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Alain Deneault, a Doctor of Philosophy from the Université Paris-VIII, teaches in political science at the Université de Montréal. He is also the author of Offshore, Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime (The New Press, 2011)
The settler, a middle figure who is neither in the unbearable position of the colonized nor in the indefensible position of the colonizer, is generally dismissed as an extra in the colonial narrative. Complementing Albert Memmi’s diptych, Alain Deneault reveals here the useful, even indispensable, idiot of the appropriation of territory, a figure that exists only in absolute solidarity with the class that dominates it, but whose political and economic powerlessness allows him to identify, when appropriate, with the colonized.
The setting in which Alain Deneault portrays this figure: Canada. Caught between a colonial past that it wishes to forget and a republican expansion that is constantly postponed, this land that we call « country » excels only in the mediocrity of its extreme-central policies, but it gives to political theory an important object: the condition of the settler, which has been that of the majority of its population and which remains so in a thousand unspoken ways.
« What is to be done? » Lenin’s question once initiated reflexions for building a new order. It is now rhetorical : Tell me I can’t do anything as I don’t have the strength to actively engage in the act of resistance the circumstances call for. We pitifully look for a De Gaulle to respond to, or a Ghandi to massively imitate — but each of us in his own corner. At this stage of political dereliction, indeed, what is to be done? Stop the indignation and move on to the next question. Work endlessly towards a synthesis of valid causes, organize beyond sectarian and parochial divides, mock ideology, objectify concepts that propaganda describes as merely subjective, transcend hegemonic modes of organization and experiment institutional forms that resemble us. Radicalize!
RIGHTS SOLD: Italy (Neri Pozza), English Canada (Between the Lines Books), Spanish (Turner Libros), Korean (Gyeol)
“The power is in the hands of the mediocre. Their empire now extends to all spheres of life: the arts, the economy, science, law, and politics. Hardworking and quick to breed, they are extremely effective, so much so that the time is not distant that they will have extinguished every passion, suppressed all sense of daring, and slashed every genuine political idea to shreds.”
In this book, Alain Deneault offers an incisive and at times caustic analysis of the reign of mediocrity, which sterilizes the human mind by spreading a reckless love for cultural and political tepidness. Mediocrity is a social order that permanently threatens to collapse in the middle.
RIGHTS SOLD: Italy (Neri Pozza), English Canada (Between the Lines Books), Spanish (Turner Libros), Germany (Westend Verlag), Arabic (Dar Soual)
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s technocrats decided to euphemize the plan to align the State with the interests of private business culture, calling it “governance.” This conceptual coup successfully dressed up neoliberal brutality in a model of “sound management.” Collectively, we are still paying the price. From that moment on, governing would entail deregulation of the economy, privatization of public services, a clientoriented approach to citizens, and the undermining of unions. Applied to a management or commerce by social groups representing various interests, governance claims to be the art of selfmanagement. Having become standard practice, referred to today at any occasion and from across the political spectrum, its opportunistic malleability is increasingly replacing the old terms of politics.
In fifty short texts, Alain Deneault demonstrates the progression of this colonization of all areas of society by governance. This is an “anesthetizing revolution,” make no mistake: it quietly establishes an era of totalitarian management.
RIGHTS SOLD: Italy (Neri Pozza)
The most famous photographer? Now, perhaps. But during his lifetime, was he the gentle one, the lucky one, the humorist, the humanist? Certainly not. André Pozner shares his memories, describing in words and images his Doisneau years—which are also his Prévert years, for it was at Jacques Prévert’s home that they met. The three of them went for longwalks, the conversation jumping fromone subject to another. Doisneau the photographer became the photographed. A group of friends with Paris as the setting.
André Pozner profiles an artist who blazed a trail in the years after the turbulence of May 1968. Far from providing a romantic vision, Doisneau’s cities and suburbs hit us with their hard greyness. What’s brilliant is his eye, the emotions he strives to convey: love, humour, and especially resistance. The resistance of a little fellow smiling beneath his velvet cap, who hated injustice and said: “There are times when you work like a barbarian, with a virtually animalistic need to do things, without thinking. These are times of great creativity.”
French journalist Anne-Cécile Robert is a member of the editorial board of Le Monde Diplomatique. Her fields of specialization are European institutions and Africa. She is also associate professor at the Institute of European Studies of the Université Paris-VIII.
Emotion has invaded social and political space to the detriment of other means of understanding the world, notably reason. Of course, as Hegel would say, «nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion», but the empire of affection has become a threat to democracy. It transforms human beings, broken by inequality, into their own executioners, inviting them to weep instead of taking action. After Naomi Klein demonstrated how the « shock doctrine » enables capitalism to thrive in the face of catastrophe, Anne-Cécile Robert analyses how social control is exerted through emotion and studies its most poisonous manifestations: compassionate narcissism on social networks, political discourse reduced to preachiness, expansion of the crime and miscellaneous news sections in the media, the staging of silent marches etc. This is a much-needed reflection on the mind-numbing expansion of teardrop territory and a civic appeal to a return to reason.
RIGHTS SOLD: Italy (elèuthera)
Bernard Arcand (1945-2009) is a graduate anthropologist from Cambridge and taught first in Copenhagen, where he was involved in the founding of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), then at McGill and Laval University, where he worked for over twenty years. His book The Jaguar and the Anteater received the Governor General’s Award in 1991.
For the anthropologist Bernard Arcand, writing The Cuivaswas a lifelong project: that of providing an intimate portrait of a small population of nomadic hunter-gatherers living in the Llanos, in Colombia. At the end of the 1960s, during the era of revolutionary fervour, the young anthropologist spent two years with the Cuivas, sharing their daily lives and studying their relationship to the world. From this experience, he drew an inspiring reflection on the classic problems of social anthropology: the causes of wealth and inequality, the origin of hierarchy, the organization of space and time, collective or individual identity.
Bernard Émond is a director an screenwriter. Primarily a documentarist, he produced La femme qui boit (“The Woman Who Drinks”) in 2001, which was selected for the International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Festival.
Gérard is an alcoholic and former crime reporter, gone back to live in the impoverished Montreal neighbourhood where he grew up. One night, his shoelace comes undone, delaying his return home and saving his life when his apartment building mysteriously blows up. Six of his neighbours are dead, others are missing. Plunged into a personal crisis, Gérard sets off looking for answers. Who were his neighbours and why was he spared? Is this his last chance to redeem himself?
RIGHTS SOLD: English Canada (Guernica Editions)
The bolshevik myth is worn out. It only remains a significant reference for a few sinister regimes and a handful of sects, clutching to dried out emblems, rituals and phrases. What’s the use, then, of talking about it? The repression of this history risks blinding us on the persistence of practices that are a direct inheritance of bolshevism : open or covert verticalism around a leader, the cult of the nation-state, obsession with the assumption of power through the means of insurrection, rejection of democracy and of autonomous self-organisation forms… All these elements compose « the shadow of October ».
The Bolshevik seizing of power has been a disaster for the Worker’s Movement and for emancipation itself. It is important to understand its deep logic and the structural continuity between the sovereign Party and the national State : Bolshevism was the fanatical and delirious climax of the western doctrine on state sovereignty. Turning its back on this type of state communism, a politics of the commons is in the course of inventing itself. Reviving another set of revolutionary experiments and instantiating the democratic principle of self-government.
This captivating text discusses how images of one of the American army’s most bitter Pacific War victories had an enormous influence upon public opinion.
At the end of 1943, after two years of distant and relatively painless battle for the United States, the American people were struck with terror by the violent footage shot during the Battle of Tarawa. This was the first real carnage suffered by the boys since entering the war, and it was also the first time that a military camera crew had filmed combat… and corpses.
Cyril Azouvi gathers the memories of Norman Hatch, a Marine Corps veteran who went to Tarawa armed with a camera. He recounts the battle and the impact that those images had upon the public’s opinion, who, up until then, had held on to the preposterous idea that war could be clean.
Daniel Zamora is a Professor of Sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He works on the conceptulizations of poverty in 20th century, on inequality and modern intellectual history. More broadly, his work has been published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Jacobin, Los Angeles Review of Books, Dissent, among others and translated in more than 15 languages.
Michel Foucault’s last decade coincided with a brutal decline of the hopes for social transformation that had emerged in the post-war period. Confronted with this « end of the revolution », the philosopher tried to reinvent the way we think about politics and resistance, which he felt his generation had failed to do.
It is with this perspective in mind that he became interested in neoliberalism as a tool to rethink the conceptual foundations of the left and to conceive of a governmentality that is more tolerant of social experiments, opening a space for minority practices and greater autonomy of the individual. In short, the means of carrying out the project stated at the end of his life, that of « not being governed quite so much ». In this respect, Foucault paradoxically reduced the scope of social critique and, in his quest for a « left governmentality », anticipated and contributed to the shaping of the contemporary political situation.
The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has spurred renewed enthusiasm for the idea of a universal basic income in both Europe and America. The project finds support from the left as well as the right and, according to many experts, could form the foundation for future social policy. More than one critical thinker has advocated for it – Philippe Van Parijs, Toni Negri, José Bové, or André Gorz – but what does this astonishing consensus really mean?
According to the authors of this book, universal basic income, under the guise of a benevolent redistribution of wealth, confirms the abandonment of the central political issue of the last one hundred and fifty years: the conflict between capital and labour. Each of the texts in this book invokes the crucial importance of this question, and demonstrates why it is imperative to oppose universal basic income.
Nowadays, it has become dangerously commonplace to say that our world is in crisis. Economic crisis, humanitarian disasters, breakdown of confidence in our institutions, worsening social inequalities, economic precariousness, the rise of the extreme right: these are all symptoms of a world that is not going well.
In this context, many feel the urgent need to act, launch a panoply of initiatives and lead to a resurgence of mobilization in defense of equality and dignity. At a time when people no longer believe in political change « from above », this book is intended as an antidote to the depletion of utopian energies and the prevailing gloom, offering a practical guide to help overcome the many challenges of our time.
Emmanuel Burdeau, film critic, has worked for France Culture, Mediapart, among others and was editor-in-chief at Les Cahiers du Cinéma.
A cynic, Billy Wilder? It is customary to say so. And uncouth, perhaps even vulgar. His films are heavy, certainly, but in a literal way. He has written some of the funniest comedies in history, emulating Lubitsch, but he is the filmmaker of gravity par excellence.
The power of the terrestrial and of weight is at the heart of his films. The moves and discourses, laughter and politics, everything is a matter of weight in Some like it hot, in Sunset Boulevard just like in One, two, three.
In truth, Wilder is less of a satirist than a historian. At times he analyses the origins and evolution of American society, at others he describes how Germany was marked by Nazism. From the material to the historical gravity is therefore the trajectory of this book, which offers a unprecedented insight into a work of fundamental importance.
Emmanuelle Walter is an independent journalist. She has worked for Liberation, Le Nouvel Observateur, ARTE Radio and Terra eco. Originally from France, she lives in Montreal.
At the beginning of Summer 2015, Emmanuelle Walter travelled across James Bay, in Quebec, with her local guide, the aboriginal leader Romeo Saganash: negotiator for the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and MP of a district the size of a continent.With country music in the background, he told his story and the story of his homeland, in a pickup truck with stop-overs in a dozen towns and communities. This road story depicts a vast and essential yet widely unknown part of Quebec, a land defaced by extractivism and global warming, but actively co-governed and managed by Canada’s first Cree and white Francophone municipality. Thanks to her guide, the author discovers a changing landscape, an unsuspected political laboratory and surprising characters : those who find creative and complex ways of living together on the Canadian Shield bedrock.
Canada has only recently been rocked by the brutal violence against young Aboriginal women. An official report revealed that since 1980, at least 1,200 Canadian Aboriginal women have been murdered or have gone missing. This alarming official figure reveals a national tragedy and the systemic failure of law enforcement and of all levels of government to address the issue.
Journalist Emmanuelle Walter spent two years investigating this crisis and has crafted a moving representative account of the disappearance of two young women, Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander, teenagers who have been missing since September 2008. Through personal testimonies, interviews, press clippings and official documents, Walter pieces together the disappearance and loss of these two young lives, revealing these young women through the voices of family members and witnesses.
RIGHTS SOLD: English (Harper Collins Canada)
Enzo Traverso was born in Italy in 1957. After having lived and taught in France, he now teaches humanities at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York). He is the author of several books, translated into a dozen languages, including, in English, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New Press, 2003), Fire and Blood. The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (Verso, 2015), The New Faces of Fascism. Populism and the Far Right (Verso, 2019).
More and more, history is being written in the first person. Historians no longer simply reconstruct and interpret the past; they now feel the need to tell their own stories. The number of historians’ autobiographies has increased in the last century, and researchers have adopted a self-reflexive stance to better understand their own intellectual trajectory. A new hybrid genre has taken form, exemplified in particular by the works of authors such as Ivan Jablonka in France or Mark Mazower in the English-speaking world: historians recount their investigations and describe the emotions they stirred up in them, thus joining the novelists who borrow from the methods of historical investigation (Carrère, Cercas, W.G. Sebald, etc.).
This surge of the self upsets historiography and raises questions about the world in which we live. The era of the selfie transforms human sciences and the neoliberal way of thinking provokes a subjectification of social relations and of the apprehension of the past. A new regime of « presentist » historicity emerges, characterized by a withdrawal of the historian into the sphere of the intimate, an absence of future and a melancholic gaze turned towards a discontinuous past where the political is secondary.
Enzo Traverso questions this subjectivist shift and highlights its creative potential and political ambiguities while identifying its intrinsic limits.
RIGHTS SOLD: Italy (Editori Laterza), Greece (Ekdoseis tou Eikostou Protou), Catalan (Editorial Afers).
Francis Dupuis-Déri is a professor of political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). Specialized in political thought and social movements, he is the author of numerous works.
To vote or not to vote, that is the question we do not dare to ask in our parliamentary systems, where elections are considered a sacred ritual. By defending the legitimacy of abstention, this essay confronts the conviction that voting is a duty, and that refusing to vote is a dangerous heresy. Much more than a mere praise for abstention, this book offers a radical critique of the electoral system.
In addition to recalling the reasons given by abstainers from all walks of life for not going to vote, the author describes the often amusing strategies devised to subvert the electoral game: calls for boycotts or zero votes, zany and satirical candidacies of anarchist plants, animals, comedians, punks or gnomes. This gallery of figures of resistance to the vote also reveals the many powerful self-defence mechanisms of the electoral system, which always succeeds in imposing its own rules, even on the most rebellious people. Therefore, abstention is only fruitful if it goes hand in hand with autonomous, popular and solidarity-based commitment and mobilization.
RIGHTS SOLD: Italy (elèuthera)
What is anarchy and what do anarchists want? A humanist questions his son, an anarchist activist who has studied the subject.
Through their dialogue, the two men explore the roots of anarchy and democracy. They evoke certain figures and the different currents of the anarchist movement, while illustrating their remarks with examples drawn from today’s world. Together, they analyze anarchist critique of the major systems of domination – the state, religion, patriarchy, capitalism and racism – and thus offer an original initiation to anarchy.
RIGHTS SOLD: English Canada (Newstar Books), Greece (Stasei Ekpiptontes)
While some view popular movements as the perfect embodiment of direct democracy, others only see them as, while sympathetic, essentially insignificant mobilizations. That is, when they are not trying to outright discredit them through accusations of violence.
Drawing upon a profound knowledge of the field and of the history of democratic practices, Francis Dupuis-Déri offers an inspired and critical reflection. He dynamically presents the struggle between political agoraphobia and agoraphilia – the hatred and love of direct democracy – revealing the arguments and tactics of both sides. He also discusses the delicate relationship between people gathering in the agora to deliberate (the dêmos) and those who take to the streets to rise up in protest (the plebs).
The word “democracy” has become so popular that all political forces claimto represent it. It therefore comes as a surprise that the “founding fathers” of these “modern democracies” associated the ideawith chaos, violence and tyrannizing the poor! How did such a radical shift in meaning come to occur?
Exploring the past discourse of the U.S. and France, the author exposes an amazing political adventure full of confrontation between personalities and social forces seeking to control the political systems founded at the end of the eighteenth century. Based on various tracts, manifestos, public declarations, newspaper articles and personal letters, this narrative reveals the politicalmanipulation of the term“democracy” by the elite, who gradually hijacked the notion and doctored it up to beguile the masses.
Two centuries later, while the entire planet seems to think that “democracy” (power of the people) is a synonym for the “electoral system” (delegation of power to a small group of rulers), any manifestation of true popular power (collective deliberations on common affairs) always meets with the contempt of the elite.
Franck Fischbach teaches Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg. He has translated Hegel, Schelling, Marx and Honneth into French, and written various essays on Marx, Social Philosophy, among other topics.
While the «left» seems to have officially parted ways with socialism, has become an avatar of liberalism and has finally and completely disconnected itself from the working class, the neoliberal-populist bloc hegemony seems impregnable. Relaunching a socialist program on the left of this neoliberal « left » is the only way to undo it, tells us Franck Fischbach. But before, one must hark back to the founding socialist hypotheses. Returning to the philosophical propositions that underlie socialist thought, notably those of Hegel, Marx, Durkheim and Dewey, Franck Fischbach sketches a socialist theory that is conscious of social rationality, a socialism of cooperation between equals that goes far beyond the Social state or «real» socialism. The socialist parties are dead, long live socialism !
RIGHTS SOLD: Slovenia (Založba Krtina)
For several decades now society has become increasingly privatized and atomized, positioning people in competition with one another and causing them to lose touch with the true meaning of the social: cooperation.
In philosophy too, the concept of the social, often preferred over conceptions such as ‘the commons’ or ‘community’, struggles to find a place. In the tradition of Dewey, this essay defends “the value of the social” as a category of thought. It analyzes the reasons behind the discrediting of ‘the social’, and seeks to rebuild the concept as serving both a descriptive and moral-political function. This book advances the argument that work, as a venue for connection and cooperation, is a strictly democratic imperative and the political expression of the social system. On this basis becomes possible a critique of those devices that effectively deprive work of its democratic dimension by subduing its cooperative logic.
Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toulouse, François Morin was a member of the Bank of France General Council and the Council of Economic Analysis.
As the number of major economic crises brought upon by the financialization of capital-value brutally rises, François Morin advocates an overhaul of the world economic system. In order to replace capital-value with liberated labor-value, it is necessary to take a real political economy approach and adapt the critical economic theory of the great thinkers of modern capitalism to the realities of the XXIst century: from Marx to Keynes and kindred contemporary institutionalists. In response to the daunting intellectual, political and moral challenges we face today, this book explores the political and economic refounding gestures that citizens and political leaders should prepare to act upon : transforming labour and rethinking the notions of money, assets, corporations, and democracy.
On many occasions between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, the kings of France did not hesitate to relieve the State of its debts by using such heavy-handed tactics as imprisoning its creditors, or quite simply putting them to death. Such measures were called “bleeding.”
François Morin believes we must take note of these lessons from the past if we want to overcome the imminent financial disaster.What will happen when the global bond bubble bursts? The evils to come may include massive uprisings and the instant disintegration of our economic infrastructure. Neither inflation nor growth will reduce worldwide debt levels. Public debt cancellation is therefore unavoidable, either as a consequence of a tremendous financial shock or as a result of a new system of financing the global economy.
Our only hope is to set up this new system immediately: wemust bleed finance before it bleeds us!
There are 28 so-called “systemic” banks, whose influence is such that the failure of any one could sink us into the abyss of another recession.
These banks form an oligopoly that is anything but public. Their dominant position imbues them with a power similar to that of large public institutions – including the ability to set the price of money – without any requirements for transparency. Through taking huge risks and making fraudulent deals, they weaken markets, but more importantly they exercise such enormous political influence that our hunt for public resources powerful enough to counteract them is in vain. Need we look any further for the causes of the political crises sweeping the Western democracies?
Introducing new evidence, François Morin is uncompromising: if we want to protect citizens from the financial crises to come, we must fight this financial hydra and return the money to the collective purse.
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was one of the spokespersons of the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE), one of the more vocal student bodies that participated in the 2012 student strikes that swept Quebec.
In this book, we follow Nadeau-Dubois step by step through power struggles, decisive encounters, general meetings and confrontations with journalists, ministers, judges and police officers.We also hear his analysis of the 2012 student strike in Quebec, also known as “maple spring”. On the way, readers will be surprised to note the moral and intellectual poverty of certain facets of the Québec elite. Above all, readers will reconnect with the remarkable energy of the students who opposed the mercenary attitude of this elite. Fighting Back should be read by people who shared the students’ anger, but also by everyone else: you may be surprised to realize that the students’ cause is also your own.
RIGHTS SOLD: English Canada (Between the Line Books)
Gilbert Boulanger (1922-2013), enrolled in the Second World War as a gunner at 18, was assigned to the “Alouette” Squadron. He took part in the Normandy landings in 1944 and miraculously survived the crash of a Wellington bomber and received the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). L’alouette affolée tells his memories of the war.
Gilbert Boulanger is no ordinary man. A member of Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, at 84 years old he built a two-seater plane with his friend Denis and, at 87, published the story of his experience as a gunner for the Canadian airforce during the Second World War, L’alouette affolée.
L’alouette affolée tells the adventures of a teenager who, no born fighter, was drawn by his love of flying into one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies. From Tunisia and London to the Normandy landing, Gilbert Boulanger discovered the world through war; with all the comradery, pain and danger that involved. Boulanger recounts his adventures, whether military or amorous, with all the candour and sensitivity of a story-teller and the youth he once was.
Gwenola Ricordeau currently teaches at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice at the California State University in Chico.
Feminist struggles and the fight for penal abolition are often presented as conflicting. This book seeks to overcome this impasse by exploring the protection, or lack thereof, that women can expect from the criminal justice system and by investigating the various ways in which it affects women’s lives, whether they are criminalized or have relatives in the system.
Does the criminal justice system protect women? How does the criminal justice system affect women’s lives? Should feminist struggles be “judicial struggles”? In answering these questions, Gwenola Ricordeau denounces the weakness of the feminist proposal that promotes the criminalization of violence against women. Critical of « carceral feminism », she advocates for building feminist solidarities and the use of transformative justice outside of the criminal justice system.
Hugo Meunier works as a reporter at La Presse, the main Canadian daily newspaper in French.
For three months, journalist Hugo Meunier went undercover at a Walmart. During his time as an “associate”, he kept a diary of the humorous anecdotes of his daily life: the infamous rally cries, the raging clients, the collapsing pallets, the absurd training sessions. With a remarkable sense of detail he describes a typical day in the life of a low wage earner working for the largest retailer in the world.
After this experience, the reporter set off to investigate the empire – from Mexico to Jonquière, by way of Arkansas. Thus to his recounting of life “on the floor” does he add a captivating portrait ofWalmart and of the cult dedicated to the one true God of North America: money.
Jacques Rancière is the author of numerous works, including The Nights of Labour, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Disagreement and Hatred of Democracy. Political Moments assembles articles, communications, interviews and radio talks responding to political events over the past thirty years.
A philosopher of emancipation and equality of intelligence, Jacques Rancière enters public debate in the course of diverse episodes constitutive of the previous decades’ “consensual times”: “the new philosophy”; the fall of “communism”; new forms of racism; September 11th; social movements; and the 2007 presidential elections in France.
RIGHTS SOLD: German (Diaphanes), Turkish (Can), English-USA (Seven Stories Press)
Jean-François Nadeau was a professor of History at Laurentian University before becoming the arts editor of the Quebecois newspaper Le Devoir.
One of the Quebec sovereigntist movement’s most eloquent champions, Pierre Bourgault (1934-2003) was also a columnsit, an activist, a professor, a fighter. He powerfully embodies the social and political history of Quebec. From his childhood in the Eastern Townships, to his teenage years at the St-Jean de Bréfeuf College, from his parisian excursion to his political career, he has proved to be a spirit of his own, a complex figure who has left a mark on Quebec’s 20th century. His life and deeds are told in this brilliant biography written after years of thorough research which presents a man in all his contradictions and unique character.
During the 1930s, when the misery of hunger, unemployment and the threat of war shadowed life for many, Canadians were drawn to a wide range of new political ideas. Communism, socialism, but also Fascist ideas appealed to some. Out of these circumstances emerged a Canadian fascist party led by a Montreal journalist, Adrien Arcand who became a significant part of the political scene through most of the 1930s. Once Canada declared war on Germany and Italy, Arcand was imprisoned for his political views. Yet after the war he resumed his activities as leader of the far-right National Unity Party, and forged ties to Quebec’s provincial government of Maurice Duplessis during the 1950s and 1960s. Although Canadian historians have paid little attention to Arcand, he played an important role in the country’s political life for many years. This fascinating biography sheds light on a man and an era that have been hidden in the shadows for too long.
RIGHTS SOLD: English Canada (Lorimer)
The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has spurred renewed enthusiasm for the idea of a universal basic income in both Europe and America. The project finds support from the left as well as the right and, according to many experts, could form the foundation for future social policy. More than one critical thinker has advocated for it – Philippe Van Parijs, Toni Negri, José Bové, or André Gorz – but what does this astonishing consensus really mean?
According to the authors of this book, universal basic income, under the guise of a benevolent redistribution of wealth, confirms the abandonment of the central political issue of the last one hundred and fifty years: the conflict between capital and labour. Each of the texts in this book invokes the crucial importance of this question, and demonstrates why it is imperative to oppose universal basic income.
Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec is a professor of History at the Université de Sherbrooke and specializes in the History of the United States of America, the Caribbean and slavery.
Valmy, Austerlitz, Ulm,Waterloo… somany battles whose names are so familiar to us. But who, outside of Haiti, has ever heard of the Battle of Vertières, that spectacular and bloody culmination of the Haitian Revolution?
Who is aware that the clash resulted, in 1803, in one of the worst defeats of the Napoleonic wars? Or that the Black Haitians were making demands in line with the ideals of the Revolution? Those that know this history are few and far between, because France, defeated, set to work erasing every trace of its embarrassment. Yet this battle should be recognized as a milestone: its outcome, disastrous to the French colonial power, irreparably cracked the foundations of slavery.
In this work, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec describes the unbelievable violence of this war between masters and former slaves, between the troops of Generals Leclerc and Rochambeau and the so-called Indigenous Army of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. He questions the meaning of the erasure of this battle from French history, as well as the troubled place it holds in the memory of the Haitian elite, as a symbol of emancipation sometimes cumbrous to those who would maintain practices of enslavement.
RIGHTS SOLD: English (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Jérôme Segal is an Engineer and a Historian. He teaches at the Sorbonne and works as a journalist and a researcher in Vienna where he has taught a class on the Sociology of Protest Movements at the University of Vienna.
Unlike veganism, which is more of a lifestyle, anti-speciesism – i.e. the fight against all discrimination based on species membership – is more explicitly political and gives rise to radical movements, some of which rely on direct action. By the end of the 19th century, socialists and anarchists created vegetarian communities and fought against vivisection in sometimes radical ways, but it was in Britain, in the middle of the 20th century, that another form of radical animalist activism emerged and took the path of radical and violent action, notably with the creation of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which would also develop rapidly in the United States.
Through a study of the movement in France, Canada and Israel, this book analyses the most sensitive points of the anti-speciesist discourse, such as the comparison between slaughterhouses and extermination camps or slavery, addresses the issue of vegan-washing, and assesses the progress of the cause and the openness of our societies to issues anchored in our relationship with animals.
Jonathan Martineau (PhD, Université York, 2012) enseigne à l'Université Concordia et à l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il est l'auteur de nombreux articles et traductions sur l'histoire des idées, et en particulier sur le temps social.
Perry Anderson, Edward Palmer Thompson, David Harvey, Moishe Postone, Derek Sayer, Simon Clarke, Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood and David McNally: nine important thinkers whose growing influencemarks a new beginning inMarxist analysis in the social sciences.
Each chapter describes the intellectual journey of one of these thinkers and analyzes his or her contribution to a constantly evolving field, thus offering readers an overview of the various forms of contemporary Anglo-Saxon Marxism. This heterogeneous and staunchly antidogmatic current has common leanings, such as criticism of economic reductionism and increased sensitivity to the historical processes of relationships of domination. The authors gathered between these covers historians, sociologists, political scientists, geographers and philosophers have each contributed in a unique way to the vast discipline of Marxist thought and historical materialism, which, a century and a half after its founding, continues to grow.
What is the power of literature? What is the political impact of «experimental» writing? From his beginnings with Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats and Éden, Éden, Éden, true indictments against French colonial violence, to his recent autobiographical trilogy that reveals a strong sensitivity to all forms of social domination, Pierre Guyotat’s writing has always been political. More than offering a simple monograph on an author who is often described as both abstruse and outrageous, Julien Lefort-Favreau highlights the political and aesthetic coherence of Guyotat’s work. He thus demonstrates the relevance of contemporary French literature when it questions the place of art in society and unites contestation with stylistic experiment, acknowledgement of historical defeats with hope, self assertion with desire for anonymity, autobiography with history. Borrowing from Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler’s thinking, this essay finds in Guyotat’s work food for rethinking politics through literature.
Louis Gill taught Economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) from 1970 to 2001.
Many people are familiar with “1984“ from having read the book or seen the movie that was made. Few are aware that it was initially inspired by Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War and the Stalinist terror that he encountered there.
RIGHTS SOLD: Germany (Verlag Edition AV)
Ludovic Lamant is a member of the editorial board of the independent news site Mediapart. From 2012 to 2017 he was the Brussels-based correspondent and covered the European and Spanish crises.
Nobody understands anything about Europe anymore, its indigestible treaties, its never-ending crises. Taking the expression «european construction» literally, Ludovic Lamant explores the most visible dimension of the EU: its institutional buildings. Wandering through the streets of the city he loves, the author meets not only the architects and urbanists who designed the European quarter, but also, tellingly, those who were barred from doing so. He encounters the members of parliament and civil servants who make Europe work on a daily basis and those bent on reforming it. The four one-way lanes of the rue de la Loi («Law street»), the wind-corridor of the Solidarnosc esplanade, the caged «space egg» in the new EU Council building: the architectural clutter that disfigures the Belgian capital symbolizes the transformation of a promising political project into a bureaucratic machine. A stroll through the young ruins of an old dream that may still be alive.
What if it was in the cities that a social Europe were to come to life? If mayors were to bring about this imagined community, disfigured by the banks, the troika, and mediocre economists? Such are the hopes that current-day Spain has to offer us. Far from the stuck-up arrogance of austerity, indignant and rebellious city halls have sprung up in dozens of cities, including Barcelona and Madrid. Despite the promises of Podemos, Spanish national politics are stammering. But at the municipal level, strong and charismatic figures, such as the squatter Ada Colau and the anti-Franco judge Manuela Carmena, are exploring new ways to do politics.
Ludovic Lamant met dozens of women and men belonging to this civic wave that has flooded across Spain. Alternating between testimonials, journalism, and political analysis, he retraces the political, historical, and social origins of the phenomenon and proposes an initial assessment. A portrait of unprecedented citizen platforms in Europe, this story of an enduring uprising also proves to be a tool box for other movements defending the commons elsewhere in the world.
Marie-Christine Lévesque has worked as an editor and a freelance publicity writer.
The Innus have been living on the land that is now called Quebec for more than three thousand years. These nomadic people were the first to establish commercial and cultural relations with the Europeans. Today, they form a nation of eighteen thousand members, distributed in eleven communities and their language and culture have survived to the settling down and the other devastating effects of colonialism. Their land, Borealia, was Serge Bouchard’s field of study when he started his graduate studies in anthropology and ever since then, after 50 years of profound friendship, he has stayed close to these women and men who’s resilience is impetuous. And now, the Innus have chosen him, Kauishtut, the «bearded man», to write their history in a book that is probably one of the most beautiful and strong that Lux has ever published.
RIGHTS SOLD: World English (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Inspired by the Radio-Canada show « De remarquables oubliés’, this trilogy, of which two volumes have been released, breathes new life into the ambition of authors: by looking at the underside of history, it shines a light on the anonymous faces of those who are its true actors.Women are absent from the official history of America – do we say it often enough? Certainly Aboriginal women, but also women of all other cultural heritages – Inuit, Canadian, British, Black, French, Métis – among them we find unsung heroines, revolutionaries, pioneers, adventurers, diplomats, scientists, explorers, and artists…
Follow the pilgrimage of fourteen woodsmen – men of the mountains, horsemen of the plains, mule drivers, ice navigators, and desert traders. By tracing their path, we uncover some of those forgotten stories that have been relegated to the more obscure pages of human history, yet which can reveal so much. The great tales of North Americans have consistently omitted these Canadians – those we called French Canadians until the early twentieth century.
Martin Gibert teaches Moral Philosophy at University of Quebec in Montreal. He is also the director of the animalist magazine Versus, and the author of L’imagination en morale (Hermann, 2015).
Most of us don’t want to hurt animals. But they also want their steak. This is what we call the “meat paradox”.We don’t want to see what we’re really eating: dead animals.
More and more researchers explain this phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance” as the product of social practices and beliefs specifically aimed at denying the existence of animal suffering. These practices and beliefs conspire to convince us, from childhood, that it is normal, natural, and necessary to eat animal products. However nothing could actually be further from the truth – in terms of our health, animal ethics, and environmental sustainability.
In this engaging and accessible essay, Martin Gibert synthesizes contemporary debates on themeat paradox. In so doing, he presents veganism, a growingmoral and politicalmovement that fights for the rights of animals as well as social and environmental justice.
Mateo Alaluf is a professor of sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and specializes in questions related to work and labour.
The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has spurred renewed enthusiasm for the idea of a universal basic income in both Europe and America. The project finds support from the left as well as the right and, according to many experts, could form the foundation for future social policy. More than one critical thinker has advocated for it – Philippe Van Parijs, Toni Negri, José Bové, or André Gorz – but what does this astonishing consensus really mean?
According to the authors of this book, universal basic income, under the guise of a benevolent redistribution of wealth, confirms the abandonment of the central political issue of the last one hundred and fifty years: the conflict between capital and labour. Each of the texts in this book invokes the crucial importance of this question, and demonstrates why it is imperative to oppose universal basic income.
Engagé depuis plusieurs années dans le mouvement libertaire, Mathieu Houle-Courcelles travaille actuellement comme responsable des dossiers politiques pour un comité logement de la région de Québec.
Resulting of a long and meticulous research, this book presents a lively and generous image of the influence of anarchist ideas in the history of Quebec, and reveals the existence of this movement way before the uproars of the 60’s. From the exiles of the Paris Commune to the Automatistes artists and poets, to the anticlerical activists of the Workers University and the Jewish revolutionaries of the Montreal Yiddishland, Mathieu Houle-Courcelles sheds light on different figures and ways of living anarchism and offers an original contribution to the present debate on the French Canadian collective memory.
RIGHTS SOLD: German (Verlag Edition AV)
The contribution of French immigrants to the American Socialist movement is little known. From Paris Commune exiles to miners from the North of France, many workers and French activists continued to be politically active in their adopted land. In this book, the historian Michel Cordillot traces the struggles, hopes and daily lives of these French socialists of America.
Michel Foucault’s last decade coincided with a brutal decline of the hopes for social transformation that had emerged in the post-war period. Confronted with this « end of the revolution », the philosopher tried to reinvent the way we think about politics and resistance, which he felt his generation had failed to do.
It is with this perspective in mind that he became interested in neoliberalism as a tool to rethink the conceptual foundations of the left and to conceive of a governmentality that is more tolerant of social experiments, opening a space for minority practices and greater autonomy of the individual. In short, the means of carrying out the project stated at the end of his life, that of « not being governed quite so much ». In this respect, Foucault paradoxically reduced the scope of social critique and, in his quest for a « left governmentality », anticipated and contributed to the shaping of the contemporary political situation.
Normand Baillargeon has taught Education Fundamentals at the University of Québec in Montreal, until 2015, in addition to writing in various periodicals and taking part in radio shows on Radio-Canada.
What is the relationship between democracy and critical thinking? What must a citizen in a democracy know to make the word democracy meaningful? In A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense, historian and educator Normand Baillargeon provides readers with the tools to see through the spin and jargon of everyday politics and news reporting in order to decide for themselves what is at stake and how to ask the necessary questions to protect themselves from the manipulations of the government and the media. Whether the issue be the call to what were told will be a bloodless war, the « debate around Intelligent Design, or the meaning of a military expenditure, Baillargeon teaches readers to evaluate information and sort fact from official and media spin.
RIGHTS SOLD: Brazil (Campus/Elsevier), Germany (Riemann/Random House Germany), Italy (Apogeo), Korea (Galapagos), Netherlands (Uitgeverij De Wereld), Poland (MinD), Romania (Editura Paralela), Spain (Critica)
Rights managed by Seven Stories Press
Since the fall of the Communist Empire, very few economical alternative models have been proposed. In the last decade, yet, the radical left has been elaborating serious proposals for an economic organization that would be more egalitarian and democratic. Participatory economics as elaborated by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, is the most convincing alternative of all. This books offers a very consice and complete synthesis of the principles and structure of parecon and explains its philosophical foundations as well as the way it works. With a critical take on the subject matter, the author manages to demonstrate the viability of this proposal.
Pierre Beaucage taught at the Anthropology Department of the University of Montreal and the Institute of History and Science at the University of Valencia (Spain). He has carried out numerous research projects in the fields of economic anthropology, ethnohistory and ethnoscience. He is also recognized for the consistency and depth of his commitment to the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
This work is the synthesis of more than thirty years of research in Mexico and the culmination of a long collaboration between the anthropologist Pierre Beaucage and an indigenous organization devoted to the reappropriation of Amerindian culture, Taller de Tradición Oral. This work describes the development, by Nahua peasants, of a complex and sustainable form of conservation for their tropical mountain environment. The author focuses on systems of representation which integrate taxonomies of flora and fauna by esta blishing the human body as the fundamental metaphor of the cosmos. The importance of this work of systematization is clearly apparent in the current context, in which indigenous people are reclaiming, as an integral part of their identity, their own ways of establishing relations with material and symbolic environments. The work provides a wealth of maps, figures, tables and photography.
The bolshevik myth is worn out. It only remains a significant reference for a few sinister regimes and a handful of sects, clutching to dried out emblems, rituals and phrases. What’s the use, then, of talking about it? The repression of this history risks blinding us on the persistence of practices that are a direct inheritance of bolshevism : open or covert verticalism around a leader, the cult of the nation-state, obsession with the assumption of power through the means of insurrection, rejection of democracy and of autonomous self-organisation forms… All these elements compose « the shadow of October ».
The Bolshevik seizing of power has been a disaster for the Worker’s Movement and for emancipation itself. It is important to understand its deep logic and the structural continuity between the sovereign Party and the national State : Bolshevism was the fanatical and delirious climax of the western doctrine on state sovereignty. Turning its back on this type of state communism, a politics of the commons is in the course of inventing itself. Reviving another set of revolutionary experiments and instantiating the democratic principle of self-government.
In the history of labour, women have played a part that most historians and sociologists have failed to recognize or even ignored. Over the past few decades, a few women historians have worked to fill this gap. Drawing on their work, Rolande Pinard offers here a sociohistorical analysis of women workers’ activism that has contributed, in the labour movement, to the development of the sociopolitical meaning of work. This richly documented research argues that, from their initial solidarity with workers, women have gradually been marginalized in the ensuing types of organized labour. In the end, emancipation through work was almost exclusively the privilege of men, who benefited from institutions (such as trade unionism) built through workers, social and political struggles.
Stressing the multidimensional aspect of the formation of the working class, Rolande Pinard points out that understanding labour from a critical point of view implies taking into account its different agents through the historical periods of transformation of capitalism.
Serge Bouchard is an anthropologist who specializes in Native American culture. He is also a radio host at Radio-Canada.
The Innus have been living on the land that is now called Quebec for more than three thousand years. These nomadic people were the first to establish commercial and cultural relations with the Europeans. Today, they form a nation of eighteen thousand members, distributed in eleven communities and their language and culture have survived to the settling down and the other devastating effects of colonialism. Their land, Borealia, was Serge Bouchard’s field of study when he started his graduate studies in anthropology and ever since then, after 50 years of profound friendship, he has stayed close to these women and men who’s resilience is impetuous. And now, the Innus have chosen him, Kauishtut, the «bearded man», to write their history in a book that is probably one of the most beautiful and strong that Lux has ever published.
RIGHTS SOLD: World English (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Inspired by the Radio-Canada show « De remarquables oubliés’, this trilogy, of which two volumes have been released, breathes new life into the ambition of authors: by looking at the underside of history, it shines a light on the anonymous faces of those who are its true actors.Women are absent from the official history of America – do we say it often enough? Certainly Aboriginal women, but also women of all other cultural heritages – Inuit, Canadian, British, Black, French, Métis – among them we find unsung heroines, revolutionaries, pioneers, adventurers, diplomats, scientists, explorers, and artists…
Follow the pilgrimage of fourteen woodsmen – men of the mountains, horsemen of the plains, mule drivers, ice navigators, and desert traders. By tracing their path, we uncover some of those forgotten stories that have been relegated to the more obscure pages of human history, yet which can reveal so much. The great tales of North Americans have consistently omitted these Canadians – those we called French Canadians until the early twentieth century.
The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has spurred renewed enthusiasm for the idea of a universal basic income in both Europe and America. The project finds support from the left as well as the right and, according to many experts, could form the foundation for future social policy. More than one critical thinker has advocated for it – Philippe Van Parijs, Toni Negri, José Bové, or André Gorz – but what does this astonishing consensus really mean?
According to the authors of this book, universal basic income, under the guise of a benevolent redistribution of wealth, confirms the abandonment of the central political issue of the last one hundred and fifty years: the conflict between capital and labour. Each of the texts in this book invokes the crucial importance of this question, and demonstrates why it is imperative to oppose universal basic income.
Simon Tremblay-Pepin is a member of Quebec’s main public interest research group on socio-economic issues. He is also a columnist and a public relations consultant.
Media holds an essential role in our democratic society: that of creating and protecting a venue for the public to engage in intelligent and meaningful debate.
But under the pressure to turn a profit, journalistic practice is moving further and further away fromthis ideal. This aberration transforms the citizen into a stunned consumer of infotainment that no longer strives to do anything but capture a large enough audience to ensure as much advertising revenue as possible.
This little five-step guide suggests a progressive criticismof the logic driving the world ofmedia. In the spirit of synthesis and popularization, the author employs a different theoretical device at each stage (such as those of Chomsky and Herman, Bourdieu, Gramsci). By way of successive recaps, this approach allows the reader to break out of the box and gradually amass an arsenal of tools with which to conduct their own media critiques.
Thomas Déri was born stateless in Paris in 1936 to Jewish parents of Hungarian origin who had immigrated due to the economic crisis of 1929. After surviving World War II, he dodged the draft at the time of the Algerian War, settling in Québec to avoid military service.
What is anarchy and what do anarchists want? A humanist questions his son, an anarchist activist who has studied the subject.
Through their dialogue, the two men explore the roots of anarchy and democracy. They evoke certain figures and the different currents of the anarchist movement, while illustrating their remarks with examples drawn from today’s world. Together, they analyze anarchist critique of the major systems of domination – the state, religion, patriarchy, capitalism and racism – and thus offer an original initiation to anarchy.
RIGHTS SOLD: English Canada (Newstar Books), Greece (Stasei Ekpiptontes)
Vladimir Pozner (1905–1992) was an important writer who valued discretion. A friend of Gorki, he had ties to Babel and Mayakovsky , helping to make Russian literature known in France in the 1920s. His work as a novelist got off to a flying start in the 1930s with Tolstoï est mort and Le Mors aux dents. A militant antifascist, he took refuge in the US during the war. A globe-trotter, storyteller, and pioneer of literary form, Pozner devoted his life and his unique voice to bearing witness to his century.
In these times of crisis, one should read and re-read this account of America during the Great Depression. This key book, “unpityingly critical and deeply tender” (Jorge Semprun), has left itsmark since it came out in 1938. In the style of literature unique to him, part reporting and part novel form, Pozner observes and describes a country, the United States, which, though in full spiritual and material distress, does not cease to fascinate. The author probes the soul of this people through a powerful montage of snapshots: daily life in Harlem, Pinkerton strike-breakers, the war of newspapers in Chicago, the fallen heros of Hollywood, the violent strikes in Pennsylvania’s mines, John Dos Passos and Waldo Frank, the “Dear Abby” columns and the ghost writers, the shoelace merchant of Wall Street, the gangsters and the undertakers. It creates a mosaic reflecting the image of a country where energy contends with despair, solidarity with poverty; and where the cult of service and efficiency leads, in most cases, to subservience and brainwashing.
RIGHTS SOLD: USA and English Canada (Seven Stories Press)
As a novelist in Paris, a Revolution-era poet in Russia, a screenwriter in Hollywood and a reporter all over the world, Vladimir Pozner experienced the twentieth century to the fullest. He knew many of the writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians, scientists, and actors who instilled the world with much of the era’s zeitgeist. And yet he never wrote about himself, or about his relationships with the famous and the infamous. Then one day he began to write a book about some of his friends who played pivotal roles in his life. Readers will already be familiar with most of them, and will discover others of the same ilk. With his customary unobtrusiveness and the magic of his words, Pozner brings them to life beneath our eyes. In doing so, he creates a portrait of himself unlike any other.
Zehira Houfani Berfas is a Canadian novelist and essayist of Algerian origin. She was in Iraq before, during and after the invasion of the country.
The US invade Iraq in March 2003. Zehira Houfani Berfas, who remains in Iraq, experiences this terrible contemporary storm of steel. She works, among other places, in the hospitals of the Iraqi capital with the Montreal section of the Iraq Peace Team (IPT). There she meets Jenan, a young girl suffering from leukemia and plans to give her a colouring book, hard to find in a country hit by an economic embargo for 13 years.
Unfortunately, the war becomes imminent and the government empties the hospitals to make way for wounded soldiers. Jenan is removed to her parents’. Zehira Houfani, following a rash impulse of the heart, decides to go looking for her, even though wisdom would dictate taking shelter with the western journalists in the bunker of the Palestine Hotel.
