas of Canada. For example, in 2015, a month of groceries cost an average of $1,909 in Attawapiskat First Nation, versus only $847 in Toronto. 4 Rates of food insecurity reach almost 50 percent in Nunavut, where the majority of the population is Indigenous. 5

Food co-ops allow consumers to actively engage in determining their local food system. In a food co-op, you don’t “vote with your dollars”—a simulacrum of democracy that is accessible only to the wealthy—but rather you literally vote on the co-op’s decisions. Because they allow consumers to make decisions that feel good to them, food co-ops tend to offer far more locally sourced and organic food products than commercial grocery stores do (20 percent versus six percent 6 and 47 percent versus three percent, 7 respectively). It also explains how some food co-ops, such as Toronto’s Karma Co-op, have successfully instituted zero-waste policies, requiring members to tote around reusable grocery bags and scoop globs of toothpaste and deodorant into Tupperware containers. Food co-ops bring people together through shared values and collective action: a practice antithetical to “disruptive” and “revolutionary” food delivery start-ups.

Yet, Toronto food co-ops are struggling. In mid-2018, when the BRFC was still in its planning stages, the WEFC was forced to relocate from its decade-long home, the Parkdale Community Health Centre. Unable to find another affordable space within the gentrifying neighbourhood, the WEFC had no choice but to close down, 8 reducing the number of active Toronto food co-ops by one-third. James Partanen, a WEFC board member, explained why the food co-op’s closure was such a major blow to the city:

Between the store and the farmers market, we have brought approximately 2 million dollars of local, quality food products into Parkdale. . . and we have done this while striving to empower and include our shoppers, producers, workers and community partners in all of our decision-making processes. 9

The WEFC brought nutritious and sustainable food options into a low-income area with higher-than-average rates of marginalized residents, making its closure a big loss for Parkdale. But, as Partanen articulates, the community lost more than just a beloved shop: they also lost food sovereignty and food community, values that are essential to flourishing food politics.

Despite the closure of the WEFC, activists remained optimistic, clinging to the hope that the BRFC, a fresh new food co-op, would take its place. Partanen left the WEFC in 2016 to help organize the BRFC, and he was confident that things would be different writing:

I know from experience, both at WEFC’s inception and through with community partners, developers and city councillors on the new BRFC, that the options for the creation of a vibrant food co-operative are limited only by the vision of the community members and politicians involved. 10

And the BRFC had such community support, in the form of rent subsidies from the condo developer and robust membership pre-signups.

But community support wasn’t enough. According to its now-defunct website, the BRFC faced “numerous financial challenges,” and in 2018 began a fundraising campaign, desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to crowdsource the last $100,000 needed to open by spring 2019. 11 At this time, the BRFC already looked finished from the outside, though it would remain stuck in this pre-opening stage for several years. Near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, BRFC board members posted on the co-op’s website that “unforeseen delays,” including the pandemic and unrelated financial roadblocks, had once again put their operations on pause. They pushed back their opening date to spring 2021, pending approval of a “final construction loan.” Spring 2021 came and went, but their doors remained firmly shut.

In July 2021, the BRFC finally admitted defeat. The announcement came over a year after the COVID-19 pandemic had radically changed food culture in Canada: by now, more than 30 percent of Canadians were using delivery apps to buy their groceries, and online food orders had increased by nearly 40 percent. 12 While the food co-op’s closure may have been predictable, the lack of media attention around it was not. If you weren’t paying close attention, you would have missed it: the closure is commemorated only by a “permanently closed” marker on Google and a short paragraph on the Stonegate Community Health Centre’s website posted in July 2021. 13

This blow to the city’s food sovereignty, community, and democracy went wholly unnoticed and unlamented: a symptom of our culture’s fetishization of convenience. Karma Co-op general manager Talia McGuire thinks the delivery economy is in part to blame: “This year has been particularly bad for sales declines, and I suspect a lot of that is going to delivery platforms,” she said to the Toronto Star in 2018. “It’s been huge for us. . . Most people are so time-starved these days that they have to shop where it’s easy.” 14 But forsaking community for convenience comes at a cost, most of all for the workers who prop up the delivery economy.

The Rise of the Delivery App Economy

Backtrack to 2015, one year before BRFC was incorporated and the same year Uber Eats entered the Canadian market. Foodora, another “revolutionary” and “disruptive” food delivery app, had just launched in Canada. Unlike Uber Eats, however, it didn’t last long, shuttering its Canadian branch just months after the Ontario Labour Relations Board declared that its couriers had the right to unionize. Much like the BRFC, Foodora was closed within five short years of its opening, and one could say that, also like the BRFC, its quick burnout was due to the marketplace’s aversion to solidarity and affinity for alienation.

In the years following Foodora’s and Uber Eats’s Canadian launches, the food delivery economy exploded, and it quickly became clear that the gig workers employed by these apps were being overworked, underpaid, and exploited. Couriers were designated as “independent contractors,” meaning that the delivery platforms weren’t technically their employers, which denied them access to basic labour rights and benefits. Within a few years, the situation had become untenable, and in 2018, a group of Foodora couriers met up in a Toronto park to discuss unionizing––a modest meetup from which the Foodsters United movement was born. 15

In January 2019, Foodsters United started working toward unionizing with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), and with the help of the CUPW’s veteran union organizers, began to attract media attention. In May 2019, Foodsters United launched its “Justice for Foodora Couriers” campaign, which demanded that couriers be treated like any other employee and that the many undocumented workers in their ranks be recognized and protected. 16 Finally, on February 25, 2020, the Ontario Labour Relations Board ruled that the Foodora couriers were right: they were, in fact, dependent contractors. 17 This landmark victory meant that Foodora couriers were now able to unionize, which a staggering 89 percent of them voted to do, proving that what gig workers want is not “flexibility” and “independence” but stability and security. 18 The Foodora couriers rejected individualism, instead opting for the safety that comes with solidarity.

Foodsters United’s win was powerful but brief. By April, Foodora had declared bankruptcy and the company officially closed its Canadian branch on May 11, 2020. 19 Still, Foodsters United proved its lasting commitment to gig workers’ rights, winning a historic $3.46 million settlement for Foodora couriers and continuing its work under the name “Gig Workers United.” 20 The Gig Workers United website explains the harms that gig workers struggle against:

Our health and safety isn’t a priority for app employers who encourage us to take risks to generate profits. . . . If the orders are coming in we’ll stay out well past the point of exhaustion because there’s no guarantee it’ll be good tomorrow. . . . Being a gig worker means dancing on the edge of financial instability, physical injury, and stress without any possibility of upward mobility. You can be deactivated at any moment without explanation, with no chance to tell your side of the story. 21

Despite these bleak conditions, members of Gig Workers United continue to organize. 22 Recently, along with Uber Drivers United and the Ontario Federation of Labour, they outlined an official “Gig Workers’ Bill of Rights,” a set of demands that comprises the labour rights each gig worker should be entitled to. These include a minimum wage, sick leave, vacation pay, the right to unionize, payment for all hours worked (including time spent fulfilling cancelled orders or waiting in traffic), access to government benefits (such as Employment Insurance and the Canada Pension Plan), and protection against harassment and abuse on the job. 23

Over the past year, the United Gig Workers have won several victories. In August 2021, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled in favour of a $400 million class-action lawsuit filed against Uber, which like Foodora, had misclassified drivers as independent contractors and unlawfully withheld basic labour rights. 24 Since then, the Ontario Workforce Recovery Advisory Committee has recognized that current labour laws do not adequately reflect Canada’s modern labour landscape, in which 13 percent of workers are employed within the gig economy. 25 The committee released 21 labour-related recommendations for the provincial government; one such recommendation, the prohibition of non-compete clauses, has already been enacted. Other recommendations include protections for gig workers, including to “create and recognize the dependent contractor category for gig or platform workers in the app-based space and give this category of worker basic employment rights.” 26

In December 2021, gig workers received a hopeful indication that their labour might finally be protected by law, as the Ontario government announced that it is considering a “portable benefits program” for gig workers. This would allow gig workers to access benefits such as health, dental, and vision coverage, and to cart these benefits between different contract jobs. No legislation is currently on the table, but it may be brought to Queen’s Park in early 2022, alongside a catch-all “dependent contractor” designation for gig workers, as Ontario Minister of Labour Monte McNaughton hinted to CTV News Toronto. 27

What does the closing of the BRFC have to do with gig workers organizing for labour rights and unionization? Both the decline of Toronto food co-ops and the rise of the delivery economy are by-products of late-stage capitalist alienation, in which consumers (often themselves overworked and underpaid) simply don’t have the time and capacity to build community and solidarity around their food choices. It follows that most would opt for the ease of an app over the hard work of co-operation.

This trend has been further exacerbated over the past two years, as the way we’ve learned to eat during the pandemic is utterly at odds with the ethos of food co-ops, and utterly in accordance with that of delivery apps. We want food that is contactless, accessible from home, and meant to be consumed alone. These values are unlikely to change post-pandemic, with half of Canadians saying they plan to continue ordering food through delivery apps at least once a week. 28 It’s hard to blame them: after nearly two years of eating in isolation––avoiding restaurants, dinner parties, even grocery stores––who wouldn’t prefer the comfort and safety of a screen over a crowded, bustling food co-op?

Food Politics in a Post-COVID World

The COVID-19 pandemic did much more than amplify our isolated eating habits, however; it also exposed the deep flaws within our food systems. For example, while the pandemic ensured that couriers for food delivery apps had a steady stream of work, it also put them in a double-bind: they were considered “essential workers” but weren’t given the required workplace protections, such as paid sick leave and access to personal protection equipment (PPE). Moreover, many gig workers didn’t qualify for the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) (and at the beginning of the pandemic, none did, due to their “independent contractor” status) leaving them unable to opt out of work, an especially dangerous situation for immunocompromised couriers. 29

“The sickness in our food supply,” Michael Pollan wrote in an article for the New York Review of Books, “is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered.” Pollan points out that while the middle classes were panic-buying dried pasta and frozen pizzas, “the very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket” suddenly came to seem “questionable, if not misguided.” Our food system routinely devalues the health and safety of the very workers who allow for its “vaunted efficiency,” which was never quite so evident as it was at the beginning of the pandemic. Pollan writes:

Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying. This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough. 30

Not only did our food system exacerbate the spread of COVID-19, but it could lead to more viruses like it. “Factory farms are breeding grounds for pandemics,” wrote Jonathon Safran Foer and Aaron S. Gross for The Guardian, noting that most of the meat we consume comes from “genetically uniform, immunocompromised, and regularly drugged animals lodged by the tens of thousands into buildings or stacked cages.” Safran Foer and Gross further point out that many recent novel viruses, including swine flu and bird flu, evolved on factory farms. 31

The COVID-19 pandemic has also exposed other, more insidious “sicknesses” in our food supply. Summer 2020 saw Canada’s highest-ever demand for foreign agricultural workers: many domestic workers did not want to work during the pandemic, and access to CERB gave them the flexibility to make that decision. Foreign workers who rely on seasonal wages for their income, however, had no choice but to take the job and risk catching COVID-19. Plus, a global pandemic is not the only threat that migrant agricultural workers face. Many of these workers constantly “run the risk of losing their wages, immigration status, and housing,” according to Noelle Solange Didierjean for Briarpatch magazine, leaving them powerless to combat workplace harassment or abuse. 32 For some, the ever-present threat of deportation leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by their employers.

According to Stats Canada (reporting data from 2017), about 16 percent of agricultural workers in Canada are foreign workers, a number that more than doubled over the preceding decade. 33 Around 90 percent of them work “low-skilled,” low-paying jobs, and on the whole, foreign agricultural workers earn disproportionately low salaries as compared to domestic workers, with average annual earnings coming in at $17,900. 34 In addition to being underpaid, this work is also precarious. According to the Migrant Rights Network, “farm workers in many provinces are exempt from basic employment rights such as minimum wage, overtime, breaks, and hours of rest between work shifts.” They add that “farm workers’ permits are tied to a specific employer,” meaning “workers cannot leave bad jobs, and that the risk of getting fired—and subsequently becoming homeless and facing deportation—makes asserting their rights at work virtually impossible.” 35 Yet, despite facing “enormous pressure” to keep quiet, at least 5,386 complaints were filed by farmworkers from Mexico between 2009 and 2019. 36

Not only is this capitalist food system harmful to its workers, it also doesn’t serve its consumers. Nearly one in five Toronto households are affected by food insecurity, meaning that they have “inadequate or insecure access to food due to lack of money.” 37 This problem extends beyond hunger (though hunger is, of course, a major issue), as food insecurity is closely correlated with negative health outcomes including chronic illnesses, mood and anxiety disorders, and mortality. The city’s food insecurity rates are on the rise: according to the 2019 “Food in Toronto: Affordability, Accessibility, and Insecurity” report, the cost of buying nutritious food went up by 7.6 percent between 2018 and 2019. The cost of eating well has risen so sharply that someone living on money from the Ontario Disability Support Program would end each month $305 in debt, assuming they had paid for nothing but essential expenses such as nutritious food. 38

Capitalism requires that we forget that food inherently ties people together and that feeding a community is a complex and interdependent process. Individual action is not sufficient to change the harms entrenched within our food systems, which is why so many major corporations have had no problem embracing ethical eating, so long as it’s on an individual scale (consider Amazon-owned Whole Foods peddling vegan-friendly tech meat). Real change comes from united action, and from working in conversation with low-income Canadians, migrant agricultural workers, and Indigenous people to build systems that account for the needs of the collective. This is what food co-ops strive to do: feed the community while remaining accountable for the systems that connect us to our meals, and to each other.

From Public to Private

The weaknesses in our food system are all essentially symptoms of alienation: from the land, the community, and the means of production. Each node in the food supply chain has, under capitalism, become so convoluted that it’s hard to connect them into a coherent system, which makes it easy to ignore the web of abuse and harm linking it all together. It is fitting, therefore, that the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed so many of these weaknesses, tacked on yet another level of alienation to the food supply chain.

In the post-COVID world, meals no longer bring people together. No longer is it anyone’s business what we eat, or how, or when: food preparation and consumption are now things done behind closed doors. In fact, both the decline of the food co-op and the rise of the delivery app economy have been driven in part by food’s shift from the public sphere to the private sphere, what Aaron Timms calls “the permanent tech-driven evacuation of eating as a public activity.” 39 This is what the delivery app economy promises: seamlessness, which is to say, alienation; not needing to look directly at the people serving you, not needing to consider where your food comes from. Delivery apps obfuscate the human hands behind your meals, whereas food co-ops bring your own hands into the fold: often physically, as many members choose to work at their co-op in exchange for membership.

The alienation of food systems is a highly unnatural phenomenon. From gathering to shopping to cooking, food has historically been a communal experience. Even grocery shopping wasn’t an independent task, and up until the early 20th century, you couldn’t buy food without the help of another person. In his book Grocery Story, Jon Steinman considers food’s first leap from public to private: “Prior to 1916, grocery stores were nothing like the stores of today. Items for sale were out of reach to shoppers. Store clerks would take orders and fill them from shelves and bulk bins located behind a counter,” he writes. 40

Canada’s first self-service grocery, the “Loblaw Groceteria” (now known as Loblaws), opened in 1919 on Toronto’s Dundas Street West. Within a few decades, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find a grocery store that wasn’t self-service––the sterile impersonality of the self-service experience proved irresistible to shoppers. The popularity of self-service grocery stores mirrors the ascent of the delivery economy. Much like delivery apps—and unlike food co-ops—grocery stores shield against human connection, making invisible the complicated processes by which every aisle is filled to the brim with glossy, packaged foodstuff, thousands of kilometres from home and priced suspiciously low.

Re-politicizing Food in a Post-COVID World

So, where do we go from here? How do we recover food-based solidarity when consumers have been rubbed raw by a pandemic and the self-service grocery store has been upgraded to an app? How do we knit back together the disparate threads that bind our complex food supply chain? How do we create a food politics built not on a single issue—food security, the environment, animal rights, access to culturally relevant foods—but rather on all the issues, all at once? A food politics capacious enough to account for the whole community’s needs and desires?

It is not enough to simply revitalize Toronto’s failing food co-ops, though that’s certainly a good start. In a city where gig workers do not have basic labour rights, a fifth of the population lacks adequate food, and gentrification increasingly pushes out the poorest residents, food co-ops are too easily taken over by well-meaning but privileged shoppers, those who are more focused on sourcing vegan ingredients than achieving food justice for all. In an article in Dissent magazine, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg reject the popular middle-class notion that fixing our food system requires us to think smaller and more local, as well as the idealization of family farms, which are still driven by profit, property ownership, and settler-colonial values. Instead, they urge us to think bigger, to imagine broad, interconnected systems able to viably support the needs of entire populations. 41

Indigenous food sovereignty and land back movements are good places to start when envisioning a just food system, as traditional Indigenous agriculture involved “the coordinated labor and expertise of large communities . . . organized around radically different conceptions of property, stewardship and kinship.” 42 A just food system would necessarily be large and complex since it needs to support a wide range of food, labour, and community needs. This means that we cannot discriminate in our support for workers, whether on factory or family farms, in food co-ops or in the delivery economy. We must focus on creating change for the people within the system, rather than the system itself.

Over the past several years, two ongoing and interwoven global issues—the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic—have changed the way we are thinking about action, organizing, and resistance. People are recognizing the urgent need to re-politicize how we live, work, and eat, and they are understanding that all these things are necessarily entangled. And so, even while food co-ops across Toronto struggle and shut down, there is a deep hopefulness in the city: a turn toward collective action and unionization, toward tenderness and care, and, after so long spent apart, toward eating together. *

Making Introductions—Anticapitalismo at the Farmer’s Market

Italian culture is admired worldwide for its appreciation of la dolce vida—a slower enjoyment of life’s sweet and ordinary pleasures. This sits in tension with the breakneck speed of modern capitalism. This pace is, by design, so deliberately demanding that anti-capitalist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes modern capitalism as “liquid.” Bauman points out that capitalism, underpinned by interlocking structures of domination, ever increases the speed of modern life, thereby engulfing possibilities for more relational, slower ways of being. This leaves ordinary people “impotent to resist the business-inspired rules of action” and “open to the invasion and domination. . . of the determining role of the economy.” 1 So, in spite of the prevailing notion of la dolce vida, the welfare of Italian society is not immune to the consequences of modern capitalism. Even traditional Italian cultural touchstones of extended mealtimes, afternoon riposo, and community bonds are ever-threatened by the unregulated velocity of modern life. How can resistance sustain itself while contending with this breakneck pace? Anti-capitalist organizers here in Padova, Italy, would begin by extending a hand in friendship and perhaps even opening a bottle of wine.

Padova is a heavily industrialized university city in the Veneto region of northern Italy. My partner and I moved here in October 2021 to spend a year learning about la dolce vida ourselves while he pursues a Master’s degree and I recover from mine. Like thousands of other cities across Europe, North America and beyond, there is a housing crisis here; we struggled to find a flat to rent and we landed in Mortise, an underserved neighbourhood on the northeastern fringe of the city. Mortise is worlds away from the beautified cobblestone streets of Padova’s ancient city centre. It is a working-class zona of immigrants, elderly folks, and students, of grimy serpentine streets and identical 1960s-built concrete apartment complexes.

On our second day living here, we went for a walk to try to make sense of where we would be spending our next year. We wouldn’t have looked twice at a large and derelict-seeming building, shrouded by concrete fencing and some pines, if it hadn’t been for an eclectic-looking group selling vegetables in the parking lot. Taking a deep breath, we approached with curiosity, bumbling out “non parliamo italiano” and explaining that we had just moved here from Canada. In a colourful patchwork of English and Italian, they explained in return that they were a farmer’s market collective, selling their organic produce and subverting the corporate chain supermercados. Something about the phrase anti-capitalismo truly transcends the language barrier; once we relayed that we are also anti-capitalists, we received handshakes and smiles, as well as some helpful tips about buses and an invitation to come back anytime.

Without really knowing it at the time, we had stumbled across something quite radical in our new neighbourhood. A week passed, and on Saturday morning we returned to the parking lot market, imagining we would buy armloads of vegetables and be on our way. Instead, we were greeted with inconceivable kindness by familiar faces. Within minutes, generous Massimo, one of the farmers and organizers, had opened a bottle of prosecco and put bubbling glasses in our hands. We shared a saluti and stood in a wide circle chatting in broken-blended English-Italian. A fascinating story began to emerge. The backdrop to the market, the neglected building with its crumbling utilitarian design, is actually an abandoned school. But if you take a peek inside, you would see that the space has been transformed into a community centre. And amazingly, for nearly 14 years, organizers have maintained an illegal occupation of the entire property. This is a home and headquarters for the Padova chapter of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, or the Communist Refoundation Party, and all the interwoven organizing that they get up to. Today, it is known to the wider community as la Casa del Popolo—simply, the House of the People.

Getting to Know “The House of the People”

As current Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) Secretary, Paolo explained to me that the global financial crisis in 2008 was devastating for poor, working-class, and migrant communities here in Padova. This metastasizing housing crisis, combined with the closure or deregulation of many industries and the ongoing increase in the cost of living, left many in precarious circumstances. The Italian state provides very little in the way of social assistance, especially for immigrants and refugees, and many community members found themselves without means and with nowhere safe to live. In response, PRC activists seized this abandoned elementary school. Organizers cleaned up, maintained, and mobilized the old school building as temporary housing; classrooms were transformed into makeshift apartments. So began an occupation that persists to this day. Over the last 14 years, hundreds of families and individuals have found shelter at la Casa del Popolo.

Just maintaining the old school as a safe refuge for those in precarious circumstances, all inhabiting a clandestine space together, has brought countless challenges to PRC organizers. Comrades chuckle and shake their heads as they describe numerous difficulties: police violence and harassment, ongoing utility cut-offs, lack of heating, and high maintenance costs. The PRC’s values are firmly based on inclusive and immigrant-friendly action, but organizers acknowledge that providing housing to multiple families with different nationalities, cultures, histories, and economic situations in an occupied building has been no easy feat. Working with these challenges, the PRC is proud to proclaim that la Casa del Popolo “provides an acceptable housing response to those who would otherwise have ended up on the street in the absence of alternatives that neither the ‘market’ nor the state will offer.” 2 The closer you look at the old building, the more signs of daily life come into focus: potted plants, a tidy collection of cleaning supplies on the balcony, sheets and socks hanging on clotheslines under window sills. These details signal the underground transformation of a school into a home.

But over the last 14 years, la Casa del Popolo has expanded into much more than a shelter. There is a dizzying amount of solidarity, activism, and mutual aid interconnected and offered at the People’s House. As such, la Casa del Popolo has become essential to the survival and fabric of this neighbourhood. One of the first offerings developed after the occupation was the sportello sociale. Quite literally meaning “friendly counter,” the PRC offers a free, drop-in, legal advice clinic every Wednesday afternoon. 3 At the sportello sociale a volunteer team of comrades, lawyers, and immigrant rights activists provide lines of workers and immigrants a place to turn to, for everything from support against unfair evictions to counsel regarding workers’ rights to assistance with immigration paperwork.

Set up in a storage room off the old gymnasium, dimly lit only by a small power generator, the existence of this legal advice counter is vital. Everyone I’ve met here describes Italian bureaucracy as archaic and indiscernible; across class lines, it is the butt of jokes. But for immigrants and workers in need of answers and security, such important assistance would otherwise be nonexistent or expensive to access. Labour and housing markets alike are ever-increasingly deregulated, and Italy’s once mighty national labour unions face constant attack from the state. Labour rights groups and the UN alike have long criticized Italy for its shadowy economy, mistreatment of migrant workers, and truly dismal record for occupational health and safety. 4 Furthermore, immigrants that I’ve spoken with have assured me that navigating Italy’s costly, lengthy, and perplexing immigration apparatus is a nightmare. The Italian immigration system has been described as a willfully harmful and xenophobic failure. 5 With the complete absence of an adequate social security net or state legibility, the compassionate expertise offered by the sportello sociale is a candle in the darkness for workers and families backed into precarious situations. Even when my partner and I had our own challenges with our landlord regarding our rental contract, we went and spoke to the volunteer lawyer, who freely offered his counsel.

The stories of worker-tenant-immigrant exploitation heard at the sportello inspire action. Through advocacy and direct action, the PRC responds to the deregulation of the housing market by taking it upon themselves to step-in directly to prevent unjust evictions all across the city. Routinely, they mobilize pressure or aid when landlords or the state baselessly disables access to water, electricity, or gas to tenants. Scaling upwards, the PRC is also currently running an active campaign against the astronomic increase in municipal utility costs as Europe’s so-called gas crisis continues. From October 2021 to December 2021 the cost of utility bills has tripled, and over the past few months, PRC organizers have collected thousands of signatures to formally hand over to the municipality at an organized rally. Twinning this campaign is their organizing against the proposed construction of a new garbage incinerating factory, known as Linea 4. 6 The incinerator project looms despite the dystopian reality that hazy Padova rates among the worst cities in Europe for air quality. PRC comrades actively fight these economic and environmental onslaughts by all means of activism available to them: rallies, lobbying city council, speaking on the local news, collective and direct action, online media, in-person petitions, and tabling in busy piazzas. These are just some of the PRC’s offerings in revolutionary consciousness. Activists are not shy to speak out vehemently and focus responsibility for the miseries suffered under capitalism on the system and its corporate-political actors, and they do so with sustained consistency, showing up somewhere every single week.

Another consistent cornerstone of PRC mutual aid is a popular buying group called GAP (groppi di acquisto popolaire). On Sunday mornings, GAP comes alive in the parking lot as community members from all walks of life trickle in. This offering is simple: GAP organizes the collective purchase of basic and high-quality food staples, such as vegetables, pasta, rice, oil, and cheese. This in turn allows, on average, 150 families to simply come to la Casa del Popolo and buy their weekly groceries, from comrades, at cost. This food security tool not only subverts the inflating monopoly corporations have on food prices but also engages the community from within the community. During the week preceding the market, half-page GAP flyers appear on signposts and tucked into every Mortise mailbox, advertising the collective prices: 500 grams of pasta for 45 cents! Buffalo mozzarella for 2 euros! The flyers also proudly proclaim the joint GAP-PRC mission statement: “To bring down prices as a defence and support tool, for workers and retirees in the crisis—Solidarity, mutualism, organization—Leave no one behind!” 7

This mutual aid organizing is followed up by solidarity organizing with the PRC’s support of labour unions. While writing this, a massive national strike, organized by two of Italy’s largest trade unions, was planned for December 16th, 2021. In major cities of Milan and Rome, comrades, trade unionists, activists, and workers descended upon the streets to vehemently protest Prime Minister Draghi’s proposed budget. The PRC regards Draghi’s budget as nothing short of class warfare, which “doubles down” on his government’s dismal economic policies by gutting public spending, offering tax cuts to wealthy corporations, and redistributing resources away from trade unions and working classes. 8 The national Partito della Rifondazione Comunista has a large presence within union organizing, and in Padova, the PRC comrades are “prepared to do what is necessary” to fight against what they call “this new neoliberal offensive.” The Saturday before the strike, comrades gathered at la Casa Del Popolo to host a press conference and strategy meeting, 9 followed, of course, by lunch and wine prepared by their comrades at the farmer’s market. A chartered bus departed from la Casa Del Popolo at dawn on the day of the sciopero generale as members of the PRC Padova travelled to Milan to rally alongside other trade unionists and comrades on the streets.

The PRC’s scope also includes international affairs in various forms. La Casa del Popolo often offers space to international organizations or local immigrant community groups who organize in solidarity. On one particular weekend in November 2021, the atmosphere was buzzing as an immigrant delegation from the Moroccan Consulate hosted a conference and community lunch in the old gymnasium. But perhaps what surprised me most was learning how PRC mobilized protests against Jair Bolsonaro when the Brazilian president was bizarrely, and controversially, granted honorary citizenship by the far-right mayor of a neighbouring Veneto city. Activists descended on the streets to condemn the Brazilian politician and his honorary citizenship, only to be met with violence from police. 10 A video on the PRC Facebook page features leaders Paolo, Daniella, and others speaking out at this anti-Bolsonaro rally, condemning Bolsonaro for his fascist politics and human rights abuses. 11 For the PRC, expanding activism to include international affairs is just another obvious way to demonstrate that the “global labour movement will not be silenced.”

As the PRC’s many overtly political actions persist and evolve in reaction to the miseries of capitalism, the magnificent and humble weekly farmer’s market that my partner and I first stumbled into remains a constant. The small market is nothing more than a modest collection of pop-up tents and tables. The produce, grown organically on the small farms of comrades on the outskirts of Padova, shifts with the seasons. In October, they sold tomatoes and leafy greens; by January, massive cabbages, purple cauliflowers, and miraculously, citrus fruits are in season. Another reliable offering at the Saturday market is, perhaps also bizarrely, massage therapy; a talented physical therapist comrade treats the aches and pains of community members on his makeshift massage bed of wooden pallets and pillows. Knitting all this together is the central Saturday gathering place, a small folding table bar of local wine, espresso, sweet treats, and deviled eggs for shoppers and comrades alike to gather around, share, and enjoy. Certainly, there is always a lot going on, but the ambience of the market is unhurried, warm, and playful. A community gathers as a community over food and drink. Since arriving in Italy, my partner and I haven’t missed a single Saturday.

“We Need to Look to Our Future”: The Roots, History, and Leaders of the PRC in Padova

My reflections are rooted in my experience as a non-Italian-speaking outsider living temporarily in this neighbourhood. At first, from my limited perspective as an outsider, the volume and diversity of interwoven organizing here all seemed at once casual, random, and sprawling. But the PRC is not disorganized; they’re busy. Each time we visit la Casa, some different radical action is happening. With colourful wooden beehives in the backyard and a low-key Soviet-era military truck in the parking lot, the atmosphere at la Casa del Popolo is gritty and eclectic. The layers of interwoven mutual aid have a wonderfully bombastic, practical, and rolling quality. “To leave no one behind” is a common Partito della Rifondazione Comunista motto. For example, a Facebook post cheerfully summarizes the events at la Casa del Popolo over the course of just one weekend: “Conventions, lunches, shopping groups, food bank, support counter, local farmers market… a lot of stuff! We’ll be waiting for you!” 12

“A lot of stuff” is an understatement. But like the physical building itself, there is more to all this organizing than what meets the eye. There is something deeply intentional to the mutualismo and activism here. When I asked farmer-comrade, and now friend, Elisabetta (who, upon first meeting us, looked us square in the eye, raised a fist, and said boldly in accented English, “I am communist!”) about the volume and inclusivity of all these distinct mutual aid activities, she quoted Zygmunt Bauman. According to Elisabetta (and Bauman), all of these separate actions converge into “pockets of resistance.” And these pockets are the necessary strongholds against the ever-evolving crisis of globalized capitalism. 13

Bauman, who passed away in 2017, is something of a champion for organizers here. Somewhat unknown in North America, he is especially influential among progressive activists in Italy, as well as in Spain, and South America. A compassionate academic and Polish Holocaust survivor with communist roots, Bauman’s critiques run from subjects like modern love to modern capitalism, all the while condemning the wolfish nature of neoliberalism, globalization, and consumerism. Elisabetta showed me her Italian-language copy of Liquid Modernity, 14 published in 2000, wherein Bauman studies the disappearance of the “solid” structures and institutions that perhaps once provided the stable foundations for society. In Bauman’s theories, the term “liquid” describes the highly-adaptable, industrialized systems that propel capitalist-fabricated consumerism. The manufacturable “liquidity” of capitalism reproduces hyper-concentrated socio-material power among the elites and state. In turn, Bauman notes that this has exploitative consequences for the day-to-day struggles of workers, marginalized individuals, and their communities. In Padova, I notice this in the unregulated struggles of migrant, gig economy, and domestic labourers who suffer directly from this demand for cheaper services with faster results.

In another article titled Living in the Era of Liquid Modernity, Bauman condemns the “hand-washing politicians” who “dump systemic contradictions on their subjects’ shoulders.” 15 Conversely, the PRC leadership are community members who can be found both giving impassioned speeches to crowds or on the evening news, but also working the cash box at the market or simply standing around on a Saturday morning chatting and listening. Further, Bauman urges society to see through media propaganda and recognize how the state redirects the “gnawing pain of powerlessness. . . to ever new objects of hatred and new targets of aggression,” 16 namely refugees or the unemployed. This is plain in scarcity-based, right-wing sentiments in mainstream Italian politics. But another motto of the PRC commonly printed on their flyers is “Fatti non Parole”: facts, not words. Their commitment to anti-racism and justice is lived out in the results of their actions and the diverse identities of comrades and those who access PRC services in the community. Just as Bauman denounces consumeristic tactics that accelerate the speed of liquid modernity to continually reaggregate elite power over workers, the PRC develops purchasing strategies to combat rising corporate greed. So while Bauman repeatedly points out that the mutable “liquid” quality of modern capitalism purposefully prevents the positive possibilities of longer-term, effective collective action, it is precisely persistent and nimble action—or pockets of resistance—that offers us our means of survival.

The persistence of partisan, anti-capitalist, and anti-Fascist organizing has an involved and revolutionary history in Italy. 17 While it is impossible to fully summarize these intricacies here, it has struck me to learn that Italian socialism was born from long-held multicultural values of community and solidarity, giving rise to organized socialist party politics in response to Mussolini’s racist rise to prominence in the early 1920s. 18 The Italian Communist Party (CPI) played a major role in the Italian resistance movement against the Fascist regime and subsequent Nazi occupation. Likewise, communist fighters also participated in armed resistance to the colonial-Fascist invasion of Ethiopia. 19 In turn, the CPI became Italy’s second largest political party following WWII. From the 1960s into the ’80s, the party rode waves of internal, national, and international transformation, as well as social and political unrest. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, the mainstream Italian Communist Party split; one faction became the Democratic Party of the Left and another became the PRC.

While the Democratic Party of the Left floundered and eventually dissolved in 1998, the PRC cemented itself in “social radicalism and philo-Soviet attitudes,” 20 transforming itself from a traditional political party into a collezionista of many mutual aid “pockets.” Responding to the emergence of neoliberalism, the migrant crisis, and the erosion of trade unions, the PRC focused on sites of struggle where they could directly improve the lives of working-class people. 21 In turn, the PRC has largely turned away from the classical models of mass party politics, projecting itself toward local chapters and “decentralized networking structures only suitable to the strategic objective of cohesion to the movement for a global worker justice.” 22 However, due to this, the PRC has been criticized as a party unable to build any practical strategy in the mainstream Italian political arena; the PRC hasn’t held a seat in national Italian politics since 2008.

Gaining popularity in mainstream politics remains the greatest challenge the PRC faces, and the rise of far-right sentiments, anti-democratic obscurement, a lack of faith in the national party leadership, a divided popular electoral base, and lack of resources or funding all make this even more difficult. Therefore, while the PRC continues to receive criticism for not “re-aggregating lost forces” in the “communist diaspora” of Italy, where far-left sentiments linger but are divided, 23 we might wonder if the PRC’s particular focus on providing mutual aid relief further diminishes their abilities to be more competitive in national politics. When I ask the PRC Secretary, Paolo, about this tension, he smiles. He doesn’t have time to get completely bogged down in the gaming of Italian politics when there is work that desperately needs to be done now. Paolo always stresses the “refoundation” aspect of who they are, repeating his common line: “We have a very large history in our past, but we need to look to our future.” For Paolo and the Padova PRC community, looking to the future is all about what the PRC can do to make a difference for their community, in the here and now, through striking a balance of both political activism and mutual aid organizing.

Certainly, their present lack of seats in the national parliament is an ongoing challenge, but the PRC’s sustained presence in community change-making merits celebration. The PRC has survived, where other socialist parties have not, by organizing through hyper-local, radical, migrant-friendly social activism. It is not prioritizing “charity” offerings over political engagement; I think activists here would argue that the revolution begins by revolutionizing how we take care of each other. It responds to the velocity of capitalism, to reference Bauman’s terminology, with a breadth of values-driven organizing, activism, subversion tactics, education, and aid. Comrades share a collective commitment to safeguard the PRC’s Marxist heritage while pursuing a horizon of a new mutuality. 24 These new horizons continue to evolve as they respond to current events and the day-to-day needs of workers and community members as instigators and sustainers of various radical social actions. The PRC cultivates itself as an open-minded political party, able to relate to its society “in the deepest meaning of the term” where it works to meaningfully create “collective, innovative and supportive experiences at local-levels.” 25

As such, the PRC in Padova is never idle; if you visit the PRC Padova Facebook page, you’d get a sense of the intensity and sprawl of their work. 26 They are under-resourced, meaning party leaders are visible and totally involved in the daily work of organizing. Paolo, who spent three years in prison in the ’70s for trying to incite a communist revolution (“I’d do it again if necessary for our cause!” he proclaims), blocks unjust evictions one day and speaks on the evening news about the attack on trade unions the next. Another impressive leader is Daniella. An active PRC ally and the daughter of an anti-colonial and anti-fascist resistance fighter, Daniella is a long-time Padova city councillor, demonstrating that while a communist presence may be absent from national government, it holds critical space at local levels. Besides championing socialist values in the municipal sphere, on Sundays, Daniella greets people by name as they come by the GAP market for their at-cost groceries. She works in solidarity with feminist groups across the city. She uses her connections to find housing or employment for migrants in crisis. She facilitates the monthly “Karl Marx Circle,” a discussion group where comrades gather to analyze political theory against the news of the day.

Likewise, the younger generation of PRC activists is also involved in the work. Radicalized around issues of economic injustice and now in his late-20s, another comrade named Francesco is equally disillusioned by the “uselessness” of trying to make a change from inside traditional Italian political institutions. He shares that in Italy, “the state and the system do not want to help us, so we have to cooperate and help each-other.” When I asked Francesco about his commitment to the PRC and its pockets of resistance, he shared this:

I could say, I am Marxist and blah blah blah, but the best and more simple answer is that I feel good when I do it. I don’t like the system where we live and I suffer for the injustices that I see every day and I feel bad if I ignore them. I may not change the world, maybe I will never see the revolution in my life, but I think that I will be able to say “I tried to do my best, in my little possibilities, to change something” and that makes me feel good.

The influence of revolutionary thinkers like Bauman and Marx is threaded in Francesco’s words; there is a persistent, high-level critique of the structural injustices and exploitative power systems. But the ongoing work itself is always relational. As Bauman said, “a good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collective to ensure individuals against individually suffered misfortune; and that the quality of society is measured by the quality of life of its weakest.” 27

The PRC also increasingly draws upon intersectional inspirations. Maintaining solidarity across all social justice struggles continues to form the basis of the PRC’s open-minded vision for a freer world. As such, the PRC is committed to supporting the struggles of workers and their families, but also the collective liberation of all oppressed identities. This is nothing short of a rarity here in Italian politics. For example, in November 2021, the national parliament infuriatingly voted down a bill that would have made violence against queer people, disabled people, and women a hate crime, with the vocal far-right claiming the anti-hate bill would infringe upon their own freedom of expression. 28 Chatting again with Francesco, he was proud to tell me that, “the work of my party is the right compromise: we offer mutual aid, we follow and support all—and believe me, really all—the green, feminist, LGTBQI+, radical, and anti-capitalist groups here, but we still participate in elections and try to do our work inside institutions.” So while critics could argue that this “compromise” might mean an emphasis on mutualismo activism undercuts opportunities for traditional institutional political success, the PRC’s trajectory and pace are on target with the pressing needs of its community. To quote Bauman once more, “An alternative world is possible. One needs to start somewhere to bring it closer.” 29

Pockets of Solidarity and Other Futures for La Casa del Popolo

Through the patient 14-year occupation of the former school, the temporary housing, the regularity of the sportello sociale on Wednesdays, the GAP market on Sundays, the friendly little vegetable market on Saturdays, direct action, rallies, petitions, protests, elections, and a hundred other little political acts of protest or mutualismo, the PRC, and its resistance pockets, persist. The PRC adapts to be attentive and reactionary to the many systemic injustices in Padova, Italy and beyond, because the pace of modern capitalism forces them to be. The aggregate total of these many resistance pockets at la Casa del Popolo indeed brings an “alternative world” closer, one act of mutualismo at a time. The PRC’s commitment to action and to holding space, both the space of a physical building and the space for “no one to be left behind” has transformational impacts on people’s lives, here in smog-laden northern Italy, that reverberate into the future. Food is shared and support is offered. The breadth of PRC activism expands, but interactions remain warm and kind. We are temporary newcomers here, but Paolo always reminds us that we are welcome anytime. We start volunteering with food distribution, we work through the language barrier. When it’s my partner’s birthday, people remember and wish him buon compleanno with raised glasses and cake.

On another Saturday farmer’s market morning in November, I ran into Paolo, both with arms full of vegetables. With a wink and a wave, he ushers me inside the old school. There I find la Casa del Popolo has been transformed once more. This time, the floor of the old gymnasium is a sea of cardboard boxes brimming with non-perishable foods, assembly-line style, with a handful of volunteers working efficiently together to pack food hampers. Paolo explains that this is a partnership between the PRC and a Moroccan community association through EU-funded food relief contracts. Thousands of dollars worth of groceries provide food security resources to our neighbourhood and it all gets organized right here in this illegal squat. Paolo explains how these groups asked the PRC if they could use this so-called “underground” space to mobilize. Further, they leverage the PRC’s contacts to get aid to community members in need. As Paolo explains all of this, he chuckles with a twinkle in his eye. I too was left marvelling at this bemusing situation. For all they might lack in parliamentary legitimacy, despite the challenges stacked against them as a small and radical political organization, the PRC reliably gets things done. It goes to show the practical power of united local actions. I recall Francesco insisting that the PRC’s collectioniza model inspired the successful radical leftist-coalition SYRIZA, who controlled parliament in Greece from 2015–2019. I wonder about the other ways that persistent pockets of resistance can cement wider solidarity.

I reflect that our education in la dolce vida here in Padova has been our weekend mornings spent at la Casa del Popolo, mispronouncing the Italian words for various vegetables, sipping espresso or wine, and asking lots of questions about Italian politics. Reflecting upon my brief time living in Padova—a time spent away from my own dear community, as an outsider in a country where my grasp on the language often falters—the comradery and the extended kindness of the PRC have been a beacon of grace for me and my partner. Since moving here, my eyes have been humbly opened to a wider world of injustices and struggles under the thumb of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. But it doesn’t take much for me to imagine, and witness, how sustaining the PRC is for community members struggling to survive in this post-industrialized, economically-squeezed, and often overtly-racist Italian landscape. Like seeds in the ground, pockets of resistance such as this hold the hopeful promise for ways of being that are rooted in solidarity, compassion, and justice.

Further proof that from little things big things can indeed grow, and proof also that in Italy all good things do take time, la Casa del Popolo stands on the precipice of change once more. In December 2021, we arrived at the Saturday market one morning to find Elisabetta, Massimo, and the rest giddy with excitement. They explained that a major victory was underway. Due to their sustained longevity in the community, their many accomplishments as organizers, and some helpful insider pressure from city councillor-comrade Daniella, soon the old school will officially cease to be a squat. The PRC and its organizers will have a layer of legal protection to ensure they can continue with their important work at la Casa del Popolo without fear of police interruption or other squat-related complications. The abandoned school lot will be zoned formally by the municipality of Padova for what it is: a House for the People. This victory means the PRC can legally and visibly do even more within the walls and grounds of the old school; Paolo envisions building a library for students to study in and Elisabetta envisions a vegetable garden. This victory is a moment for celebration. Massimo pops another bottle of prosecco in the parking lot, and we raise our glasses to a more hopeful and fair future. *

Many of the intellectual materials and personal information I gathered to write this article came from Italian media sources or from my time spent in the community and conversations with comrades, leaders and community members who mostly speak Italian. I am a non-Italian speaker. Therefore, any mistakes, misinterpretations, or nuances lost are a fault completely of my own.

Cultivating a Long View 1

“How do you avoid the feeling that you should be working ALL THE TIME given the urgency of the state of the world?”

Heather Hax, a longtime activist in Baltimore, posted that question on social media a few years ago. It garnered a lot of responses, and with good reason. This sense of urgency is completely justified, and many of us are feeling it. We live in a profoundly frightening and unpredictable period, faced with the challenges of colonialism and climate catastrophe, economic austerity and state violence, and emboldened white supremacy and xenophobia.

How can we hold this sense of urgency while pacing ourselves for the long haul? Part of the answer lies in cultivating a particular understanding of the world, our efforts, and ourselves. Following seasoned radical organizers, I call this understanding a “long view.” This view combines an urgent commitment to fighting injustice, a grounded sense of the marathon-length collective effort required to change society, and abundant patience for the process of building movements that can win, all with a healthy dose of humility about what we can know and do.

The basic idea here is that efforts to transform the world generally take longer than we’d like. We rarely win everything that we want instantaneously, we have to fight hard with institutions that we despise, and we face all sorts of challenges and setbacks. At the same time, social change is never a linear, straightforward process. There are always unpredictable things that happen, and the pace of history can shift dramatically and unexpectedly. The current shape of society is the contingent outcome of previous gains and losses of those who fought before us, sometimes slogging through periods of marginality and defeat and other times accelerating through world-historic mobilizations and transformations. What we’re currently doing may well have effects that we can’t predict in five, twenty, or one hundred years. In ways that will probably surprise us, some of those effects will be positive, others less so.

For some people, a long view is common-sense. Those who come up in communities in struggle with dense intergenerational relationships and sustained collective memory often learn this kind of perspective early on in their lives. This is the case for many Indigenous people and those rooted in the Black radical tradition. It has also been significant in left-wing working-class cultures and radical queer communities. Although it’s not exactly the same, people who stay involved in movements for decades also tend to develop a long view, mostly through direct experience, collaborative reflection, and the communities they build.

There’s nothing magical or mysterious about fostering this kind of perspective. While some circumstances certainly make it easier, people have developed a long view in all sorts of times and places. Wherever we’re situated, we can consciously work with others to cultivate one too. In this article, I explore how we can generate and nourish this kind of shared understanding.

Resistant Remembering

Cultivating a long view requires deliberately working against what activist-scholars Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile call “the social organization of forgetting.” This widespread process of forgetting, they write, “is crucial to the way in which social power works in our society. We no longer remember the past struggles that won us the social gains, social programs, and human rights that we now often take for granted.” 2 And as ruling institutions sever us from social and historical memory, we lose access to a wealth of knowledge for changing our present. Combating the social organization of forgetting thus requires what Kinsman describes as “the resistance of remembering.” 3 I like to think of it as “resistant remembering” in order to emphasize the active, ongoing, collective dimensions of this practice.

Resistant remembering involves actively reaching beyond the most readily available stories about the present and the past. Ruling institutions encourage us to understand ourselves in a very particular, constrained way: as atomized individuals (often, including our immediate families) striving to get by day-to-day vaguely connected to a distant history with little tangible bearing on our lives. In taking a long view, we can instead understand ourselves in a much more expansive, interconnected way: as living together in a present that is fundamentally shaped by the past, and which, whether we like it or not, is currently shaping the future. We are living history.

Resistant remembering also means placing the activities of ordinary people at the centre of how we understand history and change. Dominant narratives that we encounter through media and schooling encourage us to believe that powerful and charismatic individuals, whether rich people, politicians, or celebrities, are responsible for creating social change. Such narratives suggest that people at the top of society “make history”—sometimes benevolently, sometimes not— while the rest of us watch in wonder or fear.

These narratives are lies. In fact, the struggles of ordinary people are the main motor of history. Time and time again, people have fought back against the oppression and exploitation they’ve encountered. Sometimes, through a breathtaking combination of collaboration, skill, perseverance, and luck, they’ve won major victories that have dramatically reset the terrain of struggle and improved the lives of subsequent generations. The end of chattel slavery, limitations on the length of working days, greater bodily autonomy for women, and the decriminalization of homosexuality are just a few examples. Collective fights for justice and dignity propel change. 4

As we build our capacities for resistant remembering, the world around us becomes much less fixed. We can begin to tap into a more deeply-felt sense that things have been—and can be—otherwise. After all, most of the social structures and arrangements that we currently take for granted, such as race, private property, police, the nuclear family, waged work, fossil fuels, and much more, are comparatively recent developments in human history.

The slogan popularized by the prison-industrial complex abolitionist organization Critical Resistance is apt here: “Once there were no prisons. That day will come again.” All forms of social organization had starting-points, which means they can have endpoints as well. No matter how permanent and unassailable they may seem, ruling relations and institutions can be challenged and changed through organizing and struggle. Rarely is this easy or quick, but it is always possible.

Learning from the Past

Cultivating a long view also involves actively learning from the past, particularly from previous efforts to transform the world. Another form of resistant remembering, this is what activists and social movement historians sometimes describe as a search for “useable pasts.” 5 As many point out, we won’t find replicable recipes for revolution in history; with shifting social conditions and dynamics, circumstances are never exactly the same. Nonetheless, previous experiences of struggle have much to offer us.

How exactly can we use these pasts? For one, studying histories of social struggles and movements can help us to reflect more deeply on how we do things currently. When we look at the past, we can see that there is nothing “natural” or “eternally correct” about the practices and ideas of the present. Everything we take up, whether a tactic such as street protests, a concept such as intersectionality, or an organizing technique such as door-knocking, is a product of history: acting in specific contexts, ordinary people developed these things, tried them out, argued about them, and refashioned them over time. In learning how they did this, we can hone our own capacities to generate, evaluate, and remake practices and ideas for our time.

Previous experiences of struggle can help us gain some perspective as well. This is especially the case when it comes to political debates on the left. Although there are always new questions that develop in movements, most disagreements are not entirely new and many have had previous iterations. Indeed, one of the most humbling things about studying past transformative efforts is seeing how regularly the same sorts of debates come up across generations: How should we understand the relationship between capitalism and heteropatriarchy? What can radical organizations accomplish? How can we successfully fight for short-term victories on the way toward broader structural change? What place do healing and personal transformation have in movement efforts? Who is the primary agent of change? These and so many of the other questions we discuss in movements today are ones that previous radicals thought hard about and debated intensely, even if they used different terms and points of reference. With a long view, we can understand ourselves as joining these ongoing conversations and consciously seek out past insights that may clarify current debates.

Examining the past can also assist us in thinking about the internal challenges and complexities that today’s movements face. In particular, looking closely at the strengths and weaknesses of past movements can help us to assess our own efforts: how do our resources and limitations compare to those who came before us? How did previous movements attempt to build on their strengths and work with the problems they encountered? What can we distill from their experiences that might help us now? What have we learned since their times that might change how we approach similar challenges in the present? Again, there are no recipes to be found in history, but we can draw out lessons.

The past can be a valuable aid for strategic thinking, too. Studying historical struggles can help us to map out the terrain on which we presently fight, including what is unique and not-so-unique about it. We can examine how activists in previous eras analyzed their circumstances, envisioned social transformation, and tried to put their ideas into action. Importantly, this includes investigating their victories, defeats, and mixed successes. This can assist us in developing initiatives that are responsive to our circumstances and grounded in our best understandings of how social change happens. As well, it can help us to anticipate obstacles and setbacks that we are likely to encounter and consider how we might contend with them.

In addition, we can find a lot of inspiration in the past. Learning about the courage, creativity, and commitment of those who came before us is tremendously motivating. We can also draw sustenance from the conceptions of a better world that previous movements generated. To use a formulation from the radical historian Robin Kelley, these are “freedom dreams”: visions of liberation that people created, together, through imagination and struggle. 6 When we take these seriously, we can see that some freedom dreams of the past are, in fact, more audacious, imaginative, and elaborated than those of the present. 7 Exploring these dreams, including their tensions and contradictions, can encourage us to nurture our own.

Looking at the past can also help us to embrace complexity. As soon as we start studying previous movement experiences in detail, we inevitably encounter the complications and messiness of actual people trying (and, yes, sometimes failing) in actual situations of struggle. People make bad decisions, treat others terribly, become dogmatic, burn out, betray their comrades, denounce one another, drift away from politics, and at times give up entirely. People also come up with marvellous plans, develop stunningly inventive forms of collective action, care for one another, generate visionary ideas, learn from experience, collaborate across differences, persevere through great hardship, enact steadfast solidarity, and sometimes win victories.

In short, there are no superheroes or saints in movement history, just ordinary people with all of our fallibility and brilliance. Recognizing this is useful because it reminds us that, again and again, imperfect people have contributed to making a better world and that we too, with all of our contradictions, can make important contributions. Understanding that things were complicated and messy in the past can perhaps also help us to be more generous with one another in the present.

An Intergenerational Chain of Struggle

Taking up a long view also involves significantly shifting how we understand our lives. Ruling institutions encourage us to see ourselves, individually, as connected to previous generations primarily through patriotic stories of nation-states (“national history”) and nuclear family ties (“family history”). Discussions of future generations are generally vague, mainly focusing on aspirations for individual children’s lives. These sharply circumscribed ways of understanding ourselves, shaped especially by colonial and heteropatriarchal relations, are central to the social organization of forgetting.

Against this, a long view involves viscerally experiencing ourselves as links in an intergenerational chain of struggle for justice and dignity. This is something that a migrant justice activist from Tucson pointed out to me several years ago. It offers us a very different way to think about our lives: we build on the sacrifices and contributions of those who came before us, and we make our own sacrifices and contributions for those who will come next. We are participants in an ongoing, dynamic story that spans centuries, and we can make some deliberate choices about the roles we play in this story.

Another way I’ve come to think about this is in terms of responsibilities. Holding a long view means recognizing our obligations to both the past and the future. 8 To the past, we are responsible for sustaining collective memory and emancipatory visions, carrying on legacies of organizing and struggle, and working with others to right systemic wrongs, particularly ones that benefit us. To the future, we are responsible for fighting for a just and habitable world with everything we’ve got, doing what we can to build a foundation for more effective and visionary movements in the years to come, and humbly offering our experiences, reflections, and dreams.

This multi-generational perspective can help us to find continuity and community in our efforts. Even when we’re feeling alone, afraid, or embattled, we can look backward along this chain of struggle, drawing sustenance and insight from the millions of people who previously felt these completely ordinary feelings and carried on. Similarly, we can look ahead along this chain, imagining the people and movements of decades to come and the contributions we hope to make for their flourishing.

Along with continuities, this kind of perspective can assist us in identifying the intergenerational legacies we wish to break. This is especially important for those of us who obtain some advantages from the current organization and administration of power. Social relations of racism, to take one example, produce whiteness as an intergenerational political project that recruits people identified as “white” to align with ruling elites and against Indigenous people, Black people, and others racialized as “not white.” Over more than four centuries, this alignment has been crucial for sustaining colonialism and capitalism in North America. Applying a long view, we can see that this is a legacy that many before us, coming from many different circumstances, have attacked for the good of humanity and the planet. It’s one that we can work to break as well. In this way, understanding ourselves as links in a chain of struggle involves making practical choices about which legacies we build on, and which we fight. 9

This type of understanding can also help us to appreciate the significance of robustly multi-generational movements. Sustained efforts to transform the world need ways of reproducing themselves and need contributions from people throughout their lives. Whether we look at Indigenous peoples fighting for sovereignty, the long Black freedom struggle, or sustained working-class movements against capitalism, resilient resistance almost always involves people of different generations working together (though not without tension and conflict). This means building movements capable of welcoming and holding children, ageing people, and caregivers. 10

The Struggle Within the Struggle

There is also an intergenerational chain of struggle within movements. Looking back, we can recognize that one of the most consistent challenges liberatory efforts face is the tendency, usually unconscious, to replicate oppressive values and practices from dominant society. Many who have come before us have observed this tendency, and radical Black and other feminists of colour in the 1960s and 1970s played a particularly pivotal role in describing and challenging it. Still, it’s worth repeating the insight: even as we fight hierarchies based on gender, ability, race, sexuality, class, citizenship status, and other ruling relations, these hierarchies have shaped us and we frequently participate in reproducing them. As New York-based prison abolitionist Pilar Maschi said to me a number of years ago: “We’re trying to break down the system, and it lies in all of us.”

There are, sadly, many historical examples of this tendency and we can see it in today’s movements as well. Consider some concrete examples: the types of people (often cisgender men, usually white and able-bodied, frequently university-educated) who most often step confidently into leadership roles in movements, the ongoing reality of sexual assault among activists, or the movement activities (such as writing, public speaking, and high-risk direct action) that regularly get the most social recognition. We can also see this in the exclusionary assumptions that sometimes get built into campaigns. For instance, some environmental organizations have campaigned to “conserve” lands without ever meaningfully consulting the Indigenous peoples who have long cared for and lived in these places. Likewise, some immigrant rights efforts have used the slogan “we’re not criminals,” effectively leaving behind anyone who has ever been entangled with the criminal justice system.

This tendency poses significant challenges. Oppressive values and practices don’t just harm people and mar our liberatory aspirations. They also undermine our effectiveness: they spread hurt and distrust, corrode alliance-building, impede visionary strategy-making, damage and sometimes destroy organizations, and hold people back from manifesting their full capabilities. Whether we examine the past or the present, it’s clear that replicating social relations of domination invariably weakens movements.

While there is nothing new about any of this, there is thankfully nothing permanent about it either. With a long view, we can appreciate the determined efforts across cycles of struggle to challenge and transform oppressive values and practices in movements. Among many other experiences, Black people confronted racism in the first abolitionist movement, women contested sexism in the early socialist movement, immigrants and racialized people battled exclusion in the early labour movement, queers criticized heterosexism in movements of the 1960s, women of colour challenged racism and class status hierarchies in the women’s liberation movement, Black and other people of colour tackled racism in the Occupy movement, gender nonconforming people have fought for space in feminist and queer movements, and disabled people have challenged wide-ranging exclusions on the Left. 11

Although movements have an unfortunate tendency to replicate oppressive dynamics, this pattern rarely goes uncontested. Indeed, activists have criticized and fought entrenched social hierarchies in nearly every liberation struggle. Taken together, this is what some experienced radicals call “the struggle within the struggle.” The people who have led these struggles within the struggle have most often been those who directly experience devaluation and exclusion. At least initially, they have usually been small in number. But their efforts, over time, have had far-reaching effects. The development and impact of feminism, particularly over the last half-century, powerfully illustrates this. Women active in the movements of the 1960s consistently described widespread, unapologetic sexism and misogyny on the Left: being recognized only in terms of the men they were dating, excluded from organizational leadership and decision-making, ignored and disregarded in meetings, unquestioningly assigned to secretarial and caregiving roles, and subjected to overt harassment and demeaning jokes, among many other egregious experiences. The women’s liberation movement grew, in part, in direct opposition to this toxic atmosphere. 12 Because of those efforts and the subsequent cycles of feminist struggle, the culture of not only the Left but also dominant society is markedly different today.

Over the years, many feminists have helped me to appreciate more fully the significance of this change. I think particularly here of longtime activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, herself a prominent figure in the movements of the 1960s. Reflecting on sexism during that period, she told me at one point, “It used to be so blatant, where some guy would just say ‘shut up bitch, you talk too much.’ No guy would even consider that kind of blatant sexism now.” Importantly, she added, “But it does come out in other ways.” 13 This is a helpful frame: by no means did previous feminist efforts fully eradicate heteropatriarchy on the Left, but they substantially shifted expectations, practices, and behaviours. Today’s organizing against gender-based oppression rests on their efforts, including both their successes and failures.

Much the same can be said for all sorts of other struggles within the struggle. Collective efforts to challenge the replication of oppression within movements have, in many cases, had lasting and sometimes profound effects. For sure, as long as our society remains structured by exploitation and oppression, dominant values and practices will continue to seep into even our best attempts at social transformation. 14 But if we take a long view, we can recognize that, when we confront oppression in current movement initiatives, we are neither alone nor doing anything wholly new. With appreciation and intention, we can build upon the work that those before us have done to generate more and more emancipatory space within movements. In this sense, too, we can understand ourselves as participating in an intergenerational chain of struggle.

A Global Orientation

Fostering a long view involves not just a more expansive vision of time but also of place. One of the most strikingly consistent aspirations of liberatory movements—from the Haitian revolution of the late 18th century to the global anti-war movement of the early 21st century— is solidarity across borders. Although we can point to many failures of this aspiration in practice, we can also appreciate its endurance as a lodestar across generations and geographies of struggle. This endurance suggests that part of holding a long view is attempting to hold the world in view. Following activist-scholar Adam Hanieh, I think of this as taking “a global orientation.” 15

On the Left, we have most often talked about this in terms of internationalism. 16 While this ideal has taken different forms in different times and places, the central principle is working across national borders to offer tangible solidarity in struggles against oppression and exploitation and for dignity and self-determination.

Internationalism has been important in some Indigenous traditions as well and is crucial for decolonial struggles today. As Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson emphasizes, many Indigenous peoples have long practiced elaborate forms of internationalism with other human and nonhuman nations. 17 Whether in defence of Standing Rock or Wet’suwet’en territory, recent Indigenous-led efforts have built on these practices, fostering international relations in joint struggles against colonial dispossession and ecological devastation. These experiences underline that internationalism includes solidarity among and with Indigenous nations, even within the colonial borders of nation-states.

Building on internationalist ideals and practices, a global orientation involves consistently looking beyond our national contexts and thinking on a world scale. We are living in rich and dense relations with everyone else on the planet, even those who are far away physically and socially. At the same time, our world is riven by power relations that are shaped by dispossession, exploitation, and profit-making. These relations produce life and benefit for some, particularly concentrated in the Global North, and suffering and death for others, particularly concentrated in the Global South. Of course, these disparities are present within countries as well.

A global orientation is essential for understanding and confronting the interconnected crises we are experiencing. While this is especially clear with the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalating climate emergency, it is just as crucial for other contemporary crises of economies, care, migration, state violence, biodiversity, and rising authoritarianism. The current scale of the crisis is planetary, although there are plenty of specific manifestations at regional and national levels. If we take a global orientation, we can make better sense of these crises and make more strategic choices about contending with them.

A more affirmative way to think about this is that a global orientation opens up possibilities for solidarity and struggle at the scale necessary for fundamental social change. If we take a long view, we can see that staying within the confines of nation-states consistently undermines liberatory efforts. Successfully challenging ruling systems requires building movements, rooted in particular places, that communicate and collaborate across borders. This is the substance of the slogan from the global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, popularized by the international anti-capitalist network Peoples’ Global Action: “let our resistance be as transnational as capital.”

With a long view, we can also see how much a global orientation has enriched social struggles and movements historically. After all, this is not the first time that people have faced transcontinental crises with unfathomably high stakes. We need only think about European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, capitalism’s devastating economic slumps, the rise of fascism, the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, and countless US military interventions, to name just a handful of examples. In many previous circumstances, people fighting domination and destruction forged links of solidarity with people fighting in other parts of the world. At their best, they brought a spirit of care and curiosity to these relationships as they exchanged experiences, visited one another, pooled knowledge, shared resources, built coalitions, and worked to challenge local institutions responsible for oppression and devastation elsewhere.

Although frequently fraught, these relationships of solidarity have often been transformative. With a global orientation, activists in North America can learn from movements in places where the level of mass mobilization and political consciousness is much higher. Previous generations looked to France, Russia, Spain, Cuba, Vietnam, China, Nicaragua, and South Africa, among other places. In more recent decades, activists have looked to Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid, the Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas, and the Kurdish-led social revolution in Northeastern Syria. In addition to offering insights and inspiration, learning about these experiences can also serve as a sobering reminder that North America is not the centre of the world; rather, it’s a region with a lot of concentrated wealth and power that does tremendous damage across the planet. This awareness is a crucial part of a global orientation, particularly for those of us who live in North America.

Embracing Unpredictability

Cultivating a long view also involves embracing unpredictability. This can be challenging, particularly for those of us who find security in being able to assume that we know what will happen next. There are, for sure, predictions we can make with some confidence, such as those about the worsening climate emergency and the instability of global capitalism. But when we look carefully at the history of social struggles and social movements, we encounter so many surprises.

Writing in 1994, the radical historian Howard Zinn observed, “We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.” 18 Zinn was thinking about the big upheavals he had witnessed during his lifetime: victorious decolonization struggles across the Global South, the rise of anti-racist and feminist movements, the defeat of the US military in Vietnam, the demise of the Soviet Union, and more.

So much of what has transpired was unpredictable, and so much of what is yet to come we cannot foresee. This is humbling. Embracing it can help us to acknowledge our limits more honestly. Reflecting on his experiences with the unexpected takeoff of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, organizer Yotam Marom is blunt about this: “We just don’t know that much. We don’t know what’s going to work, what will resonate, or what people are ready for. Even those who look back and say they called it, the truth is, they didn’t know either.” 19 We could say the same for so many of the surprisingly fast-moving mobilizations of the last decade, such as Idle No More, strikes by teachers and prisoners, youth-led climate strikes, and the Movement for Black Lives. All of these mobilizations built on longstanding organizing efforts and tapped into popular anger and aspirations, but no one can fully explain why they took off when and how they did.

Embracing unpredictability doesn’t mean giving up on deliberate organizing efforts and simply waiting for the next wave of mass mobilization. Quite the opposite. “The not knowing means we will be wrong lots of the time, and right some of the time,” writes Marom. 20 And since we cannot know in advance when we’ll be right, we have to make our best guesses about what will be strategic and effective, and keep working with others to try things out. With a long view, we can see this is a common thread through movements of the past: while a struggle is unfolding, no one can say for sure whether it is going to be successful. When auto workers started occupying a factory in Flint, Michigan, in 1936 or when Black students began sitting-in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, there were no guaranteed victories. People took action based on their hopes, their indignation at injustice, and their assessments of unfolding possibilities.

Looking backward in time, we can create persuasive narratives that seamlessly thread together the activities that eventually led to movement wins. And we can certainly analyze previous experiences of struggle to figure out what was particularly effective. But the reality of the past is always messy and complex, full of uncertainty, contingency, and things we may never know. For any movement victory, the only thing we can say with complete certainty is that many people doing many things, cumulatively, made something happen that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred. A whole bunch of efforts, together, shifted the balance of power and led to a win.

Understanding this encourages us to have a much more capacious appreciation for the range of ways that people contribute to social movements and social transformation. 21 That is, recognizing the limits of what we can know can help us to see the potential in many activist efforts, even those that may seem insignificant or wrong-headed to us. Running campaigns to change public policies, taking direct action, establishing community institutions, setting up education programs, building organizations, painting graffiti, engaging in cultural revitalization projects, moving resources to grassroots efforts, offering public testimony, creating art installations, organizing in workplaces, raising children in community, setting up mutual aid infrastructure, protesting attacks on previous movement gains, challenging interpersonal forms of oppression, physically confronting reactionary forces, and setting up coalitions: these and many more contributions can be crucial. Indeed, successful movements of the past have combined these sorts of activities, at many different scales, to build collective power and achieve victories.

If we want to succeed, we should do our best to learn from previous experiences and be thoughtful about what we do. But who’s to say what precise combination of activities, in which set of unfolding circumstances, will ultimately make a difference? If we can’t know for sure what will be most important in the long run, we should think twice before dismissing what someone is doing as completely worthless. As veteran activist, singer, and scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon reminds us, the particular “way” or “issue” that any one of us chooses is not the way or issue. 22 If we assume that it is, we risk missing out on potentially vital pathways to liberation. With a long view, we can embrace unpredictability and all of the possibilities that come with it.

Staying Grounded

At its core, a long view is a set of habits of thinking and acting based on a particular understanding of history and struggle. These are habits, as I’ve suggested, that we can deliberately cultivate. They include maintaining links to the past, learning from those who came before us, seeing our efforts in intergenerational and global terms, and remaining open to new approaches and unpredictable developments. Built on a collective practice of resistant remembering, these habits can help us to appreciate the fragility of ruling institutions and the always-present possibilities for change. They are resources for identifying opportunities and sustaining hope.

These habits are practically useful as well. That is, they can help us to struggle more effectively right now. In the pace of movements and mobilizations, years can sometimes feel like decades and, with frequent activist turnover, we all too easily end up repeating similar mistakes and fights over and over again. The habits of a long view can help us to listen more carefully, act more collaboratively, reflect more deeply, think more strategically, learn from our mistakes, build on our strengths, and have new discussions that propel us forward.

These habits also offer tools for navigating the frequently disorienting circumstances in which we find ourselves. As we look backward, they can assist us in tracing the pathways that have led to our present, the lineages of struggle upon which we are building, and the lines of conflict and debate that shape the questions we face today. Looking forward, these habits can help us to understand (and, just as importantly, evaluate) our efforts through not only what they accomplish now, but also the groundwork they lay for future liberatory initiatives. Taking a long view enables us to locate ourselves within history as we attempt to act upon history.

Perhaps most importantly, these habits can help us to stay grounded for the long haul. In this period of accelerating crises and pervasive fear, we can be easily compelled into focusing solely on the short-term and reacting to what feels most immediate in our lives. Indeed, it can be tempting to give up on the future entirely. With a long view, however, we can remember that so many of those who came before us struggled, amid catastrophes and without guarantees, for new worlds that they could not yet fully imagine. 23 They lived full lives, fought hard, suffered defeats, and won victories. We can too. *

Notes

I, like many people, first heard that Lee had begun her journey to the spirit world from social media. As condolences and expressions of grief and loss poured in, I read them all in disbelief. So many people had stories to share highlighting her impact and legacy. I already knew some of the stories and sat in amazement hearing others for the first time: how she bulldozed space for Indigenous women in the North American literary world, storming the stage of the Vancouver Writer’s Festival in 1988 to demand that her work be read on her homelands; her involvement in the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) organizing and global anti-colonial movements. She lived a life of influence that is nothing short of astounding. Her giant presence has rippled across borders and boundaries.

It was only a few months earlier that I had spent hours every week with Lee. She had been my professor the previous semester, telling us stories of how she was gardening, writing, and knitting: keeping in good spirits. As a young Anishinaabe writer, I had long heard about Lee before meeting her. My mentors and elders from across Nations described her as a pioneer, a matriarch, whose work paved the way for all Indigenous authors, particularly Indigenous women, who came after her. I was recommended I am Woman and Ravensong again and again as foundational texts of Indigenous literature. I heard many stories of her standing up to voices of power and authority; I’d listen, slack-jawed, imagining a time when I might be so sure of myself, so brave. She seemed to be held with reverence wherever she went.

With this in mind, you can imagine the admiration and intimidation I felt the first time I met her. I remember sheepishly approaching her in the halls before I was ever her student and asking, “are you Lee Maracle?” even though I was already sure she was. I told her I loved her work and thanked her for being “a true badass.” She laughed—a laugh that seemed famous among those that knew her, a laugh that could fill a room—and she simply said, “you’re welcome.” I admired that she knew how powerful she was. I told her I had just turned 18, and wanted to be a writer one day. She looked serious, and very firmly, almost scoldingly, told me not to say that I wanted to be a writer. After all, I must already write to know that I see it in my future. Instead, I should focus on what I want my writing to do. Do I want it to be read? By who? Every Indigenous person has stories inside them, she said, only some people figure out how to tell them. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the first of many instances where she would suddenly drop wisdom for me to collect, offering me a new perspective to carry and contend with.

When I did finally make it to her lectures, it was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each week Lee would talk for at least an hour on Zoom. She was incredibly generous with her knowl edge and stories. She was also funny. One time, when she found out there was going to be a new governor general, she stopped the class and made a phone call to Senator Murray Sinclair: “Murray, it’s Lee”, she said. “Do you want to be the governor general? I should nom inate you! Call me back!” “You’re not on mute, Lee!” the teaching assistant reminded her. We all laughed.

Beyond her humour, I was amazed by the number of teachings she carried from across Nations: Anishinaabe, Stó:lō, Haudenosaunee, Squamish, and so many more. We discovered she knew my late uncle and she told me fond memories about their interactions that I had never known. It was a gift to be able to connect our lives that way. Lee also taught me many other things: that being well alive would take constant personal vigilance; to avoid phrases of self-deprecation such as “I lost my language,” that it still lives in my body and was just silenced; that singing is some of the best medicine we have. 1 These lessons and others let me see glimpses into just how expansive her wisdom was, collected from decades of conversations and activism.

Truly, there was so much that I gained directly from those dis cussions, and even more that I am left with to consider now. This is where I would like to share the hardest, and perhaps most important question Lee has left me with: How can we hold our elders and leaders, our pioneers and giants, with reverence, compassion, and also, account ability? You see, I struggle with how to reconcile the contributions from her remarkable life, ones that I surely benefit from and feel deep gratitude for, with instances where I would leave classes distressed, wondering how I could discuss with her that what she said earlier that day didn’t sit well with me.

I was nervous. Afraid that if I broached our discussion the wrong way we might find ourselves in conflict: this was the last thing I wanted to do with someone I admired and who was an authority in my life. At the same time, I knew if we could have a generative conversation, if we could learn from one another and each come to new understandings, it would be worthwhile. I thought about how just a month earlier Lee had told the class that, “the greatest gift the Earth gave us was to give us conflict so that we can grow new things and be bound together by them.” 2 With this in mind, I took the plunge. Lee, the class, and I spoke for hours. I was glad that the computer camera cut me off at the chest because my hands shook the whole time with nerves. Lee said she felt that being overly careful about how we talk about subjects like oppression, privilege, and relationality would be a disservice to the truth. These ideas are inherently difficult and we have to be able to face them head-on, even laugh at them at times. She thought that perhaps we were also experiencing a generational divide. She noted that she loves young rebels but that today, we use language to discuss issues in our movements differently than when she was first introduced to them, but that everyone would do well to try and see the value in both approaches.

Our weekly sessions ended shortly after, and news that she had begun her journey came not long after that. I wish there had been more time for so many conversations, but I especially wonder what would have come about if we were able to dig further into these unsettled tensions. I have to believe that Lee and I would agree on the necessity of facing tension, that this is how our communities become better. We must do the hard work to work through our responsibilities to one another and our kin. Lee wrote extensively about this necessity in her reflections on solidarity. She says, “whatever decisions we make must be made with the interest of our struggle at heart. This means that we participate and promote solidarity work… solidarity work isn’t a fad. It’s a vital part of our survival.” 3 I take this to heart, both intellectually and as practice. Remembering that time with Lee highlights how vulnerable it can be to wade through inter-community discord. Taking a magnifying glass to my nerves from that day, I realize now that they stemmed from a fear that she would reject me. Dismiss my concerns or ideas. Rejection and conflict from within community stings and I think many people are naturally inclined to avoid that. In a world that demands we must always be fighting, rest and ease often feel like it can only be found from within our close relationships, and in the safety of teachers like Lee. It takes a lot of conviction and practice to disrupt those ideals. This is one reason why ‘calling in’—the practice of centring intimate conversations around faults and giving people chances to learn and be accountable as a first response— is some of the most difficult but necessary work we can undertake within our communities. It is clear that whatever approach we take, it must be done with care. As Lee told us, how people work through conflict “can be empowering or disempowering, depending on how attentive they are to their relationships and relative power and privilege.” 4 There is likely no universal model that we can apply to instances of confrontation: it will be different from person to person and instance to instance. But despite my lack of certainty, I know that transformative practices of accountability are possible. I hear increasing stories from friends who challenged elders and found ways to learn from one another, making a situation safer for everyone going forward; stories of sweat lodges that are more inclusive of gender diversity and relatives with addictions; teachings that have shaken the lingering influence of Christianity and missionization; a growing understanding of how we need to protect and centre Afro-Indigenous, Indigiqueer, and Indigenous people globally; the development of trauma-informed care. All of these instances give me hope that we are collectively becoming better at pursuing the lifelong project that is being a good relative. It is work that is messy and non-romanticizable; it doesn’t yield recognition or material gain under capitalist, individualist, structures. However, it is work that current and future generations surely thank us for. It is work that I know Lee helped pave the way for as she demanded liberation for oppressed peoples globally, dedicating her life to upholding Stó:lō law and writing against gendered oppression and homophobia in such a forthright way that it surely inspired generations of Indigenous peoples to try and be better relatives.

As I write this, a worry runs through the back of my mind: that folks will think I am trying to ring the bells of a supposed cancel culture. I want to be clear that I share these reflections not to disparage the memory of a hero among Indigenous peoples or to call into question peoples’ very real mourning. Instead, I want to recognize that our heroes have limitations: that denying people their faults is just as much a form of dehumanization as idolization; that we need to have tough conversations about these things to build truly transformative, loving relationships within and among our communities. I think Lee is such an important person to have brought me to these reflections because it was her own challenging of patriarchy and internalized colonialism in her Nation and in Indigenous movements like NARP and the American Indian Movement (AIM) that made her so revolutionary to so many people: she loved her people enough to demand that they be better. I believe it is a similar love that makes me feel so badly that we must have conversations about inter-community harm, even though having them is sometimes immeasurably difficult or intimidating. I know I must embody the same bravery I first admired in Lee all those years ago, and have them anyway. Even if my hands shake each time. In recognition of her legacy, and in memory of my time as her student, that is a commitment I make here.

To end, I want to return to the motivating question of this essay: How do we hold our heroes? As I write, I am reminded of a quote from the incredible Black feminist bell hooks, another hero to many who passed in 2021, who also asks this question, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” 5

bell first asked this question before I was even born. Looking to her and Lee, I find answers. I believe they would say the answer is: with love. Lee wrote in I Am Woman that “love defines our humanity.” 6 I hope to be able to love our heroes enough to acknowledge their shortcomings, mistakes, and experiences in the world; to love our kin enough that we are willing to challenge even the most admired voices to ensure they’re being taken care of and honoured; to love future generations enough that we have the tough conversations so their communities might be more compassionate and accountable places to grow up in. There is no roadmap for these questions, but I have to believe if we are rooted in that place of love, that we are off to a good start. *

Notes

When Lee Maracle passed into the spirit world on November 11, 2021, the loss was felt throughout activist, academic, and artistic communities in North America and beyond. 1 There was an outpouring of tributes and honourings reflecting on five decades of organizing, writing, speaking, and community-building. Maracle had a remarkable impact on our generation of Indigenous writers and thinkers. Her fiction and poetry were unapologetically rooted in Stó:lō storytelling and her writing detonated the idea of genre. Her political work rejected white feminism alongside patriarchy and set the course for Indigenous feminisms for the next two decades. She introduced a generation to what solidarity with Palestinians and other anti-colonial peoples could mean, and by embracing the Two-Spirit, queer, and trans community, she inspired the tremen dous contributions we’re seeing from this artistic, intellectual, and political community in the present. She went to our protests, our plays and performances, and every one of our book launches. She was fearless, unapologetic, and hilarious. She spoke her mind, and heard us when we did the same back.

A week or so after her passing, the RCMP attacked and arrested members of the Gidimt’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation, who had renewed blockades earlier in the month to stop Coastal GasLink from constructing a natural gas pipeline in northwest British Columbia. As land defenders organized solidarity actions across Canada, we thought of Maracle and the organizing she did in the late 1960s and early 1970s with her comrades in the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) and the Native Study Group (NSG). The convergence of her passing and these renewed land-based sites of resistance are not only a reminder of how little has changed over the course of her life, but they are also echoes of the sorts of Indigenous resistances Lee was involved in as a young person.

The NARP was established in Vancouver in the late fall of 1967 after a meeting was called by Indigenous women in response to a controversial trial involving the rape and murder of a Native teen ager, Rose Marie Roper, by three wrongfully acquitted white men near Williams Lake, BC. 2 According to NARP founding members, Henry Jack and Geraldine Larkin (hereafter Gerry Ambers), NARP members included a cross-section of the growing urban Indigenous population, formerly incarcerated people, those that had abandoned high school, a few academics and university students, as well as Native working class folks who either lived in or had recently migrated to the city from more rural communities. 3

While active, NARP would grow to include chapters in most major Native urban centres across BC: Vancouver, Port Alberni, Ashcroft, Kamloops, Victoria, and Duncan. 4 In its early days, members would meet weekly in the form of small discussion-groups anywhere that space could be found: at members’ apartments, in bars, diners, Indian Friendship Centres, and the offices of leftist and communist organizations. NARP was formed explicitly as a “direct action” group to press the needs of grassroots Indigenous peoples living in cities. 5

One of NARP’s first gestures of solidarity was directed at the newly formed Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defence. Kwakwaka’wakw Elder and artist Gerry Ambers and another NARP member, the late Tony Antoine, felt it important to reach out to the organization to inform them of NARP and offer to sell the Panther newsletter, The Black Panther, to help raise money and support the Black liberation struggle in the United States. In response, their Seattle contact suggested that representatives of the two organizations get together to discuss a basis of unity. Following the meeting, Ambers and Antoine returned to Vancouver and, along with other core NARP members—Ray Bobb, Lee Maracle (at the time Lee Bobb), Willie Dunn, David Hanuse, Henry Jack, and Joan Carter (Lee’s sister, now Joan Stewart)—established their own political platform, expressed in its “eight-point program,” which was borrowed and adapted from the Panther’s “ten-point program” with Party consent. 6

Similar to the Panthers, members of NARP worked to address the material needs of the communities they were a part of. They supported strikes led by students attending residential or boarding schools. They formed a Vancouver inner-city patrol squad called the “Beothuk Patrol” that intervened in the rampant anti-Indigenous settler and police violence that is still well documented in the neighbourhood. They self-published a newsletter with a readership of over 5,000 people that covered topics ranging from recruitment for land based direct actions, general articles pertaining to the Indigenous freedom struggle, Native projects with anti-capitalist forms of economic development, news regarding the successes and failures of national liberation efforts in the Third World, as well as suggested reading lists for its young, radical readership. 7

Lee and her comrades at NARP also read. They read the works of Third World theorists like Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Albert Memmi, and in 1971, they formed a socialist study group to read and discuss and plan. The NSG had a sister organization in San Francisco formed by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Robert Mendoza, to apply “Marxian analysis and national liberation theory to the history of colonization of Native Americans in North America.” 8 In 1975, Maracle helped organize the Native Peoples’ Friendship Delegation, which was composed of 18 First Nations and Métis people who travelled to the Peoples Republic of China, paid for in part by the Chinese Communist Party, to learn about Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, and China’s treatment of national minorities. 9 Upon their return to Canada they organized several events to share what they had learned, including applying the possibilities of what they had learned to their own peoples’ experiences of colonization and decolonization in North America.

NARP and the NSG were part of Maracle’s early political edu cation and the influence of those experiences is threaded throughout her body of work. She would go on to write Bobbie Lee: Indian Rebel, I am Woman, and a long list of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry: works that refused colonialism and capitalism alongside heteropatriarchy, embraced Indigenous ways of thinking and being, and demanded solidarity with a host of anti-colonial movements. She would go on to mother and grandmother her own family alongside nurturing Indigenous theatre and writing communities in Canada and beyond. She would teach, lecture, write, dance, protest, and laugh her way through the tangle of colonialism.

In reflecting on her influence on our own practices, these early years of her life remind us of the sheer hard work of struggle and movement-building. She taught us the importance of reaching beyond one’s own experience, and of engaging with revolutionary texts and movements from around the world. She and her comrades practiced care for the community that extends beyond oneself, and centred gender in their analysis and organizing from the beginning.

Lee Maracle’s lived life reminds us that revolution means we must transform ourselves, and that, as she wrote at the end of I am Woman, “the road to freedom is paved with intimate knowledge of the oppressed.” 10 We hope to carry these politics forward in our own as a way of honouring the resistance of Maracle and her comrades in NARP and the NSG. Travel well Lee, we’ll miss you. *

Notes

On August 5, 2021, Karl Gardner sat down with four members of the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project to discuss the organization’s ongoing work to support prisoner organizing across Ontario, develop mutual aid networks, and build a movement committed to prison abolition. Together, we reflected on the organization’s achievements, challenges, and strategic approaches to prisoner solidarity and abolitionist organizing.

Jessica is a member of the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Toronto Metropolitan University.

Alannah Fricker is an abolitionist community organizer, artist, caregiver, and harm reduction activist. She is a member of the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project and Abolition Coalition and is a Registered Social Worker studying Social Justice Education at OISE.

Rajean Hoilett is a prison abolitionist and community organizer. Rajean is a member of the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project and the Abolition Coalition, a national network of abolitionist organizations that recently launched the Choosing Real Safety campaign.

Lindsay Jennings is a person who survived the carceral system. She is a committed advocate passionate about bringing positive changes to those involved with the correctional and criminal justice systems by ensuring that substance use, mental health, and basic needs are addressed as immediately as possible once they have been admitted into custody and throughout their incarceration.

When and why did The Toronto Prisoner’s Rights Project (TPRP) emerge? What are the key issues, campaigns, or actions that TPRP takes up?

Jessica: In 2019, a few of us were at the Decarceral Futures conference held at Queen’s University and connected with some folks from the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP), a collective that challenges all aspects of criminalization through public education, socially-engaged research, and activism. Afterward, we wished there was something like CPEP in Toronto so we put out a call to different community organizations, and asked if there were existing projects, or if creating something like CPEP would fill a gap. That’s when we met Lindsay who was working with Prisoners with HIV/AIDS Support Action Network (PASAN).

Lindsay: When TPRP initially started I was working for a non-profit organization, where it was very difficult to voice your personal opinion and advocate in certain situations because the carceral system is great at keeping people silent: both the folks inside and also service providers that work within the jails. I thought TPRP would be a great opportunity because prisoners aren’t talked about enough, and conditions inside are not talked about in any sort of compassionate way. Even if someone is a victim when they are incarcerated, the narrative always comes back to why the person is in jail in the first place. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit we entered crisis-mode. Ontario was one of the only provinces that didn’t offer prisoners free masks, and when people were being released, nothing was open, shelters were full, and it was chaos. So this group has been really important in mobilizing and organizing to bring prisoners’ issues to the forefront in a compassionate way.

Rajean: There are a lot of other prisoner-services organizations that exist in Toronto, but we found there wasn’t the kind of grassroots advocacy organization that would do the work of holding truth to power. A lot of us have loved ones inside, or have been incarcerated, or work with prisoners regularly. We wanted to build a community from which to take action and channel the same kind of power that was mobilized by movements like Black Lives Matter. We saw that prisoners were being left out of a lot of conversations on the Left.

One of the first issues we mobilized around was the exploitative prison phone system. Until recently, Bell Canada held a monopoly over the phones inside prisons in Ontario. They charged prisoners, their loved ones and support networks hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars every month to stay connected. To make matters worse, the phone system only allowed prisoners to contact landlines. While Bell masqueraded as a mental health champion, the truth is that they made a lot of money by putting up barriers to communication between prisoners and their support systems. Through a freedom of information request, we learned that Bell’s contract with the Ontario government was up for renewal in 2020. This was a really clear issue for us to bring more people to prisoners rights advocacy. We used Bell’s Let’s Talk 1 campaign to draw attention to the ways that Bell and the Ontario government jeopardized the health and wellbeing of prisoners for profit.

But we were never under the illusion that Doug Ford or Sylvia Jones––who, as Solicitor General, is responsible for overseeing prisons––were going to do the right thing and make telecommunications free for people who are incarcerated. We did not expect this kind of action from any of the political parties. But even under this regressive government, we were able to raise awareness about the issue. As a result of the continued organizing we’ve seen minor improvements to the phone system and the Ontario government did not renew its longstanding contract with Bell Canada.

Jessica: The Bell campaign was really important in that it humanized folks that are criminalized and incarcerated, something the mainstream media does not do a good job of. And a lot of people can connect to hating Bell, right? Given the corporate oligopoly that exists in Canadian telecommunications, the general public has long been incensed with Bell over outrageous telecom prices. This was an effective bridge that allowed folks on the outside to empathize with the plight of incarcerated people for whom communication with family, friends, lawyers and social services is essential to their mental health connections. This campaign was important to help people become aware of the issues inside different correctional spaces, prisons and jails.

Alannah: We started with an advocacy and education approach to organizing. We were doing weekly webinars about incarceration and lots of government-focused advocacy. When the pandemic hit, our work shifted toward mutual aid. We’re still doing all three––education, direct action, and mutual aid––but the mutual aid has grown and brought a lot of people into the work. We’ve expanded our group and its reach, which has allowed us to connect with a lot of new people and provide meaningful support to prisoners.

What are some of the main political commitments and approaches to organizing that TPRP uses? What do practices like abolition, and mutual aid mean to your organization?

Lindsay: I have experience of being incarcerated, and I hadn’t met people who talked about abolition, capitalism, or any of that. So I approached the work from a place of frustration. I know the feeling of being silenced, and the indifference of people who don’t care about what happens to you inside because they think you deserve to be there. So, for me, the importance of this work is to empower folks inside, and for them to know that there’s a group of people outside that care about them, who are aware that they’re alive, and want to put pressure on the system to improve their conditions. This humanizing element is so important. TPRP gave me a little bit of relief.

Jessica: One important piece to our approach is reframing innocence and guilt. The defund the police campaign is intimately connected to the work that we do. But it can rest upon mobilizing an assumption of innocence. We want to defund the police because oftentimes they fuck around with innocent people. But, an abolitionist approach means that even if you’re guilty, you’re still a person, you still have rights, and you don’t deserve the violence of the state. For a lot of people, the idea of guilt is sometimes where the buck stops, so to speak. We’re trying to push back against this, and to insist that incarcerated folks deserve care, respect, and dignity, and shouldn’t be incarcerated in the first place.

But the reality is, people are incarcerated, so we have to take cues from the folks inside. Sometimes that means finding meeting points between our abolitionist end-goals and reforms that can be meaningful for incarcerated folks right now. This is a constant balancing act. Trying to pursue reforms that provide material relief in the moment but don’t bolster the existing system. Reforms that don’t legitimize or contribute to the expansion of existing carceral systems.

Rajean: Fundamentally we’re moving in solidarity with incarcerated people, and we are an abolitionist organization. That’s the void that we’re filling in Toronto right now. Many other organizations get funding to communicate with prisoners and provide support, but they are not expressly abolitionist. In fact, they sort of tiptoe around abolition as a way to maintain their access and their funding. Being here for abolition means building a community that sees an end to incarceration and police violence. And something fundamentally important to TPRP is that we believe we will win. It’s an exhausting fight. But folks continue to come through.

Something I really love about TPRP is that we are building a transformative community space. And this is especially important given the nature of this work: some folks come and go. We have members who are here one day and incarcerated the next. And we’re trying to deal with the cop inside of our head and to create a community that cares for each other, even if folks might have engaged in acts of harm.

Alannah: For us, abolition means that everyone is welcome and everyone is valued. We all bring different things to the work, and it’s okay when people are in the process of learning about abolition. Lately, we’ve paused to look back at what we’ve accomplished in the last year and realized we’ve built an incredible group that’s in it for the long haul. This is a lifetime long––lifetimes long struggle. Abolition is not something we’ve arrived at; it is a process that involves building communities that keep us safe where we take care of and value each other. So now, when we need to take breaks and support one another in our group, we are internalizing an ethic of mutual aid and practising the gentleness and care we want to see in the world.

Rajean: We keep saying the words “abolitionist organization,” and that is a really important part of our work. But not everyone in TPRP fully embraces abolition or identifies as an abolitionist. I think the fundamental thing that unites us is that we care about prisoners. We’re in solidarity with prisoners. I think that this journey unavoidably takes us toward abolition. But we have this ethic that we need millions of people in this fight, so we have to navigate the tensions that arise when not everyone has the same political views.

Jessica: That’s very central to an abolitionist ethos, right? People can commit harm, people can be volatile, people can fuck up, people can have disagreements. But that doesn’t mean that we remove their humanity. We are still in community with them and that’s fundamental to abolition.

I understand that TPRP emerged just before the COVID-19 pandemic. How has the pandemic specifically affected prisoners? How have prisoners and groups like yours responded?

Lindsay: Fucking masks! It’s absurd that in the middle of a pandemic, we had to start a campaign to get incarcerated people access to masks. The pandemic meant mobilizing people to bring these basic survival needs to prisoners who are in life or death situations. But it shows that the government truly doesn’t care about the life or death of prisoners.

I found it interesting seeing people compare COVID-19 lockdowns to prison life. For the majority of people, we were locked down in our homes with tv, music, a fridge full of food, telephones, laptops, windows, fresh air, soap, showers, pets, books, access to information about COVID-19, access to masks, and other protective equipment. But imagine being stuck in small cell with your bed, bathroom and sink all in that space. Imagine not having windows, and if you do have a window it is frosted so you cant see outside. Imagine not listening to music at all. Imagine not having easy access to doctors or nurses when sick with COVID-19, all you get is solitary confinement with random check-ins from the on duty nurse or a correctional officer. While we watched stories and cried with families that couldn’t visit their dying loved ones in the hospital, yet prisoners inside might suffer and die alone, and the family would only be told after the fact. The atmosphere inside jails and prisons is harmful and inhumane. You can’t even protect yourself from what could happen to you inside.

While one is too many, we are lucky that there has only been one death in Ontario thus far. It was an 85-year old man who was arrested and was awaiting a mental health assessment, and he caught COVID-19 while inside and died. Sadly, this tragedy wasn’t surprising, but it did give us momentum within the community to mobilize email zaps, open letters, op-eds. We make sure to stay in touch with and take direction from folks inside, which means the world to the people who are stuck in the system. This goes a long way to combat the fear that people have inside, that nobody gives a shit about them.

Jessica: The majority of our organizing has been during the pandemic. In a way we had to create new strategies, but we were also born through these strategies. During the pandemic, people were glued to their TVs, to the news, and our ability to get media coverage was really important. People were consuming information in a way they didn’t before: webinars and online events were much more popular. Before the pandemic there was a myth that the public is apathetic, but the pandemic has proven this not to be the case: people sometimes just don’t have the time to get involved in movements. And the pandemic provided an opportunity for people to actually start paying attention to things and engaging in a more accessible way.

One obstacle we faced was that frequency and intensity of lockdowns for prisoners. Sometimes, people would only get out of their cells for 20-30 minutes a day, and not even every day. Our phone calls from prisoners and our ability to get information about what was happening inside became scarce. Because, on top of the cost of phone calls, people first and foremost want to call their loved ones to make sure everyone is okay. So, one of the things that we did in response was to start a jail hotline that services a number of different institutions in the GTA. The hotline allows prisoners to make calls to us free of charge, and helps us connect with folks and get information about the conditions inside.

Rajean: COVID-19 exacerbated the harms of capitalism, the state, and criminalization across the board. But for the people inside who are continuously harmed every single day, the conditions became even more life-threatening. We saw that the state doesn’t have any regard for the predominantly Black and Indigenous people who are locked up inside human cages. We saw this in outrageous statements by Premier Doug Ford and Federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, who publicly stated that vaccinating prisoners was not a priority despite public health recommendations. This is not to mention the valid issues that Black and Indigenous people inside might have with vaccines administered by a prison, and the inadequate public health information received inside.

Lindsay: It’s important to understand that people inside only get access to 30-second clips on CP24 2 about the pandemic and changing public health protocols. They don’t have access to real public health information. They’re just able to watch quick news clips about the lockdowns, different vaccines, people dying from blood clots, etc. which fosters an environment of fear. Incarcerated folks wonder why they can’t get masks or sanitizer, or the general hygiene products that they need. The confusion and the excessive lockdowns aren’t good for their mental health either. They are terrified of getting sick because they believe if they get COVID while inside, they’re going to die. People are living in this kind of fear every day.

Alannah: The conditions inside prisons and jails were worse than we’d ever known. There were also changing conditions of release. While prison population numbers are starting to climb again, we saw 30 percent of provincial prisoners released during the first wave of COVID-19. But folks were being released with no support. So, we started the Prisoner Emergency Support Fund and the Good Food Box program to help people getting out. Most jails are in remote communities and buses were barely running, so sometimes, we had to pick people up ourselves. There were really inadequate release supports before the pandemic, but even they crumbled and there was really nothing left for people. That’s where our mutual aid projects came in, to fill the gap between incarceration and being in the community.

Rajean: Through the Prisoner Emergency Support Fund we’ve raised over $200,000. So many people want to donate and give money to the people inside. This contradicts what we hear from Conservative politicians; that people who are incarcerated aren’t a priority or that they aren’t who we should direct resources toward. And we also saw how threatening this was to carceral institutions: they were actually blocking money that we sent to prisoners. Even though they were going to spend that money in prison!

These actions have dispelled any notion that the state cares about the people they’ve locked up, and has therefore put abolition on the table. We quickly went from saying, “we deserve to have free phone calls with our people inside,” to saying, “no one needs to be locked up and we need to start freeing people.” During the first year of the pandemic, there was a big reduction in provincial prison populations in Ontario and similar numbers in provinces across the country. And the world didn’t fall apart, right? It proved what we have been demanding, that abolition is possible.

What are some major victories or significant outcomes of your work so far? What have you found are some of the most challenging aspects of your work?

Jessica: One big success is the popular support for the Prisoner Emergency Support Fund. We’ve heard from folks through letters and phone calls that this money has been life-changing, not only financially but just to know that people out there give a fuck and are willing to support them.

We’ve also had a lot of success garnering media coverage of issues faced by prisoners. I don’t want to underplay the importance of that because, while it hasn’t shifted government policy, it has created a real shift in public awareness about the conditions faced by people who are incarcerated. It’s no small feat getting big media outlets to report on this. We’ve been pretty consistent in our ability to channel information about hunger strikes or outbreaks within prisons to major media outlets.

For example, since the outbreak of COVID-19 there have been more than a dozen hunger and labour strikes in both provincial and federal institutions in Ontario. While a labour strike in a prison or jail may garner minor media coverage, hunger strikes often begin and end without the general public ever knowing. As a result, prisoners’ bargaining capacity is next to nothing, and the general public remain completely unaware of the conditions that exist inside our provincial jails and federal prisons. One of the central ways we organize to assist striking prisoners is through our jail hotlines which currently service five institutions in Ontario. Through word of mouth and strategic flyering, our hotline number has gotten around and prisoners can call us free of charge to communicate to us what’s happening on the inside. If a strike is going to happen, for example, this hotline allows us to reach out to our media contacts to cover the story so that the Ministry of the Solicitor General cannot just quietly ignore or squash organizers’ concerns.

Rajean: The fact that we continue to grow as an organization is a success. People now have a place to go to participate in prisoner advocacy and can plug into this work in many different ways. A lot of us have talked about this as being a lifelong struggle, and now we have built a home for this work. And we’ve built relationships with other communities and organizations, like folks fighting anti-Black racism, those fighting for #LandBack and Indigenous sovereignty, Palestinian organizers, folks organizing within the street community and for harm reduction, folks organizing against gender-based violence. Now, people organizing in these like-minded groups are incorporating an analysis of prisons and are talking about prisoners and the harms of the prison industrial complex.

Lindsay: Prisoners face a lot of consequences for organizing on the inside and have little to no supports once they are released. Prisoner’s Justice Day is a perfect example of how prisoners are silenced when they protest or speak up against the human rights violations they face while incarcerated. Prisoners’ poems, articles, letters are all thrown out and not allowed to be mailed out of the facility. We have seen entire institutions be locked down due to the Prisoner Justice Day actions––like hunger strikes and refusals to work––that are organized to honor and remember all those prisoners who have died within the walls of our jails. We have also seen prisoners that get their phone calls, visits, and other privileges taken away due to speaking the truth and speaking out. Prisoners also get punished if they submit or even ask for a “blue form,” which is a complaint to the Ontario Ombudsman. Despite all this, we have seen more provincial organizing inside than ever before. The pandemic pushed people inside to organize hunger strikes in order to speak out about the excessive lockdowns, no masks, no visits, no programs, the heat, the water, and other inhumane conditions.

And it hasn’t just been in Toronto: we work closely with CPEP in Ottawa, we’ve connected with Barton Prisoner Solidarity Project in Hamilton, and a massive group of families and loved ones mobilizing in London, Ontario. It’s about educating people and bringing together different perspectives to think about a life beyond incarceration. We encounter some groups that bring it back to reform, you know, like “we need a new jail,” or “we need more police officers.” But TPRP pushes those conversations toward the need to defund the police and prisons and demonstrate what abolition looks like. We push people to question what they value in their communities.

Once people are released they sometimes contact us to say thank you and to connect with our group. And it’s really empowering for people to connect with grassroots organizations when they are trying to rebuild their lives, because they can feel like they are building a community and making a difference, like they are a part of something. So the value of our group is also more personal. It is special to have people across the country that believe you and care about you when you tell them stories about what happened to you in jail.

Alannah: We’re also doing a lot of political advocacy responding to provincial and federal governments that are planning to invest more and more into prisons. One campaign we’ll be launching soon is our 500 Possibilities report, which responds to the Ontario government’s decision to invest $500 million into prisons and jails over the next five years. We also launched the We Keep Each Other Safe project, which included a series of community forums on alternatives to policing and practical skill-building workshops, including trainings on overdose prevention, suicide intervention, mental health first aid, and more. In addition, we’ve developed many creative opportunities in our group, including an abolitionist mural project and a prisoner art exhibition. I think one success we’ve had as a group is making abolition accessible for many people and offering different ways to get involved.

Do you have any advice for organizers interested in joining the fight for prison abolition?

Rajean: We need, to paraphrase Mariamme Kaba, “a million experiments,” if we’re going to create a world in which it is unthinkable to lock someone away inside a cage and cut off their connections to their support networks. It’s important to start learning and do research on these issues, but that should not be a barrier to entry. We need your energy; we need your love; we need your compassion now.

So if you’re reading this and you’re not doing some kind of prison abolition work, this is your invitation: do it. Prisons affect everybody. We are all complicit. We all have a responsibility to think about how to take an abolitionist ethic in the places we live, work, and organize. There’s something you can do to reduce the amount of people that are getting locked up in our communities.

Jessica: For folks that want to get involved, join an abolitionist organization or start your own. But that can’t be the only space where this work happens, because abolition is multi-faceted. This means you have to bring an abolitionist ethic to your immigration support work, your gender equity work, your work in queer communities or in labour unions. How does the work you’re already doing intersect with the process of criminalization and abolition. We don’t just need one abolitionist movement, we need this ethic to penetrate the whole spectrum of organizations and organizing work that is already happening.

Lindsay: We can return to the famous saying: “nothing about us without us.” You have to take the time to include the folks and the voices of those experiencing incarceration. You have to be creative. And it’s going to take a lot of people. So, this cannot be siloed work. Non-profit work in prisons is really siloed because of the competition around funding and access. But prison abolition has to be a collective effort; it can’t be siloed and it has to encompass everyone.

Alannah: I’m thinking about Dean Spade’s book on mutual aid which was really instructive for me, and how it echoes what Rajean and Lindsay have said: we need hundreds of millions of people to abolish the police and prisons, and build a society where we keep everybody safe. We need this many people to enact climate justice and save our planet and each other from extinction. These are massive projects that we’re trying to undertake. This is not going to be done by a few professionalized organizations or individuals with specialties and degrees. For me, it’s about recognizing our power and our worth in this work and that we don’t necessarily need to be trained, or specialized, or well-read in any particular thing to be valuable to this movement.

I’ve been learning a lot from Kwame Ture’s speeches and thinking about the difference between organizing and mobilizing. Mobilizing people is important, but the importance of organizing comes from its ability to sustain and grow a movement through capacity building. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to organize to the extent where I’m not really needed. It’s not to say that we should not be integral to the movement or do the work, but rather that if something happens to us or our capacity is reduced, the movement and the momentum shouldn’t disappear. Creating leader-full organizations is necessary and it is a matter of disability justice and sustainability.

Jessica: Right now, Canada is in its largest prison building campaign since the Great Depression. This has been going on since 2010, and every year, there’ are another five or six new or expansion-based projects. These are costing billions of dollars. So, raising awareness about budgeting is important too, and that’s where politics becomes an important point of intervention. You can go to budget proposal meetings, submit your own proposals, and hold your councillors, and representatives in provincial and federal government accountable.

Lindsay: We are in a really critical time, we have an election coming up, and we need to be mobilizing and asking the right questions for the folks inside. There’s momentum right now that can help us really push our communities to think about the direction we want to steer for the next few years of our lives. The pandemic has shown that we can make massive changes in our society. So we need to mobilize people we believe are going to invest in the community.

Rajean: We also need to acknowledge that movements don’t happen over the course of a few months, or even a few years. Prison abolition takes lifetimes and generations of struggle. But we’re changing the conditions every single day and the work that we do today is incredibly important. I think just remember that it’s not all on you and the people that you know, to change the world in a day, but you’ve got to be a part of the change right now.

So, at some point in the future, they’re going to tell a story about what we all did in this moment. Do yourself a favour: be on the right side of history. Be a part of the movement of people that said, “this isn’t right,” and that laid the foundation for us to abolish prisons and free people. *

A note for our readers who are currently incarcerated:

Get in touch through our TPRP Jail Hotlines for free advocacy, referrals, information and support! We are currently operating Monday-Saturday from 9-11 am EST and 2-4 pm EST.

For the Toronto South Detention Center, Toronto East Detention Centre, Maplehurst Correctional Complex, Ontario Correctional Institute, and the Vanier Centre for Women call 0-416-307-2273.

For Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre call 0-519-642-9289.

Send us a letter for advocacy, release support, art and writing submissions, and pen pals:

Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project

PO Box 291 Toronto P

Toronto, ON M5S 2S8

Notes

Every week, Sam Salour sits down (on Zoom) with a couple dozen other intrepid readers, and works through Marxist texts, each member of the week’s gathering reading a few lines at a time, out loud. It’s a slow way to get through Capital, but one can really get a handle on concepts like commodity fetishism or primitive accumulation if you have the patience and dedication to talk it out over two months in a context where no question is too basic. It is indeed Sam’s patience, careful explanations, and guidance that carry these reading groups forward. Upping the Anti’s Sharmeen Khan—herself an attendee of these reading groups—sat down with Sam to talk about the project, and more importantly, the role and place of theory in radical movement work.

A contentious issue that I’ve experienced, and I think a lot of our readers have, is the role of theory in organizing. I’ve heard some people say it’s important, but there’s also a lot of dismissiveness, and they claim that theory isn’t accessible, or that working-class people don’t read theory, that it’s the realm of academia. We really wanted to have an interview with someone to talk about why we, as organizers, engage in political theory. So, can you introduce yourself and talk about your political journey with Marxism and revolutionary organizing?

Sure. I’m from Iran and I grew up in a radical Marxist family, but my parents never had me sit down and read Marx or any type of politics. I actually did my bachelor’s in mathematics, and a master’s in theoretical physics. But by the time I was doing my master’s, I had tensions between what I was doing and what I thought was important in terms of social justice and various problems in the world. I was at Cambridge, this small college with highly intellectual “smart” people, but they didn’t really care much about the fact that, for example, so many people don’t have the opportunity to study there, even though they may be much smarter. These sorts of social issues didn’t really bother them. But it bothered me a lot, and that’s where I decided to shift and do other things. So I started reading history and philosophy on my own at home. After a couple of months, for the first time, my mom was like “well, maybe you should read Marx.”

Unlike most who start with the Communist Manifesto or other popular texts, those actually didn’t appeal to me. The text that really affected me was Capital, and for the first time I felt that this is a text that can help me understand the world.

I eventually started a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research. I spent a couple of years in New York, and for most of it, I was in my room reading. It was all very new to me; I had no background in social sciences and humanities. I was lucky to find the Marxist Education Project (MEP), an institute dedicated to Marxist education. With a group of comrades at MEP we read a lot of Marx—Grundrisse, the three volumes of Capital, Theories of Surplus Value—and many Marxist writers.

In 2018, I came to Santa Barbara and joined the PhD program. I continued to read with comrades at MEP and became active with the grad student labour union when we had a strike in early 2020. I came back to New York when COVID happened and participated in the BLM protests where I met some folks who created this revolutionary collective called Tempest. I joined Tempest in October 2021 and alongside the MEP, it has been the place where I’ve been doing most of my organizing.

You put in a lot of your personal time in these reading groups and your style of facilitation also means helping with explaining difficult concepts and helping with analysis. And you mostly do this for free. Why do you choose not to charge for the time you spend teaching people? Also, what is your theory on pedagogy and creating mechanisms of understanding?

These reading groups have been very educational for me, and I just don’t see a need to ask for money. Although, if I felt that extremely rich people were coming to these classes, sure; I would take their money! Why not? But yeah, otherwise I don’t see a need to ask for money. Hopefully, after I finish my PhD I can do this full time, and maybe then I will have to ask for some money just to pay rent.

As for teaching, I don’t really have a teaching theory or style. I honestly never thought of myself as a good teacher, but I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they find my explanations helpful. I don’t use a technique or have a specific way of teaching. I’ve been doing the reading groups at the MEP and, over time, what I’ve found most useful, is reading together. We don’t ask anyone to read or prepare beforehand. It’s definitely slow; it takes a year, or even more, to read a 300-page book. But I’ve found it to be the most useful way because when we read one or two chapters each meeting, what usually happens is that half of the group has read it and the other half hasn’t. Even the half that has read the book, they may only remember a few main concepts, so usually discussions tend to move away from the reading to general topics that people are concerned about. But when we are reading together, we actually discuss what we’re reading, and sometimes even stay on a paragraph or even a line for a long time.

Yeah, it’s the first time I’ve done a reading group where we read in class, and it’s definitely slower, but I’ve gotten the sense that participants can actually understand it. This leads to my second question about expertise. You said you’re pretty much self-taught, so I’m wondering how you balance new readers and those who have experience in Marxist theory in a shared space. How do you create space for questions?

My reading groups are mostly oriented toward non-experts. If someone has a lot of experience in Marxist theory, they’re probably not going to take much out of my class, or they wouldn’t be interested.

One kind of response I get a lot to reading Capital is why it is relevant right now to our current conjuncture in politics and organizing. You talked about being active in BLM and Tempest, and a lot of militant organizers, even people who say they are anti-capitalist or socialist, ask “Why go to that old book?” How do you respond to people who think Capital is not relevant or necessary to read anymore?

Honestly, there are many layers and many different responses to that question. One is that for immediate day-to-day organizing, it’s not relevant at all! I helped organize a wildcat strike here in Santa Barbara among the University of California campuses’ grad students. Honestly, Capital was not relevant at all there. I was just organizing, and in that kind of organizing, there are immediate objectives that you need to get done.

It’s ironic that we have a lot of people who read about social movements, and they constantly want to impose their theories and the readings on actual day-to-day organizing. It becomes extremely frustrating because, rather than just being in the moment and doing what’s necessary, there’s the constant “oh, I’ve read that this is how we’re supposed to do things…” So actually for me, a big tension in our strike was fighting against those who wanted to impose readings on day-to-day organizing.

Let me put it this way: a big thing that came up in our strike was the defunding of state universities. Some science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students who may not have thought a lot about these issues were intrigued by a set of data on the trends in state funding of universities. The discussion, at some point, turned to questions about macro factors, like “What’s neoliberalism? Has this happened in other universities? Has this happened in other countries?” This is the nub of the issue: human beings think about and try to make sense of their social condition. Faced with new experiences, particularly those derived from struggle, they begin to question commonly held beliefs and look for different answers. The side with the most convincing answers and feasible solutions has the best chance of winning them over.

The relevance of Marx’s Capital, like any theory, is in its ability to explain the world, to help us make sense of our world. This is not about being or not being a Marxist. I no longer identify with Marxism nor with any other -ism, since it is simply not helpful.

The question for me is this: does Marx’s Capital, or explanations provided in Marx’s Capital, help us understand the socio-historical reality of the past 200 years? Does it help us understand the creation and defunding of the welfare state, growing under- and unemployment, financialization, the great recession, growing inequality, and so on? My answer is “yes.”

Coming from the sciences, I would say that Marx’s Capital has the same place as Newton’s theory of gravity or Einstein’s theory of relativity: it’s something that explains the world, and the moment that explanation is wrong, then it should be discarded. But I think the empirical reality of the past 200 years actually shows that it’s not wrong, and therefore, it’s valuable. This is not just an academic question. Forget about academia; I do think most academics are irrelevant to the world, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. They have fun with each other; they create their own jargon; they think they are very knowledgeable. So putting them aside, in what sense, and how, does revolutionary theory and knowledge matter?

I feel this was also part of your question, and I would say that it does matter. But let me just say it this way: if we take some 50-year period, you might find that in an entire 50 years, a book like Capital doesn’t matter. But in the year 52, it could become relevant! And that has to do with the creation of revolutionary moments, which are very rare. We are not living in a revolutionary moment, and so it is the experience of many of these organizers to find Marx’s Capital irrelevant. They are correct in finding Capital irrelevant because they were born, they grew up, and they organize in a society that has never experienced a revolutionary moment.

Let me put it a better way: when we live in times of defeat, in times where there is no revolutionary horizon, where there is no revolutionary perspective, it’s very understandable that Capital is appealing to neither normal people nor organizers. The horizon doesn’t exist, the possibility doesn’t exist, so when there is no hope of changing society from its roots, Marx’s theory cannot be turned into a material force.

For the past 50 years, we have been living in such a period. People don’t see the possibility of an alternative world, of a better society, and we sort of forget about the historical dynamics explained by Marx, but they exist nonetheless. There is such a thing as capitalism. Capitalism does impose its own rules of reproduction, relations of domination and exploitation. As we forget about it, we also lose an understanding of why institutions have been shaped the way they have been. We even forget to see the link between those larger dynamics and our micro-organizations. All of this wouldn’t matter if a revolutionary horizon was never to develop. But I think the crisis-ridden nature of a capitalist society and the class conflict arising from it does create revolutionary moments, and this is where a well-developed revolutionary theory becomes crucial. In the absence of such a theory that can help people make sense of their changing social reality, the desire for a better world may end up in catastrophe, either in a right-wing ascendancy, or it can relapse into reformist attempts that will result only in failure.

What do you think of the emergence of right-wing talking points? What is stopping left social movements from being able to fill up that space that people are craving, something that’s different from the status quo? How is it that so many people, working-class people, are turning to more right-wing fascist ideas?

I think that’s an incredibly difficult question and I cannot really have an answer to it. What I can emphasize based on what I said before, is the importance of developing a revolutionary theory that can account for people’s experiences and explain, in day-to-day language, why things have happened the way they have. Let’s say a white working-class American goes to find a job and then gets out-competed by an Indian or a Chinese person. If someone comes up and says, “I’m going to get rid of that Chinese and Indian who’s taking your job,” I think that will appeal to them. That doesn’t happen because they are stupid; it actually happens because it fits their lived experience. A key role for the Left is to develop its theory so as to make sense of people’s experiences, but unfortunately, due to the crisis of a revolutionary perspective over the past 50 years, we have failed to develop our theory in many ways.

Obviously, developing a theory will not solve all our problems nor can it create a powerful Left. How is the Left ready to be reconstituted? What form of organization should we have? How can we unite different sectors of the Left, when most of the time we are fighting with each other more severely than we fight with the Right? I don’t really know. I joined this collective, Tempest, because, as opposed to some others, they don’t assume they have an answer to these questions. They actually define the purpose of the collective as a collective attempt to find answers.

Political texts can’t encompass everything, but one of the critiques of Marx that comes up in our readings, and also generally, is around issues of women’s labour and social reproduction, and also colonialism. We know that Marx was writing during a certain time, but should we be reading more feminist social reproductive theory, in order to get the whole picture? Or read more anti-colonial Marxists? I’m just wondering how you respond to people who ask about those limitations around social reproduction or lack of analysis around colonization.

Right, this is obviously an issue filled with tensions and people get extremely defensive, which is unfortunate. I’m not at all an expert in issues of race or gender. Sure, I’ve read some things and I’m familiar with the literature, but not in the way that I have studied monetary theory, economic development, and economic history. I guess to me, part and parcel of the problem is that many people sort of assume that Marx claims to have explained everything. Then they correctly find, for example, that Marx didn’t really explain how or why racial and gender oppression are reproduced and take the forms they do. The conclusion is that we should either abandon Marx or modify his fundamental categories to account for all these other phenomena. To me that’s a mistaken understanding of Marx’s work. Marx does not claim to explain everything.

Now, we can and must do research to analyze and explain how a phenomenon such as race began, or how gender oppression is reproduced under capitalism. But this does not mean that we need to modify or complete Marx’s work unless we find that Marx’s theory is incapable of explaining its own object of analysis. I have not yet read a book on social reproduction or colonialism that convinces me Marx’s analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism, of its tendencies to overaccumulation, overproduction, and crisis are wrong

Reality is complex and there are many issues, but Marx has a certain object of analysis, and his object of analysis is to explain and try to understand a new form of society and its differences with the old forms of society. This new form of society is a society that has an immense tendency to increase productive forces and it has an immense tendency to innovate technologically. This is a society that is regulated by the rate of profit, where competition of capitalists imposes certain movements on people, and so on. This is what he tries to understand, and in my view, none of the theories of environment, race, gender, or colonialism are actually capable of explaining these phenomena, nor have any of them refuted Marx’s explanations of these phenomena.

They are actually trying to explain other phenomena, which can be directly related to what Marx is talking about. Obviously, capitalist exploitation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Obviously, if capitalists find out that they can exploit women or Black people more than white people, they will do that. And obviously the reproduction of gender relations, domination, and racial relations is not purely explainable under capitalist laws of motion, but I would just say: so what?

But having a concept of capitalism at the back of your mind that distinguishes, for example, a capitalist society from ancient Rome, from ancient Persia, from ancient China, is incredibly helpful to understand new forms of, let’s say, gender domination. Gender domination is nothing new to capitalism; it has existed for thousands of years, like colonialism. The interesting question for me is how capitalist society does it differently, how it justifies it differently. To understand that, to be able to think about that, in my view, you need to have a conception of what a capitalist society is, separate from these other things.

So, we don’t have this emergence in Canada, but do you think that the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has been something to be excited about in terms of that revolutionary horizon?

It’s definitely interesting. I mean it’s riddled with contradictions. For example, one of the most recent ones is that the leading voices in the DSA and Jacobin are defending a politician’s actions in support of Israel. Essentially, they are saying that a principled position on Palestine is not politically expedient. For many, perhaps that’s horrible and for me that’s also horrible. But, the DSA is something that didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago. I think that the DSA, amongst the rise of the Right and the rise of Bernies and Corbyns, are all signs that things are changing.

When it comes to organizing and when it comes to thinking about revolution, we would be wrong to base our analysis on our experiences of the past 40 or 50 years. How are things changing and how should one organize in this changing environment are difficult questions. But I think the importance of theory, to some extent here, is that it can offer an historical perspective to tell us how things are changing and in what direction. Could that, in turn, inform organizing? I don’t really think there are easy answers, but I do think organizers should be aware of this changing context.

One other kind of emergence that has been exciting is the politics of abolition, people going after police budgets and defunding prisons. I never thought that abolitionist politics would be as popular now, even as close as five years ago. So I’m wondering, would that be an example of how theories of abolition, which aren’t explicitly anti-capitalist or Marxist in name, could be galvanized, and could inspire new activists and revolutionaries?

Absolutely. What is interesting are the contradictions that these theories and the organizing coming from them fall into. So, I certainly identify as an abolitionist, but what does abolition really mean? To me, abolition really means abolishing capital. Because you cannot abolish the police force without abolishing capitalism, right? So I think the development of this and, particularly, how this was pushed by the BLM protests is really fascinating. Again, it’s a sign of things changing. Although I think this, on the one hand, and the development of theory on the other hand, shows the crisis of the Left in its theory and organizing. Many people adhere to the notion of abolition, and being a Marxist or an anarchist is a point of pride, a point of identity that I’m an abolitionist and nothing less. And then you have those on the other side of the Left, perhaps what we call reformers, who say that if you go to normal people and tell them police should be abolished, they’re not going to find that appealing or even acceptable. That’s not because they are white supremacists, or because they are racist, right?

Now, I kind of agree with that, because to the extent that we live in a capitalist society, the idea of abolishing the police is not a very reasonable idea. So, then the question becomes, how do we deal with these sorts of conflicts? Unfortunately these two sides of the debate would mostly insult each other, and there really is no communication between them anymore. But how do we deal with these conflicts, how do we think about these things? That this idea has managed to find its way into the streets through the BLM protests was so joyful and interesting for me. But, even when I was flyering and talking to people, I could never say “abolition.” I could, for example, tell them “hey listen, it’s not right to send police when someone has a mental collapse,” and they would be like “oh yeah, that’s acceptable, that’s reasonable, we agree with that.” But at the same time, if I were to use the word ‘defund’ or ‘abolition’ they wouldn’t even listen. So all of this to say that this again brings in questions regarding theory and organizations.

On the theoretical side, it’s not very clear to me that many understand very immediately that to say abolition is to say “abolish capitalism.” One cannot exist without the other. And on the organizing side, it is not clear to me if we know how to organize and advocate for these ideas without feeling obliged to say these words. To the extent that organizations such as the DSA want to remain within the existing political spectrum, such as the Democratic Party, they have to discard abolition. The problem to which no one has an answer even those who say that we should break from the Democratic Party is that, well: how do you do it? How you do it is by being relevant, of course. You know, I can say “hey, I’m a third party” and get 0.1 percent of the vote. Then the argument from the other side says you are irrelevant. They’re not incorrect, but then in supporting the Democratic Party, they end up discarding abolition, they end up supporting someone who supports Israel against Palestine. So how do you resolve or get out of these conflicts?

I think this debate is important though. You have to speak to people where they are at, but I don’t know what barometer to use; I don’t know how to judge that. When people say, “Oh, most people won’t understand Marx,” I don’t know what survey they’re using! Maybe it’s just personal experience, but it’s always a question for me. Approaching people where they are is important, but then being able to push forward your politics or theories, to not be afraid of challenging people . . . yeah it’s definitely hard. Where I’ve seen changes in Canada, specifically, has been around Indigenous sovereignty and also around migrant justice. Public opinion has changed in my lifetime, and I didn’t think it ever would. But I think people, rather than engaging with difficult ideas, get more inspired by the resistance in the streets, and not by taking the time to read and study together.

I think you will always find a few that will be interested in picking up a book and thinking more deeply. And I think it’s absolutely critical for there to be spaces for that, which I think we are generally lacking on the Left, spaces for those to really educate themselves outside of academia. Their knowledge may not be useful for a decade, maybe two or three decades, but if a revolutionary moment arises, if a revolutionary horizon arises, and there is no organization that is capable of turning that moment into something more, then that moment will just pass. I think a lot of Trotskyites and Leninist organizations think that that’s what they are doing, but if you talk to them, I think they have some serious problems. One is that they essentially think that they have resolved any sort of problems in the theory of organizing. So their position is essentially, “we have theory, and we know how to organize. All we have to do is wait for the revolutionary horizon to open up, and then we will seize the moment!” I think the reason that they’re not going to be able to do that is that we actually have not resolved the crisis of theory, nor have we resolved the crisis in organizing. So I think what leftists should do now is to form organizations that attempt to solve those problems. I think that is really the best we can do now. In such organizations, there will be a few who are interested in theory; not everyone needs to be interested, of course. Ultimately in certain things, many are allergic to the word “expertise,” but you need experts; you need people who sit down and who read 1,000 books. We need people who do that, so that many, many others don’t have to do it. But, the role of the intellectual is to serve, not to talk down, and not to “own” this space as an intellectual. So we need them, but we also need organizations that experiment constantly with different forms of organizing and always have that longer-term revolutionary horizon in mind. *

Check out the Marxist Education Project.

Coda

Yazan Al-Saadi

It is extremely difficult to talk about Israel in Canada, even within progressive circles. It’s too loaded and fraught a topic to explain the nuances behind that difficulty, although it should be discussed at some point. It is also difficult to ignore the inherent genocidal and apartheid nature of the Israeli state. I suppose those are the unavoidable characteristics of settler-colonial states, including late-stage ones like the United States, Australia, and of course, Canada.

What differentiates Israel from the rest of its colonial peers is a matter of timing. While the genocidal projects in the US, Australia, or Canada “successfully” marginalized the Indigenous communities generations ago (although the remaining Indigenous communities continue to resist that ongoing annihilation, which should remind and inspire us all that the fight never ends), Israel nonetheless remains the last overt settler-colonial state. And all of us bear witness to its ongoing genocidal process, streamed live to our phones at this very moment.

Consequently, this places Israel at the “cutting-edge” in practice, and it has developed and continues to develop many tools to that effect, such as digital surveillance and hacking, reinterpretation of international law, sophisticated forms of incarceration, and creative ways to kill and maim. Being at the forefront of the practice of genocide ensures that Israel has consistently ranked among the top 10 “defence exporting” countries since the start of the 21st century (ranking 8th worldwide, according to SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, March 2021), and has been expanding in the arms trade and policing market since it entered the market in the 1980s. Remember, this is a nuclear-armed state, smaller than the size of New York, rivalling the arms trade of larger countries like Russia, China, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.

Yes, the police and army in the US and Canada are well-versed in how to commit brutality and murder; but lately, Israel has refined and elevated the practice, in turn galvanizing other nation-states to learn from them or directly purchase the tools needed to imitate their practices.

The following are further notes and musings behind the art and words of this comic, as well as further threads to follow for readers who are curious or perplexed:

Page 1: If you don’t know who Maya Angelou is or haven’t heard of her poem, “Caged Bird,” then please stop reading and go read her.

The Arabic lyrics snaking out of the prison window are from an actual song sung by Arab prisoners that Sirène snuck in there.

Many international and local NGOs have recorded the number of Palestinians currently held by Israel, and increases or decreases according to events. But there have always been thousands of Palestinians held by Israel since its inception.

Page 2: Obviously, when writing this comic, the daring escape of the six Palestinian prisoners and their capture was the main focus on the news. The quote at the end of this page is allegedly by one of them, said to his lawyer after being caught.

Page 3: Forced labour camps were a major thing in the 1940s to 1950s, the records and numbers of them were reported by ICRC reports at the time (which was classified and then rediscovered and rereleased by Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta in 2014).

Page 4: These quotes are reproduced from the research work of Dr. Salman Abu Sitta. Pretty ironic, at least to me.

Page 5: The stats mentioned here are collected from a range of sources, including the Institute of Palestine Studies, a 2019 report by the Palestinian Prisoners Committee, and Addameer, to name a few.

Page 6: The description of the abuses of Palestinian female prisoners was taken from various sources, including reports by the Palestinian Prisoners Committee, Al-Shabak, and Human Rights Watch.

Page 7: Khalida Jarrar is an exceptional person, and everyone should research her more.

Page 8: There is a growing body of research on how central Israel has become in the global arms, surveillance, and policing industry, all gained through using these tools for decades on Palestinian bodies. The majority of Israel’s production in this industry (~75%) is made not for internal use, but for export.

Page 9: The link between Ejaz Choudry’s murder and the training the Canadian police had with Israel that enabled this murder has been articulated by the likes of the Canadian BDS Coalition, while the other links noted here between Canada and Israel were from a 2015 brief report by Independent Jewish Voices during an anti-militarization campaign, available on their website.

Page 10: The information on this page is also taken from the Independent Jewish Voices 2015 brief, which is a nice summation of the different ties between Canada and Israel. There are mountains of these pamphlets, briefs, reports, and infographics that show the depth of Israel’s incremental genocide and its positionality among the larger international order.

Page 11–12: My feeble attempt at some lyrical poetry or some such, because even when we speak plainly about Israel, it can hit deaf ears and there’s something more impactful with a line that rhymes. Perhaps that’s why the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” terrifies Israel’s supporters so much. *

It is hard to write about Dorothy, our teacher, friend, and comrade, whose influence went far beyond the academia with which she has come to be identified. Speaking about her as a conventional intellectual, as a producer of theory, dedicated to augmenting the discipline of sociology, narrows her scope of vision and eclipses the many-sidedness of her intellect and perception and the depth of what she understood by politics. Of course, she was a formidable intellectual and did all of those things that the professional world attributes to her, but that “academic” work, though not quite what I would call it, could be seen as a by-product of her boundless interest in the world she found herself in for the past ninety-five years. It is the making and the shape of that world she sought to understand. There was a reason for this—that the world did not feel right and definitely needed changing. What, then, was going on in the world as Dorothy grew up from a child to a young woman? What was it like?

In broad terms, it was a world full of struggles of great political and social forces between communism and fascism. For quite some time, it seemed as though fascism would win the future. Against the backdrop of the first world war Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and smaller countries, were in its grip. Ultimately, bourgeois democracy pulled back from the brink of monopoly capital’s untrammelled manifestation and suppressed fascism/nazism with the help of the rising communist state, the USSR, and almost immediately turned its enemy. Then cold war was initiated by the so-called free world practically simultaneously with western victory.

In the middle of air raids and sirens, in the rubbles of cities and factories, with the emergence of a vast army of industrial working women who were now enfranchised for their contributions to the first world war efforts, the young Dorothy grew up. An only girl in the family, reading long hours and taking long walks in the surrounding moors of Yorkshire, she tried to make sense of this turbulent world that reached her in direct and tangential ways. Her abiding interest in “What actually happens,” which became the core of her teaching and learning, I am sure, was rooted in this time of her life. So also did her future interest in the peace movement and nuclear disarmament germinate from this. From this vortex and from her growing experiences of life and love as a woman, from her years of secretarial work for the reputed publisher Faber and Faber, where the poet T. S. Eliot featured prominently and which published the works Sylvia Plath, to her immersion in the writings of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, to her strong interest in Marxist thought then current at the London School of Economics where she eventually studied, Dorothy fashioned herself in conscious and unconscious ways. Her personality and politics cannot be really understood without that history in and of which she was: even if she did not then know the full potential of the world view she was acquiring, a way of being and seeing that characterized her, a personality that we came to know, love, and respect as Dorothy was gradually moulded. The full mix of elements in her consciousness also included her experiences of love, marriage, and migration to the United States, her separation from her husband, and her solitude as a single woman and a mother with two boys to raise. The last, the act of mothering, remained of abiding interest to her and became the basis of her research with her student and colleague Alison Griffith. Also, there were the heady days of Berkeley’s student politics, participation in women’s movements, anti-Vietnam war protests, and awareness of the anti-racist struggles of African Americans.

All this marked or made her for the rest of her life. In all these experiences lay her awakening, both intellectual and political. She felt a palpable split between her daily experiences and academic and institutional ones. Her life as a mother and a political activist contradicted each other. Being a student and teacher of sociology and a mother and a political person conveyed different messages to her. Thus she became mindful of a deep rift or what she called a “fissure” which cracked her mental and social space and forced her to live in a perpetual contradiction, in the consciousness of a double life. As she tells us in The Everyday World as Problematic, this realization intensified and, finally, became an intolerable calling for comprehension. It sent her searching for a method of inquiry to investigate the organization of her and others’ daily life and that in professional institutions. She simultaneously needed to explore the terrains people occupied and the opposed consciousness they gave rise to. She needed to know who she was and who others were, with this fissured reality present in her or their minds. Along with this feeling came the imperative of examining the make-up of institutions, such as state bureaucracies, educational institutions, mental hospitals, the system of policing political dissent, and others, which structured capitalism. What she was searching for, therefore, was not for a theory, not theoretical insurance, a guarantee, or a pre-formed conceptual solution to explain the doubleness of the organization of the world she occupied. She did not turn to an intellectual exercise for which reality served as a mere corroboration or an instantiation of its comprehensive power. What she was looking for was an instrument of research, a method of inquiry. This method had to be an adequate one for a productive social inquiry, for navigating the labyrinth of the social in which every individual lives. This would help to explain—because she believed in explanation and analysis—how the personal and the social informed each other, and what the modes of mediation that constitute the social are. Spinning her own Ariadne’s thread of exploration, she embarked on her analytical and critical adventure.

For this, as she tells us, she turned to multiple sources: Marx’s method, the sociology of capitalism and everyday life, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, the writings of Alfred Schutz and George Herbert Mead, among others, and because of her early interest with experience, some strands of phenomenology. In this regard, what she told me in a private conversation should be repeated. She told me that the things she learned from non-Marxist sociological sources were not falling into place properly for her until she made herself thoroughly conversant with Marx and found a linking theme or thread. Her main texts were The Holy Family and The German Ideology, not only the introduction to the section on Feuerbach, but all its parts, including the more conventional ones. Having done that for a time one day in her shower, where she could get away from others, she realized how Marx’s critique of ideology might give her clues for understanding how contradiction itself, instead of being an obstacle, could be an entry point into “what actually happens,” an analytical resource. Recognition of the roots of contradictions and how they activate one another might help her formulate a different epistemology than the one she had found in conventional non-Marxist ones and, for that matter, in Marxist political economy. In fact, this other critical or anti-ideological epistemology of Marx could direct her to make use of texts written from other sociological perspectives. Still standing by the importance of the social subject’s experience in the creation of a truly critical method of inquiry into social organization, she continued to develop her ideas and her project. At no point did she waver in her confidence regarding experience as the crucial entry point to social existence, nor did she abandon her own and others’ subject-agent status, but elaborated instead on their formation, the shape they took.

Considering experience in terms of both personal and social, in immediate and mediated ways, she could create a new sociology. Her method established a two-way relationship between the personal and the social, the local and the extra-local, thereby abolishing any rigid bifurcation in concrete reality. At first, she thought, it would be sociology for women and, then, in a later, more developed stage, for “people.” Her foundational stage she named “social organization of knowledge” in distinction from “sociology of knowledge.” For this, a feminist reading of Marx proved invaluable, and she turned to the different trends of old and new feminisms that continued to develop. After charting this path for some distance, simply and yet penetratingly in Feminism and Marxism, and in other early texts, such as “K is Mentally Ill,” she invited her readers to join her in the work of grasping and writing the social without bypassing an individual’s experience in a daily and institutional sense. This is why her epistemology, as for all political organizers and participants in social movements, shows the researcher’s involvement and urgency. Her stance is never of passive contemplation or objectivist neutrality. The knower and what is sought to be known are implicated, and the knowledge gained is not alien to each other. Because she was not primarily devoted to her institutional and intellectual success, but rather to the creation of knowledge that would save our sanity (K is not mentally ill) and be truly useful for a politics of fundamental social change, she could be free of constraints in what she said. All moved toward discovery, and nothing prefabricated would be used. In this journey, furthermore, you did not know where or how you might find yourself in chasing the clues that make for and renew the social, the womb of our experience. Instead of being driven by a theory or a reified concept, your working process and findings would shape your research.

Needless to say that Dorothy’s new and critical, at times polemical, approach to the sociology of knowledge created a fair bit of misunderstanding and confusion in the world of established sociology. More so as it defined itself contra the great tradition of Mannheim and Weber and their followers. Her idea of women’s standpoint, again misunderstood as a fixed spatial location, created another set of confusion as it was taken to literally privilege all ideas and experiences of an undifferentiated category called “women.” It was claimed that she gave cardinal importance to a specific social location and gendered being in an unquestioned acceptance of an idea born of women’s consciousness and identified them as denizens of “below,” irrespective of other relational implications. This made a one-dimensional total subaltern of all women. This position misrepresents her real viewpoint. As a matter of fact, in her radical reversal of the conventional relationship between forms of consciousness and reality, that concept comprehends reality, a sub-discipline of the sociology of knowledge morphed into the social organization of knowledge. This detached knowledge from an idealist interpretation and differentiated among different kinds of production and use of ideas. Dorothy’s epistemological method, which bent Marx’s critique of ideology for a deeper understanding of the social, was all her own. It had only a partial and superficial resemblance to that of Althusser or Foucault, who subjected the existing subject-agent to structure or ideology, thereby also losing the specificity of the concept of ideology, which is only one among a whole slew of practices and their content, and, thus, rendering the social into a homogeneous one-dimensional space. This social, whose dynamic, complex, and elusive formations and expressions Dorothy detected, involves necessarily a multidimensionality with formative contradictions and coherences becoming a concert of samenesses and differences. They do not cohabit our life-sphere parallelly or linearly, but inter-incarnate each other.

Here, we talk of capital. This life sphere is not, according to Dorothy, an Archimedean form, but rather a Copernican one, without a centre and a periphery. The social organization of capital is capitalist everywhere: its smallest unit, the commodity, as Marx points out, holds in its genomic structure its fleshed-out social form. The social organization of knowledge reveals that complex social relations and their attendant kinds of consciousness saturate capital’s life sphere and are marked by constitutive and reactive differentiations. This life sphere’s dynamics are productive, motivated and activated by practices and ideas whose deployment and meaning content always vary. Measured by their revelatory power of exploring and exposing, of occluding and expressing, the scope and nature of the social, the deployment and meaning of an idea and practice, can be critical or ideological. This open-ended guideline leaves the researcher to her own motivations for undertaking an inquiry and the critical method she put together. But she must measure the research findings and the conclusions she draws from them against the subject’s experience and the social organization within which they occur. This last imperative might be considered suspect by the scientificism of sociology. It might be objected that experiences are phenomenal, subjective, and, therefore, imprecise and unable to yield a reliable (read, objective) knowledge. In this view, putting an emphasis on starting with what is at hand, that is, the local situatedness of the subject, provides further hindrances. There is always a chance that it may work out in this way, but it is also true that for some experiences to be at all possible or events named as such, there have to be certain socio-historical and conceptual conditions which are present. More importantly, any experience makes sense to us because it has been experienced and named so and understood as of that, by others. As Marx said, language is a shared practical consciousness that makes sense to us because it makes sense to others.

Since this project of an ever-widening scope, an investigation without boundary, distinguishes her work, I always thought of Dorothy as a detective of the social. Her work constructs a case for the crime of capital and argues against the criminals who perpetrate its systematic exploitation. The harm that capitalism causes with its social form constructed with ironclad inter-locking institutions, which are fueled by our lives and needs, require systematic exposure so that we may know what confronts us and may have a clear view of this mediated body, a socially organized ruling apparatus which is put together with concepts and categories. This search does not need theoretical pre-emptive closed proposals and their assertions and certitudes, but simply a method of inquiry grounded in life and experience which can identify those very grounds. Such a method of knowledge production cannot be bound by either positivism or idealism, which are, after all, the two sides of the same coin. About theorizing, Dorothy might have said what Marx said about “mere” interpretations, and theory can become a “mere” substitution for an explanation and analysis when it takes a hegemonic position over reality. Then this is mere intellectual prowess, a gesture which can not pass as a mode of investigation, made possible by a given moment of history and social division of labour between mental and manual labour. If theory can maintain its tentative, modest nature, as found in the sciences, it can help in building a problematic. Any other claim exceeds its provision. In a rebuttal to Althusser, E. P. Thompson once said, “Theory is our expectation from life, but life often does not meet it.” I think Dorothy would have agreed with this.

People with their everyday life, joys, and sorrows were never an abstraction for Dorothy. She not only thought of them but felt them. That does not mean that she erased their differences, their uniqueness of being, but she felt that they could be understood, as could be the world we live in—a mysterious but not a mystical thing. And in her process of understanding, the world would not be robbed of its fleshliness and people of their sensuousness and experiences. Instead of being lost among others, we would find ourselves in our full individuation among them, in relation to them. Our experiences would open doors to the social as we tried to understand how they came to be. In fact, we would learn to see them as experiences and be able to name what they were experiences of. That’s how the women’s movement of our time, of Dorothy’s time, came to the conclusion that the personal is political, that the microcosm of our daily lives reflects the macrocosm of the way the social is organized.

The methodological development of Dorothy’s social organization came from a general awareness that the social in capitalist societies and the state differed from earlier ones. As feudalism was waning, another way of life, culture, and economy came to replace it. The moment was roughly marked as the seventeenth century in Britain, but expanded over Europe. This change was the development of capitalism with a panoply of institutions that mediated its reproduction in a stable and long-term way. The state under capitalism is the chief institutional complex from which and in relation to which all others developed or were inspired. Life as a whole was brought into its purview, to be administered: the state became definitive of basic life activities and the practices and ideas of the social were elaborated through life under growing capitalism. They were largely referential to the organizing principles of various institutions and the predictable relations with which they hegemonized the daily lives of people. This understanding of the new social as institutional prompted Dorothy to devise a new ethnography, not of social groups in communitarian and traditional or ad hoc interpersonal terms. This new ethnography is her other singular contribution. It’s now a branch of sociology that has come to stay. Simply Institutional Ethnography, otherwise, IE.

It should be clearer by now that studying Dorothy Smith’s works is a must for activists and scholars who are keen on “what actually happens.” We must understand the now so we can build the future—in other words, the future begins in every now.

For the rest, my time with Dorothy stays with me as a major milepost in my life. Life is like that. We meet someone at a bend in the road, and that encounter is life-changing. *

Recent years have not been kind to the reputation of the health care system in Canada. Its image as a pinnacle of public systems, a place wherein care is freely offered to all comers, an unmitigated social good, has suffered. Much of this decline is attributable to the way in which the Canadian health care system has been enacted as a tool of oppression, from research exposing genocidal experimenta- tion enacted upon the bodies of Indigenous children to the deadly mistreatment of Indigenous patients in contemporary hospitals and clinics. Always held up against the American private disaster to the south, the Canadian health care system has sustained itself on a mythology that has, over the last several years, become increasingly scrutinized and critiqued both from those standing outside of its doors and from those on the other side of the threshold. For many professional organizations and governing bodies within medicine, the years following the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report were ones of great reckoning. Like exposed roots in upturned soil, the colonial foundations of Canadian medical practice are all too painfully visible. And while those outside the system call out its injustices and rattle its foundations demanding change, they are joined by people working within the system, who every day confront the policies that perpetuate and embed the racist practices therein. Health care workers committed to decolonial struggle are forcing a reckoning with the past and present violence of the Canadian health care system. In Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s important new book, some of these histories and contemporary struggles are put into print.

The title of Shaheen-Hussain’s book, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada, hints at the target of his argument. But the book and its title are deceptive: it is both the story of a campaign to decolonize one tiny piece of the health care system in one province and an overarching historical retelling of some of the great myths and mythical figures of Canadian medicine. Shaheen-Hussain, a pediatric emergency physician in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal), attained some prominence in recent years as one of the faces of the #AHandToHold campaign. The campaign appeared to be a modest struggle, seemingly a fight to ensure that the Québec goverment ceases the decades-long practice of separating sick children from their caregivers on MedEvac (Medical Evacuation) flights from remote parts of Northern Québec to tertiary care centres in the south. But as I noted, Shaheen-Hussain’s was not a singular struggle; rather, it was a node in the network of larger struggles against the colonial and genocidal logics that underpin the medical system in Canada, both in its history and its present. He shares his modest victory in challenging the ongoing colonial policies that govern modern health care while at the same time charting the massive undertaking that we face in decolonizing a system that was so thoroughly a part of the theft of land and genocide of Indigenous peoples across this vast terrain.

The book begins with a foreword by the inimitable Cindy Blackstock, whose own work defending Indigenous children is legendary. She has won cases alleging that the Canadian state discriminates against Indigenous children by consistently under-funding child welfare on reserves and is indefatigable in the face of persistent appeals and challenges by that same state. In the short foreword, she asks, “How could any government think that putting sick Indigenous children on a MedEvac flight without a parent or caregiver’s ‘hand to hold’ was a good idea, let alone an idea worth defending?”: a question worth asking of the many colonial policies that Shaheen-Hussain later outlines. But despite the various tragedies Blackstock notes in this foreword—the violence and abuse in the residential school system, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, toxic water on numerous reserves—her work is always, like Shaheen-Hussain’s, shot through with hope. She ends her foreword by noting that “rinsing Canadian society from the ravages of the colonial/savage dichotomy can happen” if people make it a priority and if the decolonial struggle is generalized across all sectors, everywhere. It is books like this one that make those hopeful words believable, not only because of the horrors they expose, but because of the possibilities they present. In his book, Shaheen-Hussain gives us a template for thinking about, and organizing a struggle against, the institutions of colonial society that callously and often blindly continue the genocidal project from within which they were born.

The book proper begins with a timeline of Shaheen-Hussain’s involvement in the struggle against unaccompanied minors being moved on MedEvac flights from Québec’s Northern communities. His campaign started in the summer of 2017 and ended just over a year later with the victory of #AHandToHold. The Ministry of Health and representatives of the MedEvac flight company confirmed that children would be allowed caregiver accompaniment on emergency medical flights. It is a complicated tale, with many sad attempts to justify racist policies with more racism and many promises broken. But it is Shaheen-Hussain’s deep involvement in the struggle that makes this story compelling. He is able to speak from the perspective of someone who has worked to treat young children: seen the fear in their eyes and the inability to communicate in the colonial language of French. He shares not only the injustice of a child with a possible head injury being flown to a major city alone, but also the ways in which this impacted the quality of care this child received. How could he know, Shaheen-Hussain asks, whether the child he was treating had suddenly burst into inconsolable tears because he had a sudden onset headache, because he had rapidly become disoriented, or because he was simply scared and alone? In laying out this and other examples, he is able to reveal the lie at the heart of the four pillars of medical ethics— autonomy, beneficence, non-malevolence, and justice—as it pertains to the treatment of Indigenous people in the health care system in Canada.

The book goes on to detail what MedEvac flights are and what the non-accompaniment rule looks like in Québec. Since 1981 the Government of Québec has mandated an arms-length organization, EVAQ, staffed by physicians from the Hôpital de l’Enfant Jésus in Québec City, to provide all of the medical airlift evacuations throughout the entirety of the province. Their fleet includes two planes that serve as air shuttles and two that serve as “flying hospitals.” Despite there being no written policy forbidding it, never in its history has EVAQ permitted family members or caregivers on their hospital planes. This has meant that children leaving remote Northern communities in perilous medical states must travel alone. Parents or caregivers must then make their own way down to southern hospitals, travelling either by road or by commercial flight, sometimes taking up to 18 hours to reach their destination. The health impacts, both mental and physical, are grave. Shaheen-Hussain quotes some of the parents who have struggled to send their vulnerable young people off alone into the dark of a Northern night with strangers on a plane, destined for a faceless institution in the south.

Importantly, Shaheen-Hussain makes it clear that the rules set out by EVAQ affect all Québecers living in Northern and remote communities, including the settler populations in places like the Magdalen Islands or the Abitibi-Temiscamingue. But the #AHandToHold campaign centred on the experiences of Eeyou and Inuit communities in particular, both because these communities are affected in greater proportion and because it allowed the campaign to make a larger, bolder, and more far-reaching claim: one about the history of medicine itself, the role it played in the genocidal foundations of Canada, and what that means for how we move forward and begin processes of decolonization within the medical system and beyond. Shaheen-Hussain is able to situate the struggle for accompaniment on MedEvac flights within broader Québec movements targeting the colonial foundations of the Canadian nation-state in general and the health care system in particular. Carefully, he notes that “health care inequalities follow the fault lines of societal injustices” (47). While the intention of the campaign was not to centre certain communities at the expense of others, changing the policy of non-accompaniment that disproportionately impacted Inuit and Eeyou communities would benefit all of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who also have experiences of sending children alone into the air without a caregiver at their side. A trickle-down theory that actually makes sense.

The final quarter of Shaheen-Hussain’s book is a critique of the medical establishment, and he does some of this from the standpoint of medical education. He offers a particularly blistering denunciation of who gets access to professional programs and how that impacts the way colonial care is coordinated. Not only are classrooms in medical education largely grounds for the reproduction of privilege, but they lack both Indigenous students and attention within their curriculum to the “impacts of colonial policies—past or present—on the health and well-being of Indigenous Peoples in Canada” (85). Ultimately, Shaheen-Hussain reminds us, “anti-Indigenous systemic racism is tolerated, enabled, and perpetuated” by medical education and the medical culture in which it is very deeply ingrained. He details the problematic premises of medical education’s “meritocracy” myth and how the people who are permitted entry into medical schools are often serious contributors to the impossibility of the medical system achieving systemic and structural change. While a struggle to decolonize medicine must target the institution itself, as Shaheen-Hussain’s work demonstrates—and no doubt, changes must be made to the ways in which hospitals, clinics, health care systems, and the practitioners within them operate—as with all political projects that claim to be radical, the changes must also begin at the root. The root of medicine as it is co-constructed today—by states, institutions, health care workers, and patients—lies in medical education; changing medical education carries with it the possibility of truly effective projects of decolonization in medicine going forward. And to begin, efforts to decolonize health care must consider who is permitted entry: who is able to gain access to that education, and what do they bring with them?

Medical training is an immense undertaking. The demands are enormous both on one’s time and their physical and mental capacities. It is a grind, pushing people to their limits and then beyond. In this way, medicine as a discipline self-selects for privilege at every step in its process. Not only does it benefit one as a prospective student to be descended from doctors (or other professionals), but it is almost necessary to be able-bodied, without histories of mental health crises, without caregiving responsibilities, without commitments to community or family or life outside of the training. It demands sublimation to the field and the exclusion of the world outside that. Hours are long. Absences are unacceptable. Vacation time is minimal.

This sort of dedication is largely possible for only a few who come with both the financial background to permit engaging in four years of (expensive) study with no earnings and also a lack of the kind of responsibilities that make one capable of such narrow-minded focus, which is all to say that medical learners largely mimic, in experiences if not in body, the myth of the settler that founded so many of the institutions in this country. Learners themselves become the personified terra nulius, unused and unclaimed land that can be worked and shaped into the civilized body of the physician. This myth of settlement is reproduced in medical education: both construct an idealization of unwavering strength, persistence, and courage; the capacity to work without end; and the lack of competing demands or commitments. The white male settler body—unattached to time, place, or struggle and unfettered by responsibility—is the subject that is idealized and adopted without ever being acknowledged. It is the foundation of medical education today, even with the recent turn to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion. And this settlement myth personified is the foundation from which a profoundly colonial medical system arises. No amount of wellness consultants or free subscriptions to the Headspace app can undo this, only a project of decolonizing medicine beginning with its roots in education can.

In his book, Shaheen-Hussain intimates that the “who” in medical education can perhaps help us deal with the “what.” Within medical education, we are taught—often very poorly and in passing—about the social determinants of health. We are taught that along with individual biology and lifestyle or behaviours, people’s living conditions, workplaces, and social contexts also play a role in their health and health outcomes. Shaheen-Hussain takes apart the ways medical education understands and teaches about social determinants of health. He notes the limitations of this perspective: the social determinants of health look at how things that already exist impact the condition of the individual, but tell you nothing of how those conditions came to be, how they are often the result of purposeful decisions, the result of the past living actively in the present. He incisively reminds us that when we place undue focus on the material conditions that people are living in now, we miss the structural elements that produce them and strip concepts like the social determinants of health of their “potential for more substantive change,” and as a result “the very framework intended to expand our understanding and analysis of health determinants ironically ends up limiting both” (52). Further, he goes on to show how attempts to integrate social determinants of health into medical training have studiously avoided questions of “class power as well as gender, race, and national power” and “how power is produced and reproduced in political institutions” (64), meaning that the very systems that create and maintain injustice and misery, and those who benefit from them, are never named.

In this way, Shaheen-Hussain begins the remainder of his book, which situates the #AHandToHold campaign within the history of medicine. He details various colonial abuses, some better known than others, in which the medical establishment played key roles. He shows clearly and with historical evidence that many doctors knew precisely what they were doing was harmful to Indigenous children and adults, but continued to do it anyway. He charts the inequities that founded the Canadian health care system and that persist today. As the book continues, it moves away from its central focus on the #AHandToHold campaign and tries to place both the campaign itself and the practice of non-accompaniment on MedEvac flights in the historical context of Canadian colonialization. Within medical education, we are often taught about the higher moral calling of physicians. A well-remunerated job one chooses because they care. Historical figures in medicine are trotted out to demonstrate for us the altruism in medicine: that medicine is benevolence, that it is beyond the political, that it only acts for the benefit of the community and of the individual.

On my first day of medical school, not too long ago, each and every student was given a copy of William Osler: A Life in Medicine, about the famous Canadian physician after whom several hospitals and medical faculties are named. We were never told of his racist writings and presentations or how his racist views were central to the ways he practiced medicine. But Shaheen-Hussain pulls apart the benevolent legacy of Osler and other key elements of the history of medical practice in Canada, spending several chapters detailing not only the ways in which the health care system was a key partner in policies of genocidal colonialism, but also how some individuals within these systems struggled against them to give the lie to the myth that all of this was just a product of its time, and thus cannot be critiqued from a presentist view.

Together, these are the histories Shaheen-Hussain collates and decodes for the reader. The critiques he makes of present policies and structures are most valuable for radicals, especially those that work within large faceless bureaucratic systems like the health care system. Pulling back the mythology of benevolence and revealing the genocidal histories that are a very real part of the present structure of medicine allows us to better see both the sites where change must take place and the ways in which it must change. Some of the histories Shaheen-Hussain shares in the middle chapters are better known, and others were previously unknown to me and came as a surprise. They are all appalling and can be demoralizing for one working within medicine and trying to create spaces of safety for Indigenous patients. But Shaheen-Hussain is not—and this should be obvious from his work—a defeatist. His book joins critique with pragmatic challenges to the colonial system; he crafts a history with enduring relevance to the present and charts the precise spaces wherein these colonial practices can be targeted. He lays out in detail the campaign he co-constructed and how he was able to succeed in this modest but wildly important movement. Shaheen-Hussain’s book is that all-too-rare story of a victory against colonial policies and, as such, serves as an important roadmap for how we, as radical health care practitioners or as radicals outside of the system, might continue this struggle in other ways and with other means, but with the same ultimate goal. *

In Canada, the struggle for working-class unity to build some form of revolutionary socialism and the struggle for an anti-racist and anti-colonial movement for abolition are one and the same. If the abolition of prisons and police also means the abolition of capitalism, how do revolutionaries make abolition part and parcel of the working-class struggle, rather than an issue-based struggle or a struggle based on identity? While activists have been working with labour organizations, this tension between working-class struggle and abolition came to a head this year during the Ottawa take-over by anti-vaccine truckers.

In February 2022, many people on the revolutionary Left were stunned by the weeks-long occupation of Parliament Hill in Ottawa by the so-called “Freedom Convoy”—mockingly dubbed the #FluTruxKlan. There were hot takes about the Left’s inability to politicize government responses to the pandemic and how easily right-wing reactionaries co-opted working-class grievances. Some expressed jealousy, admiration, or shock at how issues impacting a small group of workers 1 could take over an entire downtown for weeks and quickly raise over 10 million dollars. 2 Under the guise of pro-worker rhetoric and Trumpian arguments about the so-called “treason” of the Trudeau Liberals, anti-vaccine mandate protesters were able to park their trucks and trailers and set up food kitchens, a children’s bouncy castle, saunas, and hot tubs—effectively establishing themselves in the Canadian capital for three weeks. The convoy also inspired two disruptive blockades of Canada-US border crossings: one in Coutts, Alberta, and another in Windsor, Ontario.

Mostly immovable without the cooperation of their operators, semi-trucks proved to be an effective protest tool, enabling the protestors to lock down central Ottawa and torment residents with continuous honking. Convoy participants spread fear throughout the downtown area, targeting and harassing mask-wearers and anyone they could hurl racist and sexist comments at, while partying every weekend under the tacitly-approving gaze of the police. Activists in Ottawa mobilized to organize several counter-demonstrations against the convoy, but along with the debates and tension around safety and tactics, there was also tension around residents demanding police to “do their job,” with some protests being held at Ottawa Police headquarters demanding they remove the trucker convoy. 3

What distinguished these protests from other occupations and blockades was the utter lack of police response, especially in the early days. The success of the anti-mandate protests is directly linked to the way police, at every level, enabled them. Whether or not some on the Left might be envious of their success is not really the issue. No matter what tactics some want to replicate, the revolutionary Left will never be afforded the level of compliance and support from police that the “Freedom Convoy” received.

The call for police to “do their job” was reminiscent of a call heard after the G20 protests in 2010 when speakers at the prison defence demanded that police focus on activists who had engaged in crime rather than conduct mass arrests. Ten years later, however, there were mixed feelings among liberals and social democrats about demanding police action, due in part to the strength of the Defund the Police movement, particularly in Ottawa with “defundOPS” (Ottawa Police Services).

The call from some residents and mainstream media for police to “do their jobs” and clear the protestors provided another opportunity to showcase the discrepancy between police response to protests from the Left and Right. Police narratives throughout the convoy occupation bemoaned alleged safety concerns and a supposed lack of resources. For the Left, this notion was laughable: police never “lack resources” when they are directed to violently crush blockades by land defenders in Wet’suwet’en or at Fairy Creek, or when they are tasked with protecting the hate speech of Zionists and right-wing extremists. Yet, this mainstream refrain paved the way for the Trudeau government to declare a state of emergency, granting local, municipal, and federal police unprecedented powers. This state of emergency, which essentially overrode the civil liberties of all, was not needed but was met with little opposition or response from the Left.

When police operations began in Ottawa, these events took place in full view of the mainstream media. Former police chiefs were trotted out to give colourful commentary on network television, praising the restraint and professionalism of the police. Frequent reference was made to the Toronto G20 protests and the supposed lessons learned about violent tactics like mass arrest and kettling. Patience, and even compassion, were on national display as the police spent a weekend constructing a spectacle that was equal parts enforcement operation and media product.

Even when some labour organizations began to organize counter-protests in Toronto, organizers cooperated with Toronto police by sending them march routes in advance, moving the date of the rally to avoid conflict with the anti-mandate protests, and during the speeches, thanking them for their assistance. It is not a secret that movements to force labour organizations to adopt abolitionist policies and engage in more abolitionist organizing have been met with a great deal of failure. In many union organizations, aspects of the police, border services, and prison guards remain within the house of labour despite the racist foundation that continually upholds acts of violence against workers of colour.

Today, after calls to defund the police have entered the mainstream vocabulary, how do we take advantage of these tensions to strengthen public consciousness and education around abolition and grow a culture and politics of refusal and non-compliance in our labour movements? In what follows, we explore the tensions of ongoing police compliance in our movements, especially given the danger experienced by many activists targeted by racial profiling or from heavily-policed communities. We must identify and challenge the “security creep” in our movements and continue to forefront abolitionist approaches to social change. Rather than looking to the state for security, grassroots movements need to draw power from our radical histories of abolition as a form of community empowerment and justice. This includes long histories of fighting the police, local police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), from Indigenous communities, to radical elements of the labour movement, to Black activists researching and educating others about the role of slavery and racial profiling of Black people in Canada (the mainstream Canadian narrative having always proclaimed Canada to be a “safe haven” for Black people).

What is clear is that racism continues to be a barrier to working-class unity and solidarity. Any strategies and organizing against capitalism need to address racism and colonialism, including how state power works to uphold these relationships. Central to this work is understanding power structures and institutional violence that enable racism to continue in policing, borders, prisons, and the military. By taking the disproportionate rates of incarceration, deportation, racial profiling, and actual killing of Black and brown workers seriously, abolition must be central to the anti-racist strategy of working-class movements.

For us, the challenge is two-fold: to keep taking advantage of the tensions as they emerge to make clear connections between the police and security apparatus and white supremacist, colonial goals, and at the same time, to talk about abolition as a central aspect of working-class struggle. Currently, the police enforcement of racism and colonialism relies on narratives that claim they are keeping some working-class people safe from the more “dangerous” elements of society (Black people and Indigenous people). Our fight for abolition not only means exposing this lie but also linking it to the abolition of capitalism that exacerbates and profits from colonialism and racism and muddles working-class resistance. The image of the “working-class taxpayer” has always been a white settler—never Black, Indigenous or people of colour who also rely on selling their labour for wages.

While a great deal of the narratives and politics of police abolition come from the US, there remains a Canadian romanticization of the RCMP and the other elements of the security apparatus that are often ignored, such as Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), police guards in prisons, and the Canadian army abroad. While some local police services are targeted for scrutiny, such as in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver, Canadian histories and media coverage have always been quite generous to the police as an institution. The Left needs to reinvigorate the labour movement, connecting the demands of working-class people to the struggles of our most vulnerable communities. The fight for police abolition has the potential to build class solidarity. The labour movement must reckon with its complicity in state violence and work to reclaim the language of the working class before the fascist Right can co-opt more mass movements.

A Short History of Canadian Policing

While abolition may be an unfamiliar concept for folks outside of leftist circles, the importance of grasping the problem of prisons and policing at the root remains as important now as ever. While abolition has been used to specifically target police or prisons, it must also extend to the abolition of capitalism by targeting racist, violent security apparatuses, including borders and the military. Abolition, as a historical praxis, compels us to remember the origins of policing: that is, its connection to settler colonialism, slavery, and the attempt to construct a social order based on systems of dispossession. Some of the earliest forms of policing in North America were linked to the development of British colonial settlements in what would become the United States. 4 These early settlement towns were founded on violence and colonization carried out by settler militias and later policed by slave patrols. 5 However, the modern institution of policing as we know it today did not emerge until the mid-nineteenth century during the rise of industrial capitalism.

According to Mark Neocleous, modern institutions of policing are integral to the very fabrication of social order: policing shapes and orders civil society. 6 The working class did not appear ready-made for capital. Rather, new techniques of policing helped fabricate relations of market dependence by rendering alternatives to the wage relation illegal. 7 This process was not limited to Europe. As Todd Gordon explains, “like in Britain, the Canadian state criminalized a range of street-based working-class activities that were carried out either for pleasure or as an alternative to gainful employment”: public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, gaming, sex work, and begging being common targets. 8 It is in this sense that the creation of a criminal class has historically been important to the making of the working class.

White supremacy and colonialism were central in the emergence of modern policing. Similar to the US, in the mid-nineteenth century Canada was experimenting with different policing organizations to protect its new borders and pave the way for further settlement into Indigenous lands. Afraid of US expansion westward and the threat of Métis and Indigenous rebellion, Prime Minister John A. MacDonald created the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873 to violently quell any challenge to British Canadian rule. Following the 1885 Northwest Rebellion led by Louis Riel, Métis and Indigenous peoples became subject to harsher and more restrictive policies overseen by the Department of Indian Affairs and enforced by the NWMP. Jeffrey Monaghan explains,

In the post-rebellion period, the NWMP was central to the enforcement of pass laws, the containment strategies of the reserves, the dispersal (and non-dispersal) of rations and equipment based on compliant behaviour (despite treaty obligations), and the frontline enforcement of law and order. As the frontier became increasingly conditioned for White settlement, criminal law became an important disciplinary tool to establish sovereign, settler authority. 9

Today, the NWMP is known as the RCMP, Canada’s national police force.

Popular histories of the RCMP, often written by former cops, have worked hard to portray the “Mountie” as a benevolent figure central to Canadian identity. The RCMP has been depicted in postcards, novels, movies, and television, and the iconic red uniform was even licensed to Disney from 1995–2000 in an attempt by the Force to massage and control its image. 10 Leftist historians have also worked hard to debunk these ideological projects by exposing the RCMP’s role in enforcing the residential school system, putting down labour struggles, and enabling the internment of foreign nationals during both world wars.

In their 1973 Unauthorized History of the RCMP, historians Lorne and Caroline Brown cite the various ways the RCMP specifically targeted working-class movements and strikes, from the first Canadian Pacific Railway strike in 1883, to the 1919 General Strike in Winnipeg, to the killing of three miners during the Estevan Riot in 1931. 11 They also write the history of the RCMP in Cold War surveillance over groups such as the National Farmers Union, the Socialist Party of Canada, the Communist Party of Canada, and even spying on Tommy Douglas of the New Democratic Party (NDP). From 1948 to 1983, Operation PROFUNC 12 enabled the RCMP to extensively surveil communist and social democratic organizations, as well as student groups, queer organizations, and elements of the women’s movement. The program even included planned internment camps should a communist uprising happen in Canada. 13 Yet other disclosures from COINTELPRO in the US reveal the interconnection between the FBI and RCMP in surveilling and infiltrating the burgeoning Black Power movement of the late 60s. Interestingly, as Andrea Conte reveals in his article “Administrative Sabotage,” disclosures of police action are far more accessible in the US than in Canada, which has a markedly unresponsive and slow process for filing access to information requests. 14

Beyond the secretive inner workings of the RCMP, it is perhaps more illustrative to simply review the force’s overt actions over the decades. As Todd Gordon explains in Imperialist Canada, controlling Indigenous peoples as the “threat from within” has been a central focus of Canada’s various policing and military organizations. 15 From the Oka Crisis in 1990 to the military offensive at Gustafsen Lake in BC in 1995 with the Ts’Peten Defenders, Canadian security forces have long struggled to contain Indigenous protest and to secure stable access to resources. There is also the general racism of the police force where everyday acts of police violence and incarceration continue to oppress Indigenous peoples. Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in the prison system, 16 underserved by the police, and actively subjected to abuse. From the police terror of the Saskatoon “starlight tours” in the 1990s, to the harassment of Colten Boushie’s family following his murder, to the Winnipeg police murder of 16-year-old Eishia Hudson, 17 the state’s use of force is levelled against Indigenous communities as a tool of colonialism.

Robyn Maynard provides a recent study of the impact of state violence and policing on Black Canadians, writing that “state violence against Black persons in Canada has, by and large, remained insulated by a wall of silence and gone largely unrecognized by much of the public. . .” 18 From slavery, to bondage, to segregation, Maynard recounts how policing emerged to contain and surveil Black populations as part of the settler-colonial project, accomplished through the racialization of crime and the increase of racial profiling and “carding” that occurred in larger cities. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter and No PRIDE In Policing movements in Canada responded to police violence and murder against Black people including D’Andre Campbell, Olando Brown, Abdirahman Abdi, and Andrew Loku, as well as the violent beating of Dafonte Miller, pushing for people to criticize the seemingly “normal” presence of police in our communities and drawing attention to the reality of ongoing harassment and fear of increased policing.

Finally, we must acknowledge how the police and military apparatus target massive protests against global finance and private capital, from the RCMP attacking protesters at the 1997 APEC summit, to the FTAA protests in 2001, to the 2010 Toronto G20. Most recently, police overstep and violence was on full display when the Toronto Police Service, in conjunction with private security, forcibly evicted the residents of homeless encampments across the city. What is clear is that when there is a direct confrontation with private capital or Canada’s role in oppression, the police, military, and security forces are close at hand and well-financed to act in the interests of the state. Not only will they continually act against revolutionary and working-class movements, but their foundation, built on racism and colonialism, means that they will support or at least tolerate openly fascist movements. As Geo Maher argues: “The police aren’t being invaded by anti-democratic fascists; they are the fascists, and are busily training new recruits for the far right every day.” 19

Fight the Pig Ideology

Despite the proven track record of police misconduct and abuse, police organizations wield a tremendous amount of influence in society. While we explored the direct coercive aspects of policing above, there remains an equally powerful ideological element: police and other violent institutions are constantly working to produce consent. Whether it is the media portrayals of the military engaged in “humanitarian work” or local police engaged in “community relations” or their presence in schools ostensibly to teach kids about safety, dominant institutions are constantly working to build and maintain mainstream buy-in, despite the ongoing cracks and fissures in the façade of their legitimacy. Not only is the Mountie an icon of Canadiana, but the ideology of policing—the notion that society is chaotic and needs protectors—permeates every facet of social life. From everyday encounters with security and policing, to narrative saturation in television programs like COPS, Law & Order, or Border Security, and the mass appeal of superhero films, “copaganda” is everywhere. As a cultural aspect of abolition, the Left needs to expose the structural violence these images obscure. The challenge, as Gramsci might say, is to turn the people’s “common sense” around policing toward the “good sense” of abolition.

Importantly, we need to challenge the myth that police constitute a “thin blue line” that serve and protect the public from lawless violence. As Monaghan writes, the police circulate a deeply conservative worldview based on the notion that they form “the only social instrument that protects deserving citizens—itself a racialized construction based on norms of whiteness—against violent and predatory others.” 20 This is a foundational fiction central to the ideological work of the police: “To Serve and Protect” is emblazoned on their vehicles, stitched into their uniforms, and frequently parroted in news media. In fact, the police and their PR representatives are platformed frequently in the media as the primary, if not the only, sources in daily crime reporting. This perspective of policing is mainstream to such a degree that even leftist organizations have adopted their rhetoric and sought their inclusion (for example, the recent #MeToo movement, which elevated a form of carceral feminism that sought the involvement of the police and courts to solve sexual harassment and violence).

As Ryan Hayes explains, while police unions are not members of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), “unions affiliated with the CLC have members involved in many aspects of policing and the prison industrial complex—from the RCMP to jail guards, immigration enforcement agents, and transit cops.” 21 In fact, the CLC and other unions have openly advocated for the inclusion of police in the house of labour, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which organized 1,300 RCMP telecom operators and intercept monitor analysts in 2018. This prompted a rank-and-file campaign to get “Cops Out of CUPE” by bringing motions to the convention floor in 2018 and 2019. While these motions have so far failed, we must learn from the nature of these mobilizations and failures. When motions are on the floor that challenge police, otherwise dull conventions turn into impassioned debates, with some union members arguing emphatically in favour of the police There is also an assumption that motions to remove cops, prison guards, or border service officers from unions come from the more “elite” elements of the union movement: radical education workers in universities that are out of touch with the real working class of Canada.

In these spaces, the middle-class aspirations of the labour movement are laid bare. Unionized workers with relative stability and privilege identify with the police as allies in the fight for, and defence of, the so-called middle class. Despite the labour movement’s commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism, many within it rely on reformist proposals to lessen the violence of police and security institutions rather than signing onto abolition. Here it is important to challenge the notion that police are workers. While policing is a job, employees of the prison industrial complex do not generate value, at least not value for the good of the people. On the contrary, policing works against the interests of the working class to uphold the power of capital. The police are the muscle of our oppressors, no matter how “sensitivity trained” or polite they may appear. Their ultimate function in society is to maintain “order,” that is, to maintain the dominance of the ruling class. If this dominance is not felt by a privileged sub-section of the labour movement, this is a reflection of labour’s detachment from the most vulnerable communities in our society, both in terms of organizing priorities as well as in terms of the geography of policing.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped during the George Floyd uprising, it’s not hard to imagine a world of defunded police: it already exists in the suburbs. Spaces of affluent middle-class seclusion have the resources to invest in and fund their communities, and they aren’t policed in the same way that poor and working-class communities are. The people who face the brunt of social-service erosion and police violence lack the resources afforded to stable unionized workers. The deployment of policing is classed, and class is racialized.

It is important here to recognize the ongoing abolitionist work being done to challenge this geographic and social abuse by the police, as well as the ideological support for the police that often bleeds into other institutions, like social work or education, where workers take on roles to punish and criminalize other people. Building working-class solidarity means engaging in consciousness-raising in order to defeat the ideologies of policing. No One Is Illegal (NOII)–Toronto has fought and won Sanctuary City status for Toronto, and worked directly with social-service providers and state-based institutions to develop effective “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policies regarding immigration status. In working to achieve access without fear for our undocumented comrades, NOII has directly engaged with the service providers, many of whom are unionized public employees, to raise consciousness around the racialization of immigration and the carceral impacts of working with the CBSA. Importantly, these campaigns have highlighted our power of refusal as workers: refusal to cooperate with the police and refusal to abandon our neighbours. 22

One of the challenges of building abolitionist politics is to include the incarcerated in the fold of the working class. “Criminality,” as an ideological construction pushed by the police, is often portrayed as an ever-present attack on working-class people. This obscures the way capitalism produces so-called criminality through calculated abandonment and disposability. Abolitionists must challenge the ideological role that the “criminal” plays in the consciousness of the working class and expose it as the scapegoat it is. There will always be crime in societies with an unequal division of wealth. For Angela Davis, we must see the revolutionary potential of prisoners and see crime as an act of resistance. As she wrote in 1971:

. . .[W]hen so many Black, Chicano and Puerto Rican men and women are jobless as a consequence of the internal dynamic of the capitalist system, the role of the unemployed, which includes the lumpenproletariat, in revolutionary struggle must be given serious thought. . ..In the context of class exploitation and national oppression, it should be clear that numerous individuals are compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a result of conscious choice—implying other alternatives—but because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of subsistence and survival to this level. This recognition should signal the urgent need to organize the unemployed and lumpenproletariat. . . .” 23

To make abolition a reality, the Left needs to expand these refusals and connect the demands of the working class with the demands of abolition. Our biggest power as workers is our power to withdraw our labour, our power to strike. Raising worker consciousness means addressing the thorny issue of police collaboration within the Left and demanding we move beyond using punishment and exclusion in our movements. We must challenge the ideology of policing in our organizing spaces and build working-class community power that uplifts the most vulnerable (including the unemployed) among us, rather than abandon them to the prison industrial complex.

From Defunding to Abolition

While there is a longer history of abolition of the police, the 2020 uprisings with the Movement for Black Lives saw a more unique call for defunding the police. It was with this call that activists could direct the politics of abolition to concrete campaigns directed at local, provincial, or national budgets. This often revealed the amount of resources spent to keep oppressive structures in place over community-based services.

As Maynard explains:

National spending on police operations has increased steadily since the mid 1990s, reaching $15.1 billion in 2017–18. A 2013 government report noted that the cost of policing nationally had more than doubled since 1997, “outpacing the increase in spending by all levels of government,” with police salaries increasing by 40 percent since 2000 (whereas most Canadians’ salaries increased by 11 percent). 24

The campaign to defund the police has raised awareness of the role of police budgets and challenged a sense of Canadian exceptionalism: the belief that Canadian state forces when it comes to military, security, or policing are not as extravagant as the US, and that Canada is a “peacekeeper” nation that does not perpetuate the same levels of police violence as in the US. The budgets of the police and military are generally not of concern to many Canadians. While it is true there is not as much integration with private prisons as there is in the US (although private corporations play a role and profit from our prison and immigration detention systems), there seems to be marked exceptionalism for Canada’s more violent state forces than for life-affirming institutions such as health care, education, and social services. While the government insists on market forces to govern other institutions that might assist people, the police and military are given bloated budgets despite the fact that “crime” has lowered across the country.

These high budgets, some accounting for 10 percent of entire municipal budgets, cannot be justified by the same market forces that dictate the funding of other public services. And here we see the strong integration of these forces and the government. While many state politicians directly support both military and police services and advocate for bloated budgets, the role of police unions has disproportionate influence over police budgets as well.

In response to the critique of police violence, police organizations have created programs to “bridge” with communities. They integrate themselves into grade schools, or promote “neighbourhood” programs where “kind police officers” walk around, playing basketball with the youth. This is all, however, transparently to reform their image in order to justify higher budget lines. Meanwhile, grassroots campaigns like Education Not Incarceration in Toronto have worked tirelessly to get cops out of the Toronto school board, and won. Much of this work involved dispelling police propaganda about the supposed “success” of the program by recentring the experiences of racialized students. 25 As organizer Gita Madan states, “This victory [to terminate the school board contract with police] indicates a paradigm shift in which system educators are finally acknowledging that programs and policies rooted in the hyper-surveillance of racialized youth and the securitization of schools do the exact opposite of creating safety, equity, and inclusion.” 26

Campaigns to defund the police have led to huge splits in more liberal and social democratic movements. 27 The leadership in the NDP have been reluctant to take a firm abolitionist perspective and as previously discussed, within organized labour, campaigns to remove cops from unions have led to divisive discussion and votes on convention floors. A barrier this movement faces is the conception that those paid to violently enforce unequal power relations in society––police, prison guards, border patrollers––are working class. Here, activists need to advance a clear and accessible understanding of exactly who constitutes the working class in society and why, not least to defend working-class communities that are continually brutalized by these institutions.

Exorbitant police budgets, consistent violence against racialized communities, and a complete lack of accountability provide easy avenues to publicize and mobilize against police power. Once again, the role of unions here is key. Because unions often advocate for more work and more projects to benefit their members, the inclusion of violent state forces into unions means that unions will be in the contradictory position of lobbying the state for more of those jobs on the one hand, while supporting campaigns against racialized police violence on the other.

Hayes writes that, “Unions shouldn’t be pushing to build new jails. We need to redirect our money from police, prisons, and pipelines to people and communities.” He continues:

We [in the labour movement] can’t justify our collusion with state security forces by uncritically parroting the slogan “all workers have the right to organize.” This blurring of lines depoliticizes what it means to be a worker. Rather than drooling over employment growth within the prison industrial complex, our job is to end it. We must imagine, organize, and build alternatives in a spirit of abolition that will make our labour movement ancestors and descendants proud. 28

The over-bloated and expansive organization of police forces is part of what Maher calls “the pig majority.” Moving beyond the borders of our community, the investment in policing (controlling the movement of people) has had both ideological and practical implications, underwriting Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan and Haiti. Maher points out that the “everyday” taken for granted forms of policing are foundational to policing in general. Whether it is administrative positions or the culture of policing where people volunteer to do the work of police, to police TV shows and racist media that lift up policing, Maher writes:

This expansive, amorphous pig majority comes into being long before violence occurs and continues to coalesce and expand after the body is cold. Its backbone is the self-deputized white majority that, with an effortlessness bordering on instinct, volunteers to police others, in part because it dreams police dreams and plays them out at home on wives and children, all while praying to a police god. 29

As Maher outlines in his book, this pig majority may seem overwhelming and difficult to fight, but the abolition movement has grown and continues to grow, posing a significant challenge to the police and prison system.

From Reform to Revolution: The Promise of Abolition

Although union conventions provide important spaces to organize, debate, and raise consciousness amongst organized union members, it is important to acknowledge that to make abolition central to working-class struggle it does not necessarily have to happen on a convention floor. The promise of abolition also comes in the form of various experiments of community struggle: formations of cop-watch, Indigenous-led street patrols found in both Winnipeg and Thunder Bay as a form of community self-defence; workshops on transformative justice that give workers tools for how to respond to harm without using carceral institutions and build community models to provide alternatives to policing; calls to remove police from PRIDE demonstrations, such as the campaign by Toronto-based No PRIDE in Policing, one of the largest grassroots queer movements to remove police from PRIDE events. Most of these experimental models have been developed or led by Black, Indigenous, and racialized women and trans folks.

While we build these spaces outside of union structures, it is vital that we begin to bring the politics of transformative justice into union spaces as well and bridge the liberatory sentiments of transformative justice to working-class struggle.

A coalition of anti-racist feminists began to call for police abolition in the mid 1990s through the creation of INCITE!, a coalition of women of colour to create feminist responses to harm without the need for carceral action. The 2004 compilation, The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex was a revolutionary book that refocused the fight against violence against women on the community rather than on state structures and non-profits. While there has been growing popularity around abolition and defunding the police in the past few years, we must review the significant work done by feminist writers such as Mariame Kaba, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and recently, the Creative Interventions Toolkit on providing revolutionaries with roadmaps for ending violence and creating processes of transformative justice.

With grassroots campaigns to defund the police, mainstream books on police abolition, organizing by Showing Up for Racial Justice, and intensive networks working on abolition, there has been a clear movement toward an interest in abolition. The politics of police abolition are exciting because of their foundation in the Black liberation and queer feminist politics that led to the first convening of INCITE!, where feminists continue to write and organize around community liberation from policing and experiment with transformational forms of resolution and accountability.

It needs to be said that the contradictions around this process and experimentation have led activists down winding roads of uncertainty and messiness. Indeed, when we are told every day that a neutral criminal system exists to arbitrate between harm and justice, creating alternatives to these state structures faces many limitations. There is great doubt that communities with little resources can meet the demands that state apparatuses address. However, it shows that communities can share in and have a sense of control over what justice looks like.

This brings us to a fundamental barrier that activists need to contend with: that even though abolition can provide a bridge between reform and revolution and theory and praxis, there is no way that communities can provide all the services of the state. That is why part of the revolutionary project needs to be building power. It is not enough to have small bubbles existing alongside the police, courts, and prisons. This is the reason why abolition as a socialist horizon is not only daunting, but also exciting. For every question we get about “who are you gonna call when you need help?”, we can have new ideas that help form a roadmap toward that horizon of abolition and socialism. In this work, we must forefront a multi-racial, feminist, queer movement that can resonate however we can. Abolition not only provides a methodology for understanding systems of power and oppression, but also a template for a different economic order. Just as the goals of communism and anarchism have been written off as unrealistic dreams, so has the demand for prison abolition. Upping the Anti editors are always excited to publish in the realm of the radical imagination not just as a mental exercise, but to really understand what kind of inspiring politics could lead to greater unity and collaboration to build a radical, anti-capitalist movement: the history and current iterations of police abolition offer real, substantial gains in bridging the debate between reform and revolution. *

This interview presented a very reasonable perspective, it emphasized the horrors that minoritized people have been put through in the past, and what they continue to endure in the present. I want to reiterate the intentionality of these horrors. It is not a historic accident that some people are considered a minority rather than others. However, it is also necessary to talk of the struggles of native communities from their own perspective: with a burning urgency and as a belligerent force against the colonial order, rather than as victims.

I remember that a couple of years ago Alejandro posted on social media about his participation in an ilustratón organized for #AguaParaAyutla. By stroke of luck, we shared social media spaces and found ourselves in a place of convergent thinking. I participated in an online session organized via Estuary, an open source coding platform, generating imagery and animation with political messages that would help to make visible the issue of dispossession of groundwater reserves and, hopefully, contribute to its resolution.

Sadly, there has been little progress made on the issue, and there is still a lot not known about it. But it seems to be that we have achieved one thing: we’ve raised awareness about the unsustainability of ancestral territories.

The problem is clear, especially because the state shamelessly and repeatedly evades their responsibility and obligation. The water issue in Ayutla Mixe (Oaxaca) is the result of an armed invasion by the Mexican state and the federal police on communities, not a conflict between two Mixe communities for a natural resource such as water.

Logically, it makes no sense that a community would destroy a water storage system that it has worked for three decades to develop to dispossess themselves of a vital resource they require to remain.

There is an excess of contradictions and the deeds are in the words. What I mean is that words end up reproducing the actions of the state in its genocidal project. Words like “mestizo,” “Indigenous,” and “multicultural” reproduce the ways of thinking and acting of this organism of tremendous power. Let us demystify some equivocal, inexact, and extremely painful ideologies for groups that have been defined in these terms.

It is a state imposition to say that the category “Indigenous” is cultural. Considering that during colonial times they were called “Indians” but during the 19th century the concept was substituted by “Indigenous,” in believing that the change of the concept signifies national progress, we would err by reproducing this way of thinking because they are deceptive categories that only seek to homogenize cultural and linguistic diversity.

Far from fitting everything in the same mould, communities must understand each other by their differences, since each group that forms them has distinct characteristics: they don’t share cosmologies, music, epistemes, ways of governing, or customs and practices.

For this reason, it is important to realize that Mixes, Mazatecos, Huicholes, are not Indigenous because they don’t belong historically or culturally to the same group. They are not a homogenous whole. These groups have spent more time being ayuuk and chjota énna and wixárika than what they have spent being “Indians” or “Indigenous,” which are cultural categories in the discourse of multiculturalism, but in reality are political terms. 1

However, there is always hope. The state must recognize the communities’ freedom for self-determination and self-government. But above all, the Mexican state must eradicate the liberal narrative of multiculturalism to clear the way for native communities to produce their own varied imaginaries based on non-hegemonic ideas.

Let’s stand for all the spaces where minoritized peoples exist: their language, their territory, their thought, their life.

Notes

As a relatively novice organizer of European descent, I notice my own discomfort with the emphasis on relationships that Awâsis describes: “organization that implements natural law through land-based kinship systems of reciprocal responsibilities” (122). Because colonial values and structures have devalued and exploited planetary systems in order to feed the machine of “infinite growth,” we are collectively in a race against time. Prioritizing relationships and reciprocity in activism feels unproductive, a manifestation of my deep immersion in the capitalistic and meritocratic paradigm in which I was raised. This reinforces the emphasis on technoscientific solutions that demand and generate financial capital, again perpetuating systems that depend on inequity and that fundamentally devalue life. Those who benefit from these systems cling desperately to them, and because they hold power, control the narrative and mythology about what is necessary to address our many planetary crises.

Kyle Whyte also explores this discrepancy in his paper, “Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice.” 1 Although we must urgently address the climate crisis, meaningfully addressing the critical aspects of relational justice inherent in mitigating the crisis takes time. Whyte writes, “consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity are qualities of relationships that are critical for justice-oriented coordination across societal institutions on any urgent matter. Yet they are precisely the kinds of qualities of relationships that take time to nurture and develop. That is, they are necessary for taking urgent action that is just, but they cannot be established urgently.” I struggle to know how to resolve this contradiction, through the essential work of decolonizing my own mindset in a world that wants me to stay colonized. And yet when I experience despair, I am reminded that relationships, community, and diversity are fundamental to health and life; without these, what are we acting to save?

Centering our relationships with the land, water, air, more-than-human beings, and one another is the only way forward. This is the essence of Indigenous anarchy, as described by Awâsis: a “‘returning to ourselves’ and the land in a way that amplifies place‐based relational networks” (126). Not lawlessness, but mutual reciprocity, respect, and honouring of the laws of nature and relationships. Those of us who are steeped in colonial systems must humble ourselves to these universal laws. This is a paradigm leap for those of us for whom Awâsis’ piece is an awakening. We must enter into the deliberate work of deconstructing internalized white supremacy, and engage in the work of what Trevor Hancock calls (apt terminology for a white person), “heart, gut and spirit stuff.” 2

Notes

In the US, Black women are, proportionally, the largest population of vegans, and people of colour are often those that are subject to the trauma within factory farms, or live near them due to Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) discrimination. The idea that it is only privileged white people who support the animal rights movement, who believe all creatures deserve equal rights, is a myth that only perpetuates the idea that POCs can’t sympathize with those beyond them. In fact, it is also a myth that eating sustainably and vegan entails a great deal more costs and therefore is completely inaccessible to those in low-income areas. While the truth of this can vary widely depending on the community, a study conducted by Lancet Planetary Health Today found that in high-income countries, such as the US, vegan diets can actually slash food costs by more than a third. To ignore the oppression of nonhumans is to ignore the oppression of so many more, and I believe the plight of nonhumans has been, and still is, shared by other groups subject to discrimination.