As police budgets are increased by hundreds of millions of dollars, the Canadian state still deems that t he cost of searching the Winnipeg-area landfill for the remains of murdered Indigenous women remains too high. But they are willing to expend money on policing those involved in the #SearchTheLandfill protests. The same state has also claimed that it would be too costly to pay for excavations at multiple residential schools so as to locate the many bodies of those murdered in these colonial concentration camps––allowing numerous reactionary "journalists" like the Kays and Rex Murphy to write genocide denial opinion columns––while providing the typical "thoughts and prayers" bullshit when politically expedient. Recently the anniversary of Colten Boushie's execution passed, reminding everyone who cared about that case that Boushie's murderer, Gerald Stanley, walks free because Canada's repressive state apparatus was on his side from the beginning. The
Back in 2014 I wrote in The Communist Necessity : "The act of making communism a necessity is generally unpleasant––but so is reality. If we have learned anything from the last two earth-shaking revolutions [Russia and China], it is that bringing communism into being is a messy business." Elsewhere in the same text I talked about the necessity of many of us having to be dragged down, losing our privilege, in order to make revolution. In his review of my first book, Gabriel Kuhn focused on this particular aspect of necessity and asked "when it comes to creating a better world, do you want to put your trust into the hands of someone who declares reality to be unpleasant no matter what?" Since that critical question was asked, and because this review was overall positive, I've had friendly relationship with Kuhn where we have discussed these points of critique. Because while, on the one hand I agree that this comment (and others like it in the text) did make the