Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution is an endlessly fascinating and unique guide to actually fighting to win. While you might ask why else would you fight if not to win then you haven't observed much of the political and social action over the past few decades.
Youth activists and youth activism are sometimes characterized as naive participants or idealistic dreamers, caught up in unrealistic expectations and agendas. Youth engagement is minimal at best and apathetic at worst: a sheltered perspective of real community struggles and issues. What Power of Youth has set out to do is prove that youth activism and activists are more than these flawed descriptions.
The activists who contributed to the latest edition of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' journal of education transcend boundaries and use unique experiences of technology and community to inform their roles: they are innovators, they are leaders.
As attention turns toward the mass student strike on the streets of Montreal, ongoing for three months, the Quebec student movement clearly exemplifies the power that activism holds to shape our collective imagination.
The student protests distant from the halls of political power in Quebec City, are largely setting the terms of political debate on moves by the Quebec government to significantly hike post-secondary tuition fees.
Call me an anarchist, but I think everyone should get an equal voice. And that's one of the first things that endeared me to Whose Streets?
I love that editors Tom Malleson and David Washsmuth made the democratic and risky decision to include a broad spectrum of opinions in their book, to the point where two different authors and opinions on the subject have tiny battles of wit between the pages.
Necessary -- though not necessarily pretty -- topics and opinions (for example, the spectre of Diversity of Tactics and the role of unions) are raised in Whose Streets?, but without the hot anger they elicited during the G20 Summit itself.
The strength of Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach comes from Joan Kuyek's perspective, informed by over 40 years of organizing. Initially intended as an update of Fighting For Hope: Organizing to Realize Our Dreams, which Kuyek wrote in 1990, it has instead become a book that reflects both the changes in the world and Kuyek's learning over the last two decades.
If you want to live in a just and sustainable world (and who doesn't?) then egalitarian collective process is unavoidable. Come Hell or High Water, is a much needed critical analysis of this process. The authors are careful to explain, "the purpose of this book is to clarify some of the problems that can come up in groups that strive for equality and openness." It's not an instructional manual, it's a critique. And hey, if it's worth critiquing, it's worth practicing.
For someone who is immersed in collective organizing and is interested in the nuts and bolts of how it works, it's refreshing to read an honest deconstruction of egalitarian collective process. The crux of collective process is handily summed up in the introduction:
Reading AK Thompson's book Black Bloc, White Riot kept bringing to mind one particular memory from the Summit of the Americas protests in Quebec City a decade ago.
Few conflicts provoke such a visceral reaction as Israel-Palestine, that land held hostage by narrow media images of constant chaos and violence. While bookshelves are well-stocked with political and historical analysis, a growing body of literature broadcasts grassroots voices struggling with the dynamics of daily life in this deeply divided society.
Save the world.
These three ambiguous words have slipped off the tongues of well-meaning parents and empathetic teachers for decades, designed to empower and thrust youth into action. To us, the children of the 80s and 90s, this seemed like a challenge -- a charge to change the world placed firmly on our shoulders.
Our elementary school classrooms were plastered with posters urging us to save the whales, the forests, and the bald eagles. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" was more than just a slogan; it was a mantra. And even before we knew what the ozone layer was, we knew that we had to save it.
This is a good thing, right? Maybe not, argues Courtney E. Martin, the author of Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.
The 1960s was a turbulent period. Liberation movements in the Third World, anti-Vietnam war protests, China's cultural revolution and movement against racism and for a just society in the western world were there. However, the political turmoil in Montreal, the subject of Mills' book, The Empire Within, was unique, not only because of it was bigger than in any other Western Metropolis, but also because it combined its internal contradictions with anti-colonial struggles.
Mills' book meets the expectations of those who participated in the movements of 1960s and 70s; it could well be a companion to Jean-Phillipe Warren's Ils voulaient changer le monde. Le militantisme Marxiste-Léniniste au Québec.