If, like most sentient beings these days, you are worried about the ongoing and human-caused destabilization of our planet’s climate systems and the cascade of damage caused by the way we keep fouling our own common home; and if you have begun to suspect that we are going to need far more drastic remedies than reusable cloth grocery bags and composting bins to meet this lethal challenge, L.E. Fox’s new book of essays, This Book is a Knife: Radical Working-Class Strategies in the Age of Climate Change should be your next read. Even if you are not yet persuaded that capitalism is a driving force in the climate change disaster, you will be treated to the work of a remarkable prose stylist and acute critical thinker. And who knows? They might change your mind and move you to join them and the millions around the world who are working for social justice and climate sanity.
Fox self-describes as “a proudly queer non-binary working-class writer and activist.” They have published widely as a science writer and social critic, appearing in The Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Outside, The Tyee, Vice, The Narwhal and CBC News. Their first book, This Has Always Been a War, was described in a Globe and Mail (a paper not prone to praising anti-capitalists) in a 2022 review that said, in part:
“What makes this a truly important book are the stories Fox tells of how so much of our economy functions – driven by greed, and status-seeking, and unthinking cruelty on the part of those with wealth and power towards those who work at some of the toughest jobs for the lowest pay. Fox brings it all viscerally to life, making us feel something of what it’s like to be constantly worrying if you can make the rent, or living out of your vehicle as you move from one crappy job to another.”
Well, Fox is still turning out powerful, moving, idiomatic and marvellously profane text, and her new book is a must read for anyone who cares about the ongoing damage being done to climate equilibrium or about the future of English language writing. The author is a spectacularly talented writer with a voice that is unique and a message that is of profound importance.
Fox has a supple mind and a powerful eloquence that serves their cause well. Despite their obvious passion and the painful personal experience that has shaped an anti-capitalist, pro- environment stand, Fox continues to make an argument in fresh and persuasive ways, without any of the strident self-righteousness that weakens and distracts in so many essays by other writers.
Fox is a writer who seems able to deftly use many modes and genres without ever losing the fluent and idiomatic style that gives reading them the delights of a good night at the pub with a smart friend. They can pull off essays of ideas, a moving memoir, a semi-fictional “interview” with a TV host that allows her to clearly state her position on capitalism and the need for collective resistance, and a vision, reminiscent of Ursula LeGuin’s finest work, of a time in the near future when the resistance has won and a new, eco-anarchist community is being built.
By the way, it is striking to me how much phenomenally good writing is being published by queer and non-binary authors like Fox these days. See, for example, the recent review
of Sim Kern’s magnificent Genocide Bad. If, as some have commented, the role of the Irish in the early 20th century was to save the English language from the English, perhaps in our time the role of non-heteronormative writers may be to save modern English from dead white males and the canon that celebrates them exclusively.
Fox is writing for their own people, the working class, the racialized, the queer, and the poor. This book never talks down to workers or others who are hurt by the implacable machinery of capitalism. Fox can move from erudite commentary on other writers to wilderness adventure to memoir to utopian visions of the future without skipping a beat. Their definition of the working class is expansive and generous, and Fox is clearly out to persuade everyone in the class to recognize common interests and unite to save life on Earth from the doom that capitalism is creating. They desire, like the great American radical Gene Debbs, to rise with the class, not from it.
Reader, no matter how you understand your own class position, this is an important book for you to consider. The great and tortured American comic Lenny Bruce had a routine in which he told his audience that so long as anyone was naked, those of us with more than one shirt were all thieves. It was this unsparing moral honesty, delivered in pungent stand-up comedy that got Bruce destroyed by the authorities and by his own demons. But he was not destroyed before leaving a legacy of honest witness. We are all thieves, in Lenny’s terms, but we can and should change sides and stand and fight with those we have robbed. Fox is a new and important voice urging us all to do so. We should all be listening.
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