Two new must-read books from Canadian radical publisher Between the Lines

From one of my PhD supervisors at York University, David F. Noble: Beyond the Promised Land: The Movement and the Myth. I read the manuscript and it's fantastic. Writing arguably his most accesible book to date in clear and punchy prose, Noble links the Western story of the promised land to the failed promises of global capitalism in a sweeping re-reading of the past 6000 years of Western history. He makes the ultimate claim that the myriad recent social justice movements around the globe are, to a great extent, responding to, resisting, and creating new alternatives to the failed promises of western civilization.

From SFU colleague and now sociology professor at Queen's University, Richard Day: Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. I'm looking forward to including this book in my emerging list of must-reads. You can read an early synthesis of Day's book in a recent essay entitled "From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements", published in Cultural Studies Vol 18, No. 5, September 2004. The gist of his argument? That the "newest" social movements are challenging the "long shadow" that Gramsci's concept of hegemony has cast over "radical political theory" by showing us the logic of affinity instead of the logic of hegemony and counterpower in the newest social movements' "new forms of self-organization that...run parallel-or as alternatives-to existing [socio-political] forms."