David Camfield Book Launch (Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left)

Name: David Camfield Book Launch (Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left)
Start: 2025-05-03T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-03T20:00:00-05:00
Location: McNally Robinson Booksellers

Schedule

Sat May 03 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

McNally Robinson Booksellers | Winnipeg, MB

Join David Camfield for the launch of Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left (Fernwood Publishing) featuring special guests Tami Gadir and Andrew Loewen.
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781773637327/david-camfield/red-flags
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream: https://youtube.com/live/cmbFIPpdpHQ
This is a mask friendly event.
An anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian introduction to the history of the USSR, China, and Cuba that asks: Were they actually on the road to communism? Red Flags traces the path from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the construction of the world’s first "actually existing socialism" society: the USSR. It also looks at the post-revolution societies created along the same lines in China and Cuba. Using the intellectual tools of historical materialism, Red Flags argues that they were not in fact moving towards communism because the social relations remained fixed in class exploitation. The workers were never liberated.
This book offers an analysis of the contradictions and uneasy truths the left needs to confront if it is to build a genuinely liberatory alternative to capitalism.
David Camfield is a professor in the Labour Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba. He is the author of Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change, We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society, and Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement and has written many articles on Marxism and left politics. He is on the editorial board and editorial advisory committee of Labour/Le Travail and the advisory board of Alternate Routes. He has long been involved in social justice activism, served on the executive of the Winnipeg Labour Council, and is active in the University of Manitoba Faculty Association. David is on the editorial board of Midnight Sun and hosts the podcast Victor’s Children.
Tami Gadir is a researcher from RMIT University, Australia, specializing in the politics of global music industries. Her research on nightclub cultures culminated in a book, Dance Music: A Feminist Account of an Ordinary Culture and her current project is about workers’ choirs. Gadir is a member of the International Socialists, and has served as a union delegate while being active in climate and anti-war movements. She has worked across five cities and three continents.
Andrew Loewen has been active on the grassroots, anti-colonial radical left for more than two decades, primarily in the Prairies and western Canada. He is a former editor of Briarpatch Magazine and works for a large public sector labour union in Winnipeg.