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Canadian police provocateurs are as old as Canada itself...Manufacturing Threats tells the story of police provocateurs going back to the time of Canadian Confederation. Whether against communism or the FLQ, the Black Liberation Movement or the Muslim community, Alexandre Popovic documents the role Canada's secret services have played in repressing marginalized communities and movements for social change. From bombings and harassment campaigns, to setting up fake urban guerrilla cells and leading invasions from the US, there seem to be no limits to what the operatives of the Canadian state will do to stoke fear and justify their own ever-growing budgets.Beyond just documenting these nefarious and shocking misdeeds, Manufacturing Threats shows the perennial failures of attempts to rein in or reform these agencies. Popovic argues that the entire concept of repressive apparatuses whose actions must be hidden from the public and even elected politicians-which has remained the untouchable assumption of these reform efforts-is itself the problem, and that these sorts of outrages will continue unless real transparency and accountability can be achieved.Different chapters detail the 19th-century origins of Canada's secret police in countering the Irish nationalist Fenians, many of whom were based in the United States, and the Métis Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel. Popovic goes on to show the role of entrapment and provocation in countering the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Communist Party in the 1920s and '30s, and then in attempting to entrap Black and Indigenous activists and in successfully infiltrating and manipulating the nationalist Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in the 1960s and '70s. Examining the work of the provincial and federal governments' Keable and McDonald Commissions, which came about following disclosures of RCMP dirty tricks (arson, break-ins, kidnappings...), and which led to the establishment of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Popovic then details three major examples of CSIS informants (Marc-André Boivin, Grant Bristow, and Joseph Gilles Breault) who were allowed to carry out acts of violence and intimidation in the service of their government paymasters.This book is an important introduction to the subject of Canada's repressive agencies and the legislation and lack of oversight that have structured their use of agents provocateurs and informants over the years.First published in French as Produire le menace (Sabotart, 2017), this first English-language edition includes updated information as of 2022.

This two-part book starts with the paper of that name, on the birth of the modern lumpen/proletariat in the 18th and 19th centuries and the storm cloud of revolutionary theory that has always surrounded them. Going back and piecing together both the actual social reality and the analyses primarily of Marx but also Bakunin and Engels, the paper shows how Marx's class theory wasn't something static. His views learned in quick jumps, and then all but reversed themselves in several significant aspects. While at first dismissing them in the Communist Manifesto as "that passively rotting mass" at the obscure lower depths, Marx soon realized that the lumpen could be players at the very center of events in revolutionary civil war. Even at the center in the startling rise of new regimes. The second text consists of the detailed paper "Mao Z's Revolutionary Laboratory and the Role of the Lumpen Proletariat." As Sakai points out, the left's euro-centrism here prevented it from realizing the obvious: that the basic theory from European radicalism about the lumpen/proletariat was first fully tested not there or here but in the Chinese Revolution of 1921-1949. Under severely clashing political lines in the left, the class analysis finally used by Mao Z was shaken out of the shipping crate from Europe and then modified to map the organizing of millions over a prolonged generational revolutionary war. One could hardly wish for a larger test tube, and the many lessons to be learned from this mass political experience are finally put on the table.

[C]apitalism will not topple "through ... exhaustion." It will not "stop running on its own." It must be overthrown by a politically conscious, mass counter-force, and the primary issue for us concerns how such a force might develop... -from "Financialization and Hegemony" From the Communist Party of the 1950s, to autonomous European movements in 68 and the revolutionary armed liberation movements of the '70s and '80s, to the antifascist organizing of ARA in the '90s, to cutting-edge analysis of the fallout of on-going capitalist crisis, right up to today, Don Hamerquist's biography reads like a history of the post-war US radical left. But Hamerquist is not some political scenester, being blown by the winds of whatever latest fashion. Instead, he uses his decades of experience in collective struggle to analyze a world constantly in motion, always living his own advice to "look at what is new" - not a simple quest for novelty, but a prophylactic against getting mired in old left debates which are grounded in a world that no longer exists. Bridging gaps, sorting wheat from chaff, Hamerquist calls on those who (like him) still identify as Leninists to recognize the failures of the vanguard party and "actually existing socialism," while also calling on anarchists, who share his commitment to a struggle outside of and against the state, to recognize the necessity of disciplined organization and a rejection of purity politics. I think that it is a fundamental problem to look for a viable perspective for today in some segment of this tradition or in the positions taken by some set of historical figures as if it is something to discover. Instead, we have to realize that this perspective is not there to discover, it must be created out of the ingredients that exist-one of which is our collective history-through an effort of will and analysis.-from "Thoughts About Organization" In this book, a selection of Hamerquist's writings from 2000 to 2022 - some of his contribution to this creative "effort of will and analysis" - have been collected together for the first time. Written as emails to comrades or for the websites of various collective, radical left projects, these essays touch on the anti-globalization movement, anti-fascism, revolutionary organization, Occupy, the 2008 financial crisis, changes in global capitalism, Ferguson, state repression, and more. Along with their specific content, Hamerquist's work offers a model for conducting revolutionary analysis: always in conversation, humble without retreating disagreement, historically-informed without being stuck in the past, moving fluidly between the specific and the general, the global and the local, the theory and the practice. With Introductions from both Hamerquist and Dave Ranney (with whom he has been in conversation since their days in the Sojourner Truth Organization together in the '70s and '80s) and editorial material designed to make Hamerquist's wide-ranging references accessible to any reader, this book is an invaluable tool for anyone who want to make a contribution to the development of a left capable of committed and unrelenting struggle against the logic of capital, while also being "accessible to regular-assed people."

The struggle against fascism is a widely accepted part of the revolutionary struggle, but even the most radical activists often sound like liberals when explaining the hows and whys of anti-fascism. Or else use the word in such a way that it has only a vague meaning as something very evil (fascist cops, fascist cutbacks, fascist State repression, etc.) .The essays in Confronting Fascism are an attempt to grapple with this situation. Breaking with established Left practice, this book attempts to deal with the questions of fascism and anti-fascism in a serious and non-dogmatic manner. Attention is paid to to the class appeal of fascism, its continuities and breaks with the "regular" far-right and also even with the Left, the ways in which the fascist movement is flexible and the ways in which it isn't. Left failures, both in opposing fascism head-on, and also in providing a viable alternative to right-wing revolt, are also dealt with at length.The lived experiences of anti-fascist activists inform this work, and more attention is paid to actual historical developments and facts than to neat theories that explain everything but only coincidentally intersect with reality. Understanding the relationship of fascism, the State, left reformism and what it means to be revolutionary are priorities in a world where it seems increasingly true that those who do not advance will have to retreat.