F.N. N.

Unless you are an immortal jellyfish, writes Adrian Marie Brown,

death is coming for us all.

Breakdown is an inevitable part of human and in most cases animal life.

Physical breakdown, but also relational breakdown.

At some point in our lives, we're all going to come into conflict with those around us.

If you're part of a movement or any group of people that's trying to work together towards a shared goal,

the chances of conflict go, well, through the roof.

The flattening of political difference at the so-called end of history,

the erosion of union membership by neoliberal policy

and the migration of our social lives online are all factors in the well-worn concept that

is cancel culture. The tendency in our societies and organizations to cast out those

who contravene certain unquestionable truths.

Against this punitive tendency has risen up a contrarian one, a dirt bag left that gets a kick out of breaking taboos and saying the unsayable.

But is there a third way?

Following three decades of work with social movements,

Brown offers us her fourth book, Loving Corrections.

More practical than their previous monographs, the book oscillates between memoir, scholarship, and practical steps to course correcting those displaying harmful behaviors and beliefs.

For me, the book is an antidote to those who've skim read a single

Ruth Wilson Gilmore book and have hastily concluded that abolitionism preaches that anything

goes, that harm needs to be understood not addressed, and that we should just leave those who harm us head on, bringing them into a tight but loving bear hug,

which is the building block even the precondition for political organizing.

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