A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James

The Invading Socialist Society and Every Cook Can Govern

Noel Ignatiev, C.L.R. James

C.L.R. James was a leading figure in the independence movement in the West Indies, and the black and working-class movements in both Britain and the United States. As a major contributor to Marxist and revolutionary theory, his project was to discover, document, and elaborate the aspects of working-class activity that constitute the revolution in today’s world. In this volume, Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, provides an extensive introduction to James’ life and thought… (more information)

About Canada: Animal Rights

John Sorenson

Adopting Mahatma Gandhi’s idea that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” this book considers the status of animals in Canada. Casting a critical gaze over how dominant ideologies, such as capitalism and patriarchy, have negatively impacted our relationships with the natural world, Sorenson examines the institutional exploitation of animals in agriculture, fashion and entertainment. Addressing the fur trade, seal hunt… (more information)

Aski Awasis/Children of the Earth

First Peoples Speaking on Adoption

Edited by Jeannine Carrière

The adoption of Aboriginal children into non-Aboriginal families has a long and contentious history in Canada. Life stories told by First Nations people reveal that the adoption experience has been far from positive for these communities and has, in fact, been an integral aspect of colonization. In an effort to decolonize adoption practices, the Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA) in Alberta has integrated customary First Peoples’ adoption practices with provincial adoption laws and regulations… (more information)

Between Terror and Democracy

Algeria since 1989

James D. Le Sueur

Algeria’s democratic experiment is seminal in post-Cold War history. In this book Le Sueur shows that Algeria is at the very heart of contemporary debates about Islam and secular democracy. Between Terror and Democracy is a lively examination of how the fate of one country is entwined with much greater global issues. (more information)

Beyond the Profits System

Possibilities for the Post-Capitalist Era

Harry Shutt

While many have claimed that no one could have foreseen the financial crisis, Harry Shutt was predicting just such a collapse as far back as 1998 in his book, The Trouble With Capitalism. In Beyond the Profits System, Shutt offers a radically different analysis to the mainstream, establishment commentators who have struggled to come to terms with the crisis. Arguing that we need to move away from a system based on compulsive addiction to growth and obsession with the profit motive, towards a collectivist… (more information)

Black Canadians Second Edition

History, Experience, Social Conditions, Revised Edition

Joseph Mensah

Black Canadians provides an authoritative reference for teachers, students and the general public who seek to know more about the Black Diaspora in North America. Arguments made in this book may be unpleasant for those with little appetite for pointed, provocative views and analysis from the standpoint of Black people. For those with a genuine interest in venturing beyond established orthodoxies and simplistic solutions to the contentious ethno-racial problems in Canada, this book will be insightful… (more information)

Canada and Israel

Building Apartheid

Yves Engler

This book is the first critical primer about Canada’s ties to Israel. It is a devastating account of Canadian complicity in 20th and 21st century colonialism, dispossession and war crimes. The book documents the history of Canadian Christian Zionism, Lester Pearson’s important role in the United Nations negotiations to create a Jewish state on Palestinian land, the millions of dollars in tax-deductable donations used to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Canadian Security… (more information)

Deadly Fever

Racism, Disease and a Media Panic

Charles T. Adeyanju

In February 2001, a woman from the Congo was admitted to a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, with a serious illness of unknown origin. Very quickly, the rumour spread that she was carrying the deadly Ebola virus. Even though it was equally quickly determined that she did not carry the virus, the rumour spread like wildfire throughout the Canadian media. Through a content analysis of four major Canadian newspapers and interviews with journalists, medical practitioners and members of the Black community… (more information)

Down But Not Out

Community and the Upper Streets in Halifax, 1890-1914

David Hood

An examination of poverty and homelessness in Halifax at the turn of the twentieth century, this book challenges the notion that the poor are deviants who are responsible for their own misfortune. Historians have too often accepted this characterization of poverty without question and, in so doing, have allowed for its perpetuation into current discourse. Through an exploration of public records and the stories of real people, David Hood breathes life into Halifax’s sordid past — and… (more information)

Economic Democracy

The Working Class Alternative to Capitalism

Allan Engler

Identifying capitalism as a system of socialized labour, privately owned capitalist collectives (corporations) and workplace (dictatorships), this book proposes economic democracy as an alternative form of organization. Unlike the capitalist system, which centralizes power with a small elite, economic democracy entitles everyone to a voice and equal vote in their communities’ economic and political decisions. Workplace and community democracy will replace capitalist (corporate) dictatorship… (more information)

Global Capitalism in Crisis

Karl Marx & The Decay of the Profit System

Murray E.G. Smith

The world economy is currently experiencing a devastating slump not seen since the Second World War. Unemployment rates are skyrocketing and salaries are plummeting in the developed world, while astronomical food prices and starvation ravage the developing world. The crisis in global capitalism, Smith argues, should be understood as both a composite crisis of overproduction, credit and finance, and a deep-seated systemic crisis. Using Marx to analyze the origins, implications and scope of the current… (more information)

Great Multicultural North

A Canadian Primer for Hosers, Immigrants and Socialists

Ernesto (Ernie) Raj Peshkov-Chow

Canada is a funny place, with funny people and an even funnier system of government. In fact, according to ComCan, a division of the Intellectual Property branch of the Department of Trade, Industry and Digging Deep Holes into the Earth, about 4.16536356 per cent of our GDP is a direct or indirect result of our sense of humour. In addition, the ability of Canadians to laugh at themselves is one reason this country could lead the planet past ethnic, political and economic divisions, according to… (more information)

Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity

The Politics of Difference and Solidarity

Evelyn Leslie Hamdon

This book is a critical analysis of a Muslim group in Canada that has been working to challenge Islamophobia in their community. An important part of their anti-racist work involves dealing with the internal conflicts and dilemmas created by the differences among the members of the group. The coalition has been successful in developing several educational initiatives, in part, because they have been able to negotiate internal differences in ways that do not fragment the group. Through discussions… (more information)

Maternity Rolls

Pregnancy, Childbirth and Disability

Heather Kuttai

Heather Kuttai is a 40-year-old white, heterosexual woman. She is married and is the mother of two children. Living in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood, her life is, in many ways, seemingly the quintessential picture of what many consider to be traditional. However, her life is not as conventional as it appears: she is a paraplegic and uses a wheelchair for mobility. Her disability dramatically changes the picture. Much of the writing about the experiences of women and mothers excludes the stories… (more information)

Ontario Works–Works for Whom?

An Investigation of Workfare in Ontario

Julie Vaillancourt

This book is an institutional ethnographic investigation of the Ontario Works program and the problems that it creates in the lives of people on social assistance. Ontario Works is a work-for-welfare program that was implemented in Ontario in 1996 as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state. The book shows that Ontario Works has not, in reality, been used to help people on assistance and rather has been used as another means of facilitating an attack on them, while providing subsidized… (more information)

Poverty, Regulation & Social Justice

Readings on the Criminalization of Poverty

Edited by Diane Crocker, Val Marie Johnson

Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism. Exploring issues such as homelessness, social assistance and single mothers, and written from a diversity of perspectives from academics to frontline workers, policy-makers and those affected first… (more information)

Public Service, Private Profits

The Political Economy of Public-Private Partnerships in Canada

John Loxley, Salim Loxley

PPPs/P3s have become all the rage amongst every level of government in Canada in recent years. Proponents claim P3s reduce the costs of building and operating public projects and services,that projects and services are delivered more efficiently through the P3 model, so that in the end taxpayers are better off economically and as consumers of public goods. This book tests all of these claims, and more, finding them mostly empty, ideological assertions. Through an exhaustive series of case studies… (more information)

Race and Well-Being

The Lives, Hopes and Activism of African Canadians

Akua Benjamin, David Este, Carl James, Bethan Lloyd, Wanda Thomas Bernard, Tana Turner

Through in-depth qualitative and quantitative research with African Canadians in three Canadian cities — Calgary, Toronto and Halifax — this book explores how experiences of racism, combined with other social and economic factors, affect the health and well-being of African Canadians. With a special interest in how racial stereotyping impacts Black men and boys, this book shares stories of racism and violence and explores how experiences and interpretations of, and reactions to, racism… (more information)

The Aid Triangle

Recognising the Human Dynamics of Dominance, Justice and Identity

Stuart C. Carr, Malcolm MacLachlan, Eilish McAuliffe

The Aid Triangle focuses on the human dynamics of international aid, from impoverished farmers to aid workers, donor diplomats to multilateral bureaucrats, celebrities to activists, and to the unconcerned and uninvolved. This timely work illustrates how the aid system incorporates power relationships, and therefore relationships of dominance. It explores how such dominance can be both a cause and a consequence of injustice and how the experience of injustice is both a challenge and a stimulus to… (more information)

The Economics Anti-Textbook

A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Microeconomics

Rod Hill, Tony Myatt

Mainstream textbooks present economics as an objective science free from value judgments. The Anti-Textbook argues that this is a myth–one that is not only dangerously misleading but also bland and boring. Challenging the mainstream textbooks’ assumptions, arguments, models and evidence, this book puts the controversy and excitement back into economics to reveal a fascinating and a vibrant field of study–one which is more an ‘art of persuasion’ than it is a science.… (more information)

The Global Fight for Climate Justice

Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Environmental Destruction

Edited by Ian Angus

As capitalism continues with business as usual, climate change is fast expanding the gap between rich and poor, and between and within nations, as well imposing unparalleled suffering on those least able to protect themselves. In The Global Fight for Climate Justice, anti-capitalist activists from five continents offer radical answers to the most important questions of our time: Why is capitalism destroying the conditions that make life on Earth possible? How can we stop the destruction before it… (more information)

The Nature of Human Brain Work

An Introduction to Dialectics

Joseph Dietzgen, Larry Gambone

Called by Marx “The Philosopher of Socialism,” Joseph Dietzgen was a pioneer of dialectical materialism and a fundamental influence on anarchist and socialist thought who we would do well not to forget. Dietzgen examines what we do when we think. He discovered that thinking is a process involving two opposing processes: generalization, and specialization. All thought is therefore a dialectical process. Our knowledge is inherently limited however, which makes truth relative and… (more information)

White Femininity

Race, Gender & Power

Katerina Deliovsky

This book contributes to the emerging field of white studies — an examination of the notion that whiteness is not an invisible category, but is itself a category of race. Looking at hegemonic white femininity in particular, the author examines the ways in which white women are coerced and compelled to demonstrate an allegiance to whiteness through their choice of intimate partners,sexual orientation, participation in racial inequality and complicity with white feminine beauty standards. This… (more information)

Zapatistas

Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global

Alex Khasnabish

In 1994 a guerilla army of Indigenous Mayan peasants in Southeast Mexico emerged and declared ‘Enough!’ to 500 years of colonialism, racism, exploitation, oppression and genocide. The effects of the Zapatista uprising were profound and would be felt beyond the borders of Mexico. At a time when state-sponsored socialism had all but vanished and other elements of the left appeared defeated in the face of neoliberalism’s ascendancy, the Zapatista uprising sparked a powerful new wave… (more information)