Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
A Partisan Reading of the Events from Spring to Fall 2024 in Tiohtià:ke-Montreal
This text seeks to take stock of the political sequence that unfolded from the McGill encampment of April 27, 2024, to the student strike of November 21 and 22 against the NATO summit. We wish to bring forward a number of remarks and lessons that the events of the past months have revealed to us.
At the heart of this text is the concern with the conditions of possibility for a conflictual situation and its possible passage into an insurrectional situation. Throughout the past year, we have tried to understand what unfolded in the movement of solidarity with Palestine in Montreal, stretching from spring to summer and up to November 2024. It is a matter for us of discerning the openings and the limits of such an overflow.
This text is addressed to those who feel concerned by the political experiments that took place throughout the spring, summer, and fall. It is addressed to those who want to engage head-on with the conflictual, insurrectional, and revolutionary political situation. That things were difficult, disappointing, enraging, and wounding is, to us, simply the obvious fact of any unusual political moment. These difficulties are not an end, but a starting point.
This past year has been a surprising one. Many people have lived through the most intense and overwhelming political and existential moments of their lives.
This text is also addressed to them.
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“We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death”
“For the first time, workers felt at home in these factories where, until then, everything constantly reminded them they were on someone else’s property. Every moment of the working day, some painful little detail reminded the worker, at his machine, that he was not at home. These men and women, who had belonged to the factory every day of their lives, for a few days, the factory belonged to them. And that is the tragedy of such an existence: for them to feel at home in the factory, the factory had to stop. Now that the machines are running again, they find themselves under the same constraint. Yet at least they can become conscious of this tragedy. They have once felt what a factory should be. For the first time in their lives, the sight of the factory, the workshops, and the machines was a joy.”
— Strikes and Pure Joy, Simone Weil
Weil’s words feel distant to us. Between the four walls of the university, the machines are imperceptible. Yet the factory illuminates the amphitheater. The feeling of being “other” — everywhere. The intimate catastrophe of that.
That everything seems impossible, inadequate, futile, exhausting, titanic — this is precisely what shows the gravity of the work ahead. In the trough of the political wave, the specter of defeat still haunts us.
We are a few who share the sensitive affect of disaster, a few who want to organize. The world of a few years ago already feels very distant. Everything is accelerating, and the empire is tightening around the carcass of history. We are only a handful, and we are not satisfied with the small victories some proclaim. Some seem tired by the latest political sequence and take those victories as a balm. So, if these so-called victories are to be lived — reified perhaps, but still lived — so be it; let’s take them seriously, let’s cherish them. Let’s linger on the angles they suggest.
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Since the end of the 2005–2008–2012–2015 sequence, we have witnessed first the festive, then the slow and silent death of something like a student force. Then, in spasms — the internships strike, “No to COP15,” the NATO summit — something like a combative spirit resurfaced. But the aura is no longer really there. Each attempt appears as a fleeting political moment. Its ephemeral character is its illness, not its direction; it is its internal limit. The punctuality of the last strikes is not a decision but a fatality. And it seems that there is something inauthentic in these moments, truly — in the sense that the act of striking does not appear as a moment of rage and breakdown.
The time of the strike should be a time when the empty and homogeneous time of everyday life is suspended, fissured, then broken open to new encounters, new uses, and unexpected moments. But the latest punctual strikes rather appeared as the preparation for a dull, well-known exercise.
Some have evaluated the student strike against NATO as a success, due to the level of combativeness of the nighttime demonstration of November 22, 2024. In our view, this is a misreading. The strike served as a pretext, certainly, but its real meaning lay elsewhere.
That night, as we recall, a few hundred students and pro-Palestinian militants briefly marched through downtown to the Palais des Congrès. In a skirmish, autonomous groups pushed back a police line into an alley, doused them with paint, and launched fireworks at them. A few moments later, trash bins and cars were burning; the windows of the Palais exploded under cobblestones and hammers. The crowd was quickly dispersed.
The media and police treatment of the event quickly took on enormous proportions, and the farce was set. It took the SPVM police chief himself to remind politicians that these were not antisemitic acts, but political gestures by groups known to the services. No arrests to this day — perhaps not so well-known after all.
That said, this demonstration is not representative of what was, overall, a disappointing two-day strike. Let’s rejoice in the brief insurrectionary outburst, certainly and with great joy, but also subject the real exercise of the strike to critique.
At UQAM, the most striking feature of the strike was how few people it managed to mobilize. A strike zone had been improvised in the agora. There were a few activities, leaflets, banners, readings, coffee. That was about it. A small internal demonstration of about half an hour.
At Concordia, the protest was spicier; the crowd, under the initiative of a constellation of autonomous groups, invaded the hallways and marched across several floors, leaving a trail of tags and broken security cameras behind them. At the administration office entrance, there was a moment of hesitation and confusion. One could imagine what could have been. At that moment, there was a real harmony between rage and joy. Initiatives seemed ready to spring up, unpredictable, outside of all expectations.
We say this is what a strike must produce: the play between what is expected and what is not, a proper reshuffling of the deck. But all of it was quickly aborted. Thirty minutes later, it was all over.
On the second day of the strike, a few more people showed up at the agora, mainly because students from striking CEGEPs had converged there. Just before the evening demonstration: security workshops, distribution of defensive materials, formation of teams — the agora was full, and it hadn’t been so lively in a long time. Surely, some people found comfort or real satisfaction in the exercise of the November 21 and 22 strike. We admit that we did too, a little bit at least.
Yet what happened seems to us to highlight mainly what could have happened.
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“While the first form of work stoppage (the political strike of demands) is a form of violence, for it only brings about an external modification of working conditions, the second, as a pure means, is without violence. For it does not set out with the hidden intention of resuming activity after superficial concessions and some modification of working conditions, but with the resolve to resume only an entirely changed work, one not imposed by the State; a change that this kind of strike achieves less by provocation than by realization.”
— Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin
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In Critique of Violence, Benjamin focuses on two distinct forms of strike. On one hand, the political strike appears as a demand-driven exercise, where workers use work stoppage as a means to mediate and reach an objective, whether wage-related or otherwise. On the other hand, there is what Benjamin calls the “proletarian general strike.”
We will understand it here as a human strike, a social strike.
The social strike suspends the real temporality of productive labor activities and the normal everyday activities under capitalism. Labor time is freed from its dispossessing and alienating burden; time changes, space becomes inhabitable, and relationships as well.
The social strike achieves more than it provokes — that’s what Benjamin meant.
But the recent punctual student strikes have failed — or no longer manage — to suspend the normal course of everyday life. There was nothing shocking or disturbing about a few couches, a few slogans, and some banners.
Thus, we need to revisit the short list of possible objectives for a strike: apply pressure, change real life, alter the relation to infrastructure, reappropriate the use of spaces, free up time, and so on.
Given that the strike of November 21–22 did not manage to apply real pressure (since obviously it was targeting a counter-summit and no one dismantled NATO), we would have expected that the strike zone would be much more populated, that people would use the punctuality of the moment as a force — after all, it is much easier to overturn everyday life for one day than for six months — and open up much more playful, lighter possibilities than those of an endless unlimited general strike. We would have wanted associative and autonomous slogans, people taking initiatives, painting entire sections, setting up canteens, throwing parties, creating real spaces to meet.
Clearly, we are missing the organizing force needed to achieve something like that.
Yet a reappropriation of space and time — that is precisely what the pro-Palestinian encampments exercised, in their own way, a few months earlier. A melting pot between radlib-leaning students, the Muslim community from various backgrounds, insurrectionalists, the radical student left, familiar faces from community organizations, and a handful of autonomists.
But mass overflow through sheer numbers was the great absentee. Demonstrations organized on autonomous bases rarely reached over a thousand people.
That said, the pro-Palestinian encampments should still shed light on a series of things. Our reading here is that it was indeed the spring and summer 2024 pro-Palestinian encampments — and not the mobilization for the November 21–22 strike — that allowed a scene like the offensive-style demonstration of November 22 at night to emerge.
Our observation: no group, composition of groups, or organizations were capable of making the events of November 22 resonate beyond fantasy and chatter.
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Parenthesis on Composition
The term “composition” became trendy after Les Soulèvements de la Terre and the impressive and macabre riot of Sainte-Soline.
In recent months in Quebec, it has been used to propose a strategic way to seize politics, its binaries, and its tendencies — and to possibly overcome them.
Here, however, we propose reading the concept of composition not as the strategic proposal of a problem, but as the real emergence, the current reality, of every contemporary social or political movement.
Understanding politics as a real situation, not an ideal one; striving to grapple with the real political landscape; organizing the counterpoints of the forces at play — the sequence of the pro-Palestinian encampments of spring and summer 2024 managed to express this political grammar differently than we were used to. It forced a number of groups and tendencies to work together.
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Parenthesis on the Barricade
The encampments brought back into favor what we will call here the theory of the barricade.
We argue that what the barricade truly does is not limited to occupying or defending territory. Of course, the barricade is a liberation of a space, a redefinition of its uses, an effective dismantling of the existing landscape.
But the barricade also makes the position emerge.
It forces people not only to acknowledge its existence — something that discourse and calls to struggle often fail to do — but also polarizes and compels people to take a side. One stands either behind or in front of the barricade, and that means a lot. It doesn’t mean that everyone on one side agrees on everything, but that they share a certain sensitive understanding.
To be on one side of the barricade is also to reject the reality that the other side proposes. In a world where touching and affecting constitute real challenges, this is no small thing.
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Parenthesis on Densification
We also note that the encampments managed to create a new mode of relationship-building that was unprecedented in the classical activist landscape of Montreal.
In the momentum of an international movement, McGill students, activists from the Palestinian Youth Movement, Montreal 4 Palestine, many from the Muslim community, Jewish students, and a certain number of folks in black took over McGill Lower Field and made it their own.
One might ask whether the length of time (74 days?!) ultimately showed the inefficiency of the tactic with regard to its demands — that’s a good question. Indeed, strikes or short-lived actions have little direct impact on the transformation of an institutional political situation.
But that’s not the point here.
What we saw, however, was that the exercise allowed for a particular densification of political and sensitive ties among people from all walks of life. The densification was spatial and temporal: in just a few days, strangers became comrades, then friends; people radicalized visibly; day-to-day tasks were taken up collectively; preparations were made for a smart response to eventual police raids.
All this created new forms of trust, but also new fears, new doubts, and new lived realities of struggle.
The densification achieved by the encampments was both their strength and their limit.
The shared conclusion after the camps: the exhaustion of the forces in play, particularly in the daily material reproduction of camp life.
The Dense Hour
That said, the densification also allowed new alliances and new forms of conflict to emerge — ones that agreed on the desire to clash with the police and urban and university infrastructures.
We saw a surprising contamination of offensive and defensive street tactics. Four key moments followed one another (though these do not exhaustively represent all conflictual moments):
i) the nighttime police skirmish at the Al-Aqsa Popular University and the simultaneous brawl;
ii) the occupation of the administration offices and the stormy demonstration of June 6 at McGill;
iii) the anger at the dismantling of Al-Soumoud and the retaliation against McGill’s administration building;
iv) the October 7, 2024 demonstration at Concordia amidst police confusion.
Each of these moments showed how, in a sudden surge of anger, forces that seemed impossible to bring together could realign.
It was a recurring work — both organized and organic — that allowed the normalization and multiplication of a tactic like the Grey Bloc during the summer and fall demonstrations.
In the contingency of spring and summer, where on one side relationships of trust and tactical knowledge were exchanged within the camps, and on the other side where overflow-prone demonstrations multiplied, a confrontation gradient emerged, breaking with the pacified demonstrations of previous autumns and winters.
This sequence is interesting for the questions it raises: it makes us wonder how we could have done better and earlier within the movement — whether, for example, we should have played a role from the beginning in the major demonstrations, offering a reachable presence for those who recognized themselves in rage, anger, and the desire to build a real force of overflow.
It also forces us to ask how we could have channeled the forces present beyond what actually happened.
If we had managed to meet and connect with more people, we must still ask: where and how could we have taken the overflow so that it would not just be a repetition doomed to exhaustion?
The sequence of camps and demonstrations seems to have burned out toward the end of the summer.
We understand this exhaustion both as an inability to connect widely enough to students, an inability to overflow beyond campuses, an inability to create meeting moments that were not mere repetitions of the so-called revolutionary milieu, an inability to intervene satisfactorily in already existing political spaces, an inability to resonate beyond a fairly limited group of already-convinced individuals.
This exhaustion also appears to us as a real fatigue. As we said, the daily logistics and material demands of the camps consumed internal energy that could have gone into thinking and doing otherwise.
Within the pro-Palestinian movement, this exhaustion had something tragic, tinged with an unbearable sense of helplessness.
Faced with these conclusions, we inevitably have to ask ourselves the following questions:
• How can we break through stagnation in conflictual political sequences?
• How can we avoid isolating ourselves within radicality while preserving it?
• How can we become reachable?
If there was an overflow last year — and we believe there was — it eventually ran into the trenches of a certain lack.
We think that lack is precisely that of organization.
A conflictual or insurrectional situation materializes through the articulation of several elements. We will name just two here:
On the one hand, such a situation can appear as if by itself — in the sense that the overflow seems neither anticipated nor properly organized. This is what appears to have happened with the pro-Palestinian movement in Montreal: it was more the accumulation of small events (and their international resonance) that led to the emergence of the camps and combative demonstrations.
This is also the form that riotous moments like the one on May 31, 2020, in Montreal, following the death of George Floyd, take. We call this spontaneity.
On the other hand, there are movements that are organized and strategized in advance. Here, we think obviously of the 2012 and 2015 student strikes.
These movements were organized based on local, regional, and national organizational structures.
The ASSÉ (Association for Student-Union Solidarity) was the structured element of the combative student movement. It allowed the establishment of training camps, mobilization campaigns, media coverage, and the organization of relatively large demonstrations throughout Quebec (especially in Montreal).
It was both a vehicle for student mobilization and something like a democratic front that could be joined on an almost permanent basis.
The relative success of the 2012 and 2015 movements was obviously not solely due to the work of ASSÉ and its various committees. Rather, it was the massive and autonomous overflow of these structures that allowed truly conflictual situations to arise.
We are not here to regret the death of ASSÉ or to advocate for the construction of strictly identical structures, but rather to observe what organizing on a formal basis makes possible.
This type of structure is obviously insufficient and full of limitations, but it still significantly expands the possibilities for mobilization. It is also alongside and starting from these types of structures that autonomous groups and affinity groups reach the height of their effectiveness.
That said, we must not fantasize about the revolutionary character of such structures. Nothing is truly revolutionary unless it dismantles the real course of everyday life under capitalism.
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The coming months are uncertain: the looming shadow of mass impoverishment, the continual state of exception around a vampiric and filthy management of the housing crisis, mass layoffs, exploding inflation, and the doubling-down of extractivist projects everywhere.
The questions raised earlier must be taken seriously if we hope to be up to the situation.
If, trapped in the belly of a bleeding machine, a revolutionary politics is possible, then it must necessarily take place on the long timeline.
We must develop more infrastructures and organizational practices that allow us, collectively, to become reachable by others.
Post-scriptum on the Revolutionary Body
There are things that surge forth. But what surges forth also sweeps away.
We have seen it: insurrection will bear the mark of the strongest signifier. To refuse to play the game of hegemony — a game that inevitably leads to betrayal of oneself and of others — is to refuse to lay claim to insurrection for a program.
However, we must attach uses, ethics, and forms to it. We must embody gestures, and by embodying them, change their course.
When the State or Capital stumbles, someone or something must be there to make it fall. We cannot rely on a body that would surge forth spontaneously and strike the fatal blow. The opportunity is too great, and the risk too high.
What we need is a body capable of clarifying and strategizing this fall. In the same way, we need a body that can build quickly, connect, write, share, diffuse, and organize.
We are not under the illusion that this body would create insurrection itself — the exact recipe for that remains unknown to us. We recognize the role of the revolutionary body in creating movement, but not in creating the movement.
The Groupe révolutionnaire Charlatan said it — and we share their view: the role of the minority is indeed to force a taking of position.
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We also assert that a revolutionary body must not be about a historical political tendency. We have seen in recent years how these tendencies allow us very little understanding among ourselves, even less the means to realize our ambitions or to draw real lines of convergence and fracture.
There is nothing revolutionary about claiming an anarchism or a communism of one kind or another.
Everything revolutionary lies in the work of making them happen.
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On the other hand, it is never about denying or hiding radicality. The revolutionary question must cease to be constantly relegated to historical binaries.
These binaries must be brought back down to earth.
The reformist, in a given moment, may tip into insurrectionary action: they are crossed by the situation.
We are among those who prefer to think in terms of situations, strategies, ethics, and uses rather than political identities or moral principles.
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Also, the revolutionary body must not have the subject as its object.
The band, the group, the organization: none are the image of what a revolutionary body should be.
There should be no claiming or process of recognition to belong to the revolutionary body — only the material and existential reality of participating in its construction.
We understand the historical necessity of certain groups and their key role in real infrastructural scaffolding. On the other hand, we also understand their insufficiency in constructing strong common revolutionary positions.
A revolutionary position does not consist in charismatic and publicizable proposals.
It consists in the creation of an opening, of a faultline within everyday life, a faultline that can be reactivated by others, and differently.
A revolutionary position must be reachable — but being reachable must not be its sacrifice.
We have been told that what enables resonance with others is authenticity in the gesture. We agree.
We have been told that creating relationships while distancing oneself from political identity affirmation is inauthentic and dishonest. Yet the very word “identity” does the thing and performs it.
Calling oneself insurrectionalist does not make an insurrection. Pastors preach to us that to be “anarchist” or “revolutionary” should prefix our political existence.
We will simply say here: calling oneself revolutionary or anarchist has little meaning in itself. It is the gesture, and its articulation with the situation, that gives those terms their meaning and strength.
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We also reply that there is authenticity in wanting to be heard and understood — and that we must strategize the ways to be so.
We say that not everyone is able to understand what is being attempted by 50 people dressed in black standing isolated against an army of police. We say that, often, that does not resonate — or resonates only like a scream in a box, an echo of one’s own voice.
And we are not particularly keen on deafening each other.
We do, however, want to speak loudly enough to be heard and understood. We want neither to scream into the void nor to whisper among ourselves.
We move in the direction of that phrase which says: we cannot force everyone to speak our language; we must become polyglots.
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In the end, being reachable means touching the heart of what is shareable in the intimate and sensible catastrophe of the world.
If the revolutionary position can appear as a secession from the everyday life of the economy and politics — in the sense that it emerges from torpor, incapacity, confusion, and anguish, and seeks to build ways of life harmful to the capitalist mode of production — it must not, at any cost, become a secession from the “individuals” of the social body.
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Being able to formulate revolutionary or insurrectionary positions that are reachable requires a certain level of formalization.
Thus, our conclusion: overcoming the opposition between movement and organization appears more as a necessity than a wish. It seems the only way to get out of the insular “militant milieu” and actually try our luck.
As we said: one role of the revolutionary body is to elaborate revolutionary positions.
But the revolutionary body must also be wary of its own corporality.
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The revolutionary body is not the sum of the identities that compose it, unlike the band or the group.
Its historical function must not be recoverable because it must consist in dismantling the everyday reality of the capitalist mode of production.
It must carry the destructive joy of the band — but without its gregariousness, without its character traits, leaders, and egos.
The revolutionary body must find its meaning only in what it actually achieves.
It must obsess over these questions: analyzing lines of force and weakness; following the evolution of conflictual sequences; distributing tasks for an upcoming situation; theoretical and critical elaboration; strategic and tactical follow-ups of past sequences; mapping and developing the infrastructures needed for building and maintaining said infrastructures; intervening politically at the right time to break the spectacle, etc.
The revolutionary body must fluctuate in intensity depending on the density of social conflict.
It must at the same time guard against activist urgency and remain a quiet force in the trough of the wave.
It must constitute itself as the interface for those who live the revolution in the world, head-on, even in the dead time of political sequences.
The revolutionary body must not claim the social body — in part or in whole — but its positions must seek to open it, clarify it, polarize it, and transform the real processes of production and reproduction of everyday life and its aesthetics.
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Thus, the revolutionary body does not deny the forces already present in revolutionary milieus, but surpasses them.
It surpasses them because it seizes existing powers, but instead of claiming them or reproducing them, it articulates them strategically and opens them outward.
What must appear essential in the coming months is to succeed in creating a relatively formalized space where the different organizing forces of the revolutionary body can agree on a certain number of real priorities, distribute tasks to build and consolidate an upcoming conflictual situation, identify infrastructural shortcomings, and think about how to fill them.
Learning from the past year, from its successes and failures — and because the times demand it, doing better.
– HN