Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination Edited by Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block Fernwood, 2020 It is a commonplace on the left to speak of the crisis of capitalism, often claimed to be terminal. What is less obvious is how the
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Canadian Dimension: Making the world big enough for all of us: A review of Max Ajl’s ‘A People’s Green New Deal’
In his new, eminently readable work, researcher and postdoctoral fellow Max Ajl systematically dismantles ruling class and ostensibly progressive visions for a Green New Deal. A People’s Green New Deal Max Ajl Pluto Press, 2021 For several unfortunate years of my life, I was what might be termed a leftist
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Why the ‘New Corporation’ is bad news for democracy
The New Corporation: How “Good” Corporations Are Bad for Democracy Joel Bakan Allen Lane, 2020 Joel Bakan begins his latest book, The New Corporation, by noting that, in 2019, “…the Business Roundtable, led by JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and composed of more than two hundred of America’s top CEOs, heralded
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: ‘Capitalism must die to protect the sacred’
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth The Red Nation Common Notions, 2021 The Red Deal, a new book by the Red Nation—an American grassroots organization dedicated to the “liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism”—is a revolutionary call to reject capitalism and restore a mutually beneficial
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Charting a course for the future of feminist organizing
Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age Nora Loreto Fernwood, 2020 In reading Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age, it dawned on me how important feminist and socialist voices are. Nora Loreto puts that front and centre in her new book. These voices
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Communist love in the time of capitalist doom
The Communism of Love: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Exchange Value Richard Gilman-Opalsky AK Press, 2020 “This book is about the communism of love. It is, in other words, about the necessarily and irreducibly communist form and content of love.” So begins this broad-ranging book on a largely neglected
Continue readingScripturient: Musings on Poets and Poetry
For me, reading the American literary critic, Harold Bloom, is often like wading in molasses. Intellectual molasses, to be sure, but slow going nonetheless. His writing is thick with difficult ideas and difficult words. Bloom’s historical reach, his knowledge and his understanding of the tapestry of literature far outstrip mine,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How to blow up a movement: Andreas Malm’s new book dreams of sabotage but ignores consequences
Andreas Malm’s latest book calls for rapid escalation by the global climate movement into the realm of sabotage and property destruction. Image by Canadian Dimension, adapted from a photo by Mike Benna/Unsplash. How to Blow Up a Pipeline Andreas Malm Verso, 2021 Andreas Malm’s latest book—his second in less than
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Does the left really hate the working class?
Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class Paul Embery Polity, 2021 The Labour Party’s dismal performance in the 2019 UK general election has generally been attributed to its incoherent Brexit policy and the shortcomings—real or perceived—of its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But according to trade unionist and party
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How Cuba survived and surprised in a post-Soviet world
We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World Helen Yaffe Yale University Press, 2020 The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the consequent demise of its multilateral economic assistance programs shook what had been the socialist world. By the time the USSR voted
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Confronting medical colonialism
Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada Samir Shaheen-Hussain McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020 Anyone who thinks that racism in Canada is more benign than it is in the United States—or that Canada has left its genocidal policies in the past—must read Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Places of freedom: Reimagining the future of Standing Rock
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance Nick Estes Verso, 2019 In the fall of 2016, in a shopping mall located near a small city in North Dakota, the smell of campfire betrayed a group of activists arriving
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Growing cultures of despair in Middle America
Hillbilly Elegy Ron Howard Netflix, 2020 American director Ron Howard’s latest film, Hillbilly Elegy, released on Netflix in late November, is the latest Trump-era attempt to capture the decay of Middle America. Based on a bestselling memoir written by J.D. Vance (2016), the movie tells a heart-rending story set in
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Andreas Malm’s new pamphlet on climate, corona, and communism fails to ignite
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century Andreas Malm Verso, 2020 One of the left’s richest traditions is the polemical pamphlet written amidst crisis. Who can forget the November 1917 postscript to Lenin’s State and Revolution, where he admitted that he hadn’t finished the final chapter of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How the KKK capitalized on Canada’s racism
The Ku Klux Klan in Canada: A Century of Promoting Racism and Hate in the Peaceable Kingdom Allan Bartley Formac, 2020 Aside from accounts of the many acts of horrific, hate-driven violence committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Canada, one of the most disturbing quotes from Allan Bartley’s new
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Attacking the substance: A review of Young, Banerjee, and Schwartz’s ‘Levers of Power’
Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It Kevin A. Young, Tarun Banerjee, and Michael Schwartz Verso, 2020 In their new book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It, Kevin Young, Tarun Banerjee and Michael
Continue readingScripturient: Donald “Asshole” Trump
Back in 2012 — several years before the 2016 US election that saw what many believe was an inept, incompetent, lying, Russian agent and con artist get elected to the US presidency — associate professor of philosophy Aaron James wrote a book called, “Assholes. A Theory.” It wasn’t about anyone
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: In a compelling call to arms, Seth Klein presents inspiring vision of Canada’s response to climate crisis
A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency Seth Klein ECW Press, 2020 In May 2019, the The Guardian made an important decision when it decided to stop using the neutral terms “climate change” and “global warming” and start using terms that more accurately reflect what’s going on—“climate emergency”
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: An odyssey indeed
Itineraries: An Intellectual Odyssey Philip Resnick Ronsdale Press, 2020 Although Philip Resnick did not run into any cyclopses in his life’s journey, the tale that he recounts is as fascinating as that of Odysseus. Part of the reason is that, like Homer’s Odyssey, his writing is also quite poetic, both
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Jakarta Method: How to destabilize and control the Third World
The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World Vincent Bevins Public Affairs, 2020 Today, the “First World” typically refers to imagined “Western” countries plus Japan, otherwise known deferentially as “developed countries.” The “Second World,” those countries associated with the defunct Soviet Union, has
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