Letters to the Editors
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Letter
Dis-owning Knowledge
Dear UTA, I was excited to see the publication of an article focusing on critical trans politics in Issue 14 of Upping the Anti. Rob Nichols’s interview with Dean Spade provides a succinct overview of Spade’s critiques of legal frameworks and institutions as these pertain to, and govern, concept…
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Letter
Partners in Radical Projects: Thoughts on Activist-NGO Alliances
Dear UTA, I am writing in response to your interview in Upping the Anti Issue 15 with Kat Stevens, an anarchist and community organizer involved for many years in Tar Sands Blockade organizing in Houston, Texas. While discussing lobbying efforts to combat the Keystone XL pipeline, Stevens characteri…
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Letter
Letter - Reflective Solidarity and Paradigms of Suffering
Dear UTA, The Editorial in Upping the Anti Issue 15 invokes Jodi Dean and Chandra Mohanty’s visions of solidarity as a process of linking distinct struggles, rather than rallying around common identities, as one way to avoid a feminism molded exclusively around experiences of White women, to the e…
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Cautionary Notes on Spontaneity and Organization
Dear UTA, Congratulations for producing Upping the Anti 14 in spite of adverse circumstances. The issue’s editorial concludes that we (the revolutionary Left) “must commit to ever increasing spontaneous proliferation of organizational experiments and when we fail we must learn to, as Samuel Beck…
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Letter
Prison Abolition and "Sex Crimes"
Dear UTA, For those of us who believe in prison abolition, how to deal with people labelled “sex offenders” is a difficult question. Although we recognize the failure of prisons to keep us, our families, and our communities safe, we have not yet implemented widespread programs and initiatives th…
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Letter
It's More Than a Class Thing When We Deal with Class Struggle
Dear UTA, There are a number of points raised in “Revolutionary Ambition in an Age of Austerity: An Interview with Neil Smith” that I agree with. I will briefly engage with some issues around the class struggle before speaking to the manner in which race is missing or, at best, implicitly presen…
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Letter
Copwatching Everywhere
Dear UTA, In “Their Eyes Were Watching Cops,” Joaquin Cienfuegos talks about his experiences of political organizing, specifically with Copwatch LA. As a member of Winnipeg Copwatch, I found his insights to be incredibly valuable. Winnipeg’s Copwatch group has been active since 2006. Throughou…
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Letter
The Law's Fundamentally Violent Character
Dear UTA, As a radical lawyer and legal scholar with over a decade of experience in activist legal defense (and – full disclosure – as a former Upping the Anti Advisory Board member), I eagerly awaited your last editorial. However, despite its historical breadth, “The Courtroom and the Street:...
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Letter
Solidarity & Internationalism
Dear UTA, It was with utmost appreciation that I read Shourideh Molavi and Niloofar Golkar’s analysis of the 2009 revolutionary movement in Iran. The radical Left’s unfortunate confusion with resect to Iran did not, of course, begin with the recent movement. One can hardly find a greater betraya…
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Letter
We Are the Ones
Dear UTA, When I saw Victoria Law’s article, “Protection Without Police: North American Community Responses to Violence in the 1970s and Today” in UTA 12 (conveniently on the back of the toilet of a sweet friend’s bathroom) I jumped for joy, or something like it. I’m a feminist nerd, so I…
