Book Reviews
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Review“We Will Behave Calmly and Carefully”: On the Perils of Strategic Pacifism at the End of the World
Book review of How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm
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.
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ReviewQueer Eye for a Commie Person: Toward a Queer Left Liberation
Book review of De-centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War by Bogdan Popa
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.
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ReviewRevealing the Myth of Canadian Health Care: A Decolonial Practice
Review of Shaheen-Hussain’s book, Fighting for a Hand to Hold
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.
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ReviewNot for All the Money in the World
Review of Blood and Money by David McNally
Not for All the Money in the World
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Review
Finding All That is Lost: The Fight for History and Power in Black Lives Matter Canada
Finding All That is Lost: The Fight for History and Power in Black Lives Matter Canada
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ReviewArcane Activists and Psychical Politics
Review of Erica Lagalisse' Occult Features of Anarchism
I will preface this review by saying I am not an initiate of occult, academic, or anarchist sects. Having consistently lacked the discipline to commit myself to rigorous studies of anything, it has been by way of fleeting interest that I have come to possess some knowledge of the aforementioned fields.
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ReviewOrganizing for Power in a Stolen City
Review of Owen Toews’ book Stolen City
Growing up in the northeastern suburbs of Winnipeg, a common occurrence for my family was driving over the Disraeli bridge. As soon as Main Street became visible, the doors of our rusted blue hatchback locked with an authoritative click.
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ReviewRupturing Settler Myths
Review of Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan’s Policing Indigenous Movements
Myths about Indigenous peoples are persistent in popular settler Canadian discourse. They show settler disconnect and lack of understanding around dispossession of Indigenous lands and lifeways, settler colonization, and cultural genocide.
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ReviewThe Spectre of Austerity
With these blistering words, Moufawad-Paul begins his incisive polemic, Austerity Apparatus, a text that cuts at the heart of leftist politics. Alongside The Communist Necessity (Kersplebedeb, 2014) and Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (Zero Books, 2016), Austerity Apparatus completes a theoretical trilogy that explores the political possibilities of communism in political activism, particularly as it manifests in Canada. Positioning himself as a Marxist theorist with experience in Left organizing in Toronto, Moufawad-Paul illustrates how austerity isn’t wholly new, but merely a different face of capitalism designed and maintained to reproletarianize the working class.
