Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Struggle isn’t a puzzle we solve by sharpening definitions.
It is mud. It is cold dawn. It is the door that must be knocked on twice because the first knock was fear and the second is a promise. Like we’ve always been told.
He insists: “We must write, because only then will we be able to tell who is serious and who is not”.
We need theory that walks like the body does: limping when we limp, sprinting when sirens grow, picking glass from its heel after the march, then laughing about it around the kitchen table while the kettle shrieks.
Remember how it felt when the names were lighter? We called ourselves anarchists, autonomist, anti-authoritarian, some remained nameless, only to be used as a shorthand for the impossible promise we carried like contraband in our chests: that no hierarchy is eternal and that ordinary people can and should arrange their life without overseers.
We were meant to be the crowbar; we were meant to pry open rooms we were locked out of. Then the rooms multiplied, each declaring itself the only legitimate sanctuary. We became curators of micro‑identities: anti‑authoritarian but not anarchist, autonomist but not left, insurrectionist but suspicious of the autonomists. Language then turned itself into something heavier than the deeds it was meant to inspire.
Writing is not the enemy. Writing is a whetstone — but the blade must leave the house. Let pamphlets circulate, but let every pamphlet end with a time and place: “Meet here. Bring tools. No Phones.”
Let zines be passports that expire unless stamped by action.
Our word need be scrawled on cardboard, rehearsed in networks, corrected in practice, revised by failure, annotated in bruises, and eventually sung — without copyright — by crowds that forget who wrote the first verse, by crowds we won’t be apart of.
Hold the pen lightly, hold one another firmly, and hold no illusion that theory absolves us from the necessity of risk that is expected from each of us. Our pages must be worth the dirt that clings to their margins. So dirty them.
Fred Hampton claimed that only revolutionaries die, not revolutions. Yet, I can’t help but smell the reeking odor of formaldehyde off of both me and those around. Our rallies feel like wakes: we chant slogans that sound like last rites, we smash storefronts like mourners breaking dishes, hoping the clatter will bring about the insurrection, the revolution, le grand soir. The streets reply with sirens, batons, no red sun. Insurance replaces the window, we keep the bruises, lose momentum again.
Meanwhile, the rest of us exchange theoretical love letters across online boulevards where eye contact is impossible. We scroll, applaud, eviscerate, scroll again, waiting for the curtain to fall on the academic pageantry. If the pen must be hoisted like a holy relic above all else, I would sooner snap it, scatter the ink into garden soil, let it nourish tomatoes for me to eat, as only then would it be of use to me.
To the comrades in our Montreal milieu, who walked away, who have been seduced by the glow of theory, who are disillusioned, your absence gapes like an open ravine; it’s filled with ritualized quarrels. We keep circling the same questions — what now, how, with whom — discovering each time that the void is expanding because we have no base, no ground compacted by shared labour, no community. Inaction does not merely leave a space; it deepens the chasm that now threatens to swallow what little remains of our common ground.
To those who’ve departed: where are you now? Will we only cross paths under tear gas, silhouettes lit by dumpsters on fire? Will we be worthy of your presence then? Must devotion be visible only in the strobe of police batons? Will your labour be lent for barricades only? Come argue across the table while the coffee burns, scream at me in raw disagreement, have an unexpected laugh.
When you are all satisfied after the ink is finally dry, close the laptop, lace your boots, find the fraction of the faction you cannot stand and invite them to hash this out over a beer no obscure webpage can overhear. Let our factions braid themselves into something sturdier than agreement — into familiarity, into a landscape where contradiction is welcomed and nobody is exiled. Only dialogue, stubborn and messy, can weld practice back onto principle until sparks fly and the metal holds.
Writing is a spark, not a furnace. The furnace is built in kitchens, meetings, late night phone calls, and beer soaked arguments that end with a workable list of next steps, and a solid plan.
Respond to this post if you must, but understand I won’t scroll back to read it. I only seek a tap on the shoulder, a chair pulled out for us to sit.
Let the streets supply the footnotes.
— A Comrade Among The Fragments