Canada’s growing food insecurity crisis requires solutions that go beyond asking grocery store CEOs to bring down prices. Policies from windfall profits taxes, to price controls, to city-owned grocery stores would do much more to help with food insecurity, while backing labour’s struggle for wages and working conditions.

Following the 2022 Ontario provincial election, a new strategy needs to reconnect with social movements that are certainly growing amid multiple global crises but are now growing at an increasing distance from the electoral left. Amid the Liberal’s and Ontario NDP’s ongoing leadership transitions, the parties ought to give serious thought on changing how the electoral left builds from here.

While not a heroic call to arms, Wright’s last book is useful in its analysis and concise in its strategy. His life’s work imagined utopia, and while some may find this manifesto too tame of a project or too naïve to embark upon, it ought to be a great starting point for those who feel stuck in capitalism’s contemporary quagmire and have yet to envision a socialist alternative.

The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World is a new book by American journalist and writer Vincent Bevins that tells the history of how the United States developed its regime toppling program during the first decades of the Cold War, unleashing a wave of violence to ‘align’ the Non-Aligned Movement.

In 2020, Joe Biden finds himself as the pick of the Democratic establishment for the US presidential primaries. Their case for Biden is a “return to normalcy” as the strategy to beat Donald Trump in the general election. In Branko Marcetic’s Yesterday’s Man, however, there is a strong case to be made against the 77-year-old’s presidential candidacy.

Priyamvada Gopal’s new book, Insurgent Empire, offers a thorough analysis of these episodes of rebellion throughout the British Empire from the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India, to the Mau Mau Rebellion in 1950s Kenya. Essential to these movements was the interaction of white and racialized activists, bringing forward ideas of freedom from the struggles and constructed poverty of colonial subjects. Emancipatory ideals among British thinkers didn’t just come from their own thought; these ideas were imparted on to them from diasporic anticolonial resistance.

Unpredictability, economic unpredictability in particular, means that it’s never a good idea to leave things without a good plan. A truly free market is chaotic and leaves too much room for the possibility of failure, especially for the wealthy and well-endowed. A good plan, however, limits the possibility of failure and tries to make things work for the best possible outcomes. But in the absence of democratic control over planning, who sees the rewards of those best possible outcomes?