Red Flags Book Launch—Ottawa launch

Join David Camfield for the launch of his book new book Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left. He will be joined in conversation by Genevieve Latour

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. David is on the editorial board of Midnight Sun and hosts the podcast Victor’s Children.

Genevieve Latour (she/her) serves on the national executive of the Canadian Associate of Professional Employees (CAPE), to which she was elected in 2023 as part of the Members for Change team with a mandate to radically transform the union. Dedicated to building power in our communities and forging links among grassroots movements and labour organizations, she is active with Queers for Palestine as well as queer and Palestine solidarity initiatives within her union.

Red Flags traces the path from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the construction of the world’s first "actually existing socialist" 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.

At a time of burgeoning anti-communism from both conservatives and liberals, this book is an accessible, vibrant synthesis of the history of communism that draws on the latest research to develop a rigorous analysis of the contradictions and uneasy truths the left needs to confront if it is to build a genuinely liberatory alternative to capitalism.