mtlcounter-info

Report-back from the antifa demo of March 4th

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Mar 082017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Unexpectedly and for the first time in many years, far-right groups were able to march in Montreal. We didn’t think fascist groups could mobilize as they did, after the crushing defeats of the Pegida demos in 2015 where 4 or 5 lost aunts and uncles were countered by 500 protestors.

The day started around 11am with a gathering of far-right groups at Place Émilie-Gamelin. Defending freedom of expression was their pretext for spewing their hatred of Muslims. The rally consisted of about 150 people, with numerous flags of “La Meute” [“The Pack”, as in “wolfpack”] as well as some Quebec flags. A small group of Maoists tried to block them from the start, but the cops quickly stepped in to push them away and clear the street for the fascists.

The fascist demo arrived at City Hall around 11:30am and a counter-demo of around 400 people awaited them. Punches started flying from both sides, as the police had not yet separated the two demos. The far-right group members who wandered a bit too far certainly received a beating and were tossed to the ground. The cops then separated the two demonstrations and at that point things crystallized. The far left on one side and the far right on the other. Insults flew from both sides but without confrontation.

Nevertheless, about thirty anti-fascists spontaneously decided to skirt around the police formation. Despite efforts to gather more people to join the group that was splitting off from the demo, the majority of the anti-racist demo stayed put. It’s hard to say if the obstacle was the inertia of a large crowd waiting 45 minutes in the cold, the unwillingness of organizers to communicate the initiative, or the lack of a banner to encourage a broader movement. Regardless, only a small portion of the crowd joined the effort to block the fascists from marching. This small, mobile group soon found itself face-to-face with the members of La Meute performing security for the far-right demo. Punches flew, then glass bottles, large blocks of ice, and a garbage can rained briefly down on the fascists. The handful of anti-fascists then took the street to try to block the fascist’s march. But bike cops quickly arrived to disperse the antifas that had found themselves on the wrong side of the police line. The far-right then had free reign to continue marching while the anti-racist demo followed from behind and was pushed back by police deployments. The far-right demo dispersed at Place Émilie-Gamelin.

The day was a defeat against the far-right which succeeded in marching in Montreal. Most people arrived with the notion that things would be fairly calm, with at most twenty or so racists and nationalists at the far-right demo. We were unprepared. Fascists have become a real threat even in Montreal, though we thought the city immune to far-right demonstrations. Next time we’ll have to take the importance of antifascism much more seriously and ensure that racists can’t show up on the streets, that they’ll stay hidden behind their pathetic Facebook pages. Reflecting on Saturday, one of the few sources of consolation is that most of the crowd seemed to support physical assaults on racists and the notion of stopping them from taking the street. A culture of struggle is ingrained enough in Montreal that violence toward the far-right is accepted and we need to continue acting on this when we meet them in the street.

Some tactical reflections for future antifa demos

When we have a crowd of 400 people, rather than trying to break riot police lines, 50 to 100 people should have positioned themselves on neighboring streets to prevent anyone from joining the far-right demo.
We need different kinds of projectiles to throw at the fascists, whether eggs, paint bombs, rocks or fireworks. A lot of things can be useful when trying to force them to leave.

Anarchists in Montreal can no longer take the question of antifascism lightly, because the threat is real. Let’s all participate actively in this struggle which is spreading across Europe and so-called North America. Antifascism can no longer be just tied to a subculture, but must be an important part of an effective struggle to root out racism.

“Cops Protect Fascists” Report-back

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Mar 072017

From Sub.media

As the far-right attempted to mobilize demonstrations all over North America on Saturday, anti-fascists came out in force to oppose them. In Montreal, the far-right organized under the banner of La Meute (The Wolf Pack), an anti-Muslim group which was founded by a former soldier in the Canadian army.

Anti-fascists attempted to shut the far-right down, but faced down with an extremely determined police force who were intent on allowing the fascists to march. This was the first time that a far-right organization has been able to hold the streets in Montreal in years.

Video Ninja: Jon Milton
Music: SOLE

Assessment & Report-Back from

Anti-Racist Counter-Demonstration

This is a quick personal assessment and report-back of today’s anti-racist counter-demonstration in Montreal to an attempted mobilization by racist, anti-immigrant Islamophobes. This is a public report-back (I know that anyone can read it). I can share other info privately with comrades.

This is simply one anti-racist activist’s take on what happened earlier today in Montreal, influenced by discussions with comrades, many of whom have shared much of what is written below already.

Assessment

It’s essential to be brutally honest: Today’s mobilization was a tactical failure by anti-racists and anti-fascists in Montreal. It wasn’t enough for us to be on the streets or to be more numerous than racists; we needed to minimally prevent the Islamophobic racists from marching and attempt to shut them down. However, more than 100 racist demonstrators, surrounded by cops, succeeded in marching from near City Hall to Berri Square, and we were unable to stop them. This is simply unacceptable, and a huge failure.

For the past two years, despite the recent rise of anti-immigrant, racist groups, we have prevented the far-right from marching or demonstrating publicly, or confronted them with some success (eg: failed Pégida demonstrations in St-Michel and Villeray; failed JDL mobilizations and events in Montreal; preventing the anti-immigrant, racist Marche du Silence; actively confronting Marine LePen’s visit to Montreal). Today, the racist far-right succeeded in marching on Montreal’s streets, and there’s no way to sugar-coat that reality.

Speaking with comrades afterwards, and reflecting personally, there were several immediate reasons for our collective failure, in my opinion:

i) When our 400 strong contingent was separated from the racist demonstration and there was essentially a 45-minute period where we were on one side and their 100+ demo was on the other, a critical mass of our main demo (perhaps at least 50 to 100 people) should have moved on side streets to the other side, to box-in the racists. It would have been harder for the cops to push through us to allow a racist march than for us to get through riot cops (which we weren’t able to do). To be fair, people were talking about this, some individuals did move, but it never happened in an effective, decisive way.

ii) Our anti-racist demonstration should have been much larger. We were no more than 400 people at the high point, and we should have been at least 1000 people. Please, take calls to confront fascists and racists seriously, change plans if necessary, and show up (if you have the ability to do so), or play just-as-necessary support roles to allow other people to show up.

iii) Show up on time when confronting racists; we were 400 people at the high point, but likely only 200 at 11:30am. There were already racists present, and we could have perhaps coordinated a break into two anti-racist demos, to box-in the racists, if more people were present earlier.

iv) The racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobes were mobilized and organized. They managed to gather together at least 100 people. The “Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens”, the nebulous Islamophobic group that called the protest across Canada, was essentially taken over in Quebec by the racist La Meute group, who organize on quasi-military lines. We are way beyond the days when activist cynics would de-prioritize anti-fascist efforts as not central to organizing because only a handful of fascists would show up to the racist demos they tried to organize (our mobilizations had something to do with keeping those fascists to a handful). The racist, anti-immigrant far-right is organized and mobilized in Quebec, including in Montreal. From reports I’ve read and videos I’ve seen, these racists marched openly (albeit in small numbers) in Quebec City and Chicoutimi today, in addition to Montreal.

v) Not only did the racist demo manage to march, surrounded by cops, from near City Hall to Berri Square, but La Meute arrived at the demo by marching from Berri Square to City Hall (coordinating their efforts with the cops). It was a tactical failure not to know about this march in advance and to do something about it.

vi) Our collective communications today was a failure. Next time, there needs to be organized, not improvised, runners and scouts, and some level of coordinated, reliable communications, part of a collective plan to surround the racists, box them-in, and then try to shut them down.

One possible positive outcome of today’s failure to shut-down racists is that we can be less complacent in our anti-fascist organizing, and get better organized, meaning also to not rely on “antifa” being a subculture, but rather a central organizing priority of all groups that oppose racism and fascism. Another outcome is that we need to take the growing anti-immigrant, far-right in Quebec and Canada seriously (in case some people weren’t). Another outcome is to challenge our existing organizing models, especially the reliance (by some) on total improvisation over some basic, reliable, necessary organization.

Report-back

For those who weren’t there, here’s a bare-bones report-back of what happened:
The callout for an anti-fascist/anti-racist counter-demo was timed for 11:30am, at least 30 minutes before the racist demo was going to start in front of Montreal City Hall. Before 11:30am, about a dozen people who were intending to protest at the racist march were present, with about 100 anti-racists present, with more arriving slowly over the next 30 minutes. There were verbal confrontations, and at least one physical confrontation, between the racists and anti-racists. The cops ended up dividing up the two groups, with the racists moved by the cops to the east of City Hall, and our larger group of anti-racists to the west. A line of cops separated us and created a buffer zone of about half a block between the racists and anti-racists.

For about 45 minutes, or more, there was chanting from our end to the other end. During that time, the La Meute people arrived and joined the small group of racists. Their numbers increased from a few dozen to about 100 or more, waving their clearly visible wolf claw flags. A small group held up “Pégida Quebec” signs (a reference to the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant group that began in Germany, and failed at previous attempts in Montreal to demonstrate publicly).

It became clear that the racist demo began marching east on Notre-Dame towards Berri. The police line was moving back and we followed it (although in retrospect we should have just doubled back to try to block the racist demo). During this move, there were skirmishes with the riot cops. The cops deployed pepper spray and some comrades received baton blows (one individual had his teeth cracked by a baton blow; we got the badge number of the cop and will follow-up with support).

Eventually, there was seemingly a collective strategy, and that was to try to catch the racist march by running up (at one point, literally running) St-Denis street, and trying to go across a side street to Berri to confront the racists. However, both times this was attempted (that I observed) a line of riot police (and bike cops) prevented us from getting to the racist demo.

By the time we reached De Maisonneuve and St-Denis, La Meute had already arrived at Berri Square and was dispersing. The main group of anti-racists went north to try to find a way to double-back to Berri Square. I was part of a small group that stayed, and seeing that the cops were demobilizing, walked to Berri Square. There were about 50-75 La Meute people left, dispersing, so we heckled from a distance. Riot cops were present, and eventually set up a line against our small (20 people) group.

Much later (about 10 minutes later), the larger anti-racist group arrived, but everything was over. Some folks took solace in burning the signs that the racists left, and singing the Internationale, but that definitely wasn’t my mindset after such a huge tactical failure.

For the liberals…

Here’s a reminder about why the demo today was racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant (and not simply about M103 and free speech): The individual(s) behind the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens have publicly expressed anti-immigrant views, deliberately exaggerated the effects of motion M103 and other policies in an Islamophobic way, expressed openly their admiration for Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, posted videos from extreme far-right groups in Eastern Europe with slogans like “Islam out” and “no more mosques,” and expressed quasi-anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros and the world order. Their Quebec-based marches have been openly supported, and organized, by far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim groups like La Meute. These groups claim to be concerned about Islam and Islamization, and not against Muslims, but when you deliberately exaggerate and repeat toxic falsehoods about Muslims and Islam, not to mention immigrants, then you’re being Islamophobic and racist. Individuals associated with these groups have both committed violence and express violence against identifiable groups (those groups – Muslims, migrants, people of colour, antifa activists – do not include white liberals).

The position of the groups who mobilized for today’s anti-racist counter-demonstration is that we don’t provide public space in our streets and neighborhoods for racists. Today wasn’t the day to “dialogue” with racists, but rather to shut them down. Some of us do dialogue with racists (many of us people of colour don’t really have a choice, the “dialogue” is imposed on us) but today was about an attempted shut down. Liberal second-guessing of effective anti-fascist tactics the moment when we’re trying to implement those tactics in the face of riot police, pepper spray and violent racists who have threatened us, at a demo based on clear callout to shut down fascists and racists, is incredibly counter-productive to an effective anti-racist movement. So are your condescending lessons about “diversity.” Fuck you.

Hoping this assessment and report-back is useful to people who were both present and not present at Montreal’s demo. More discussions, in our organizing spaces and elsewhere, are certainly going to happen, and this is one quick day-of contribution.

– Jaggi Singh,
member of le Collectif de résistance antiraciste de Montréal (CRAM) and Solidarité sans frontières
(this report-back is a personal reflection)

A Collaborative Project for 4/20

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Mar 072017

Here’s an idea: a zine, well laid out and readable in an afternoon, with a funny picture on the front of it and a few varied articles inside; a day in late April, hopefully not too rainy, and a bunch of people gathered in a park or a public square; anarchists, normal-looking or otherwise, and maybe with a solid chemical excuse for not being able to articulate their ideas in plain words.

Needless Exposition – or skip to the TL;DR

I’ve only ever attended one large gathering on 4/20. (Or, at least I’ve only attended one weed-themed gathering on this date.) It was in 2013, on the eastern slope of the mountain in Montréal. I didn’t realize what day it was until my friend and I arrived there and saw what was up. We had been planning to hike up the mountain and we didn’t have any weed on us. But still, it was a good time. There were so many people there, and so few cops – just a few, watching from a healthy distance. Once we started climbing, there were no cops at all, but there were lots of people, teenagers mostly, climbing trees and running around and talking shit around the fires they had made for themselves. Some folks were playing some pretty good hip hop from speakers in their backpacks. It was a fun atmosphere to be in.

I cared about 4/20 for a very brief period in the latter half of high school, when I was living in a much smaller town than Montréal. For a few years in a row, it was an excuse to skip school and do stupid shit with my friends. The year I remember best, it was the first really nice day of the year, and me and the crew spent most of it by the river, talking and dipping our feet in the water. I didn’t sesh that day at all, because I was back on my straight edge or whatever. But it’s a good memory; my friends did what they wanted, and I did what I wanted, and we did it together, even if what we did wasn’t much at all.

I stopped caring about 4/20 when I stopped hanging out with those people. For a few years, I definitely didn’t think about it all. As I became an anarchist, and got involved in struggle with other people against the state, I developed some fairly complicated – but mostly negative – thoughts about drugs, including weed. You know the deal: sober for the revolution and such. At the same time, I didn’t always do what I thought I should do (who the fuck wants to be a serious revolutionary all the goddamn time?), and I smoked up pretty frequently, sometimes to ill effect.

I am not against weed. The very notion of being against weed is, of course, fucking dumb. But what I thought was cool on 4/20 in 2013 wasn’t the weed itself, but the sight of lots of people having fun with their friends – some of them high school age, and maybe less jaded or worn down than I already was at twenty-three years old. I liked the blatant criminality of the whole thing, the good-clean-fun nature of it. That’s what life should be like all the time.

So anyway, in the last few years, state institutions – in North America, at least – have moved in fits and starts towards the deprohibition of weed. Justin Trudeau got elected on his legalization promise. It’s already happened in a few places in the United States, and perhaps it will happen across Canadia soon, in one shitty form or another. Of course, poor and black drug dealers like Jean-Pierre Bony might still get shot by police while we wait on parliamentary committees, while those with the most power have time to set themselves up to control the market when the hat finally drops. If you’re reading this, you’re probably an anarchist, so I don’t need to tell you that technocracy and capitalism are bad. The relevant question is, How do we determine for ourselves what we need, and actually make it happen?

There can be no final answer to this question, obviously. Final, complete, ostensibly perfect answers are for Marxists and worse. Rather than pretending to have articulated the anarchist position on weed or whatever, me and my friends think it would be better to just hear what people who are thinking hard about freedom and domination have to say about Trudeau, weed addiction, counterculture, cognitive self-determination, disability, the War on Drugs, actually existing weed capitalism in Colorado, how getting stoned at work is an act of sublime rebellion, ways to fuck with Marc and Jody Emery, solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that involve the desert blooming with kush, and whatever else.

For my part, I am planning to go to a 4/20 gathering this year, both to have a good time, to make anarchists visible in such a space, and maybe to contribute something helpful in the event that the cops act like pricks. Hopefully some friends will come with me, and ideally, we’ll have a zine that we’ll feel good handing out to strangers. Perhaps some people will go off, read some things from the zine, and come back to ask us about it and talk to us. Maybe it’ll do all sorts of things. But first, it needs to exist.

The TL;DR

I want to do a zine about weed and anarchy for general distribution on 4/20.

The Real Plan

If you know of a good text about weed (or something), get in touch.
If you are writing one, or want to write one (or something), get in touch.
If you want to do a comic, a poem, an infographic, or something else instead, get in touch.
If you want to get copies for yourself – and especially if you want to distribute them at your own local 4/20 gathering – get in touch.

Me and my friends can accept submissions in English, French, and Spanish. If we have the time, we might be able to do some translation, but otherwise, we might just create something hectic and multilingual. It’s hard to say.

As an editorial group, me and my friends obviously have our tendency, and that will partially inform what we are going to want to put effort into publishing. That said, we have a pretty pluralistic idea of anarchism, and are definitely open to publishing perspectives that aren’t our own, so long as they’re lucid enough. (And if we don’t want to put it in our zine because we’re snooty bastards, you can always post it yourself to anarchistnews-dot-org.)

Being based in Montréal, in the territory of the Canadian state, we are hoping for stuff relevant to our context – both because we will be to apply it better in our lives, and because we are more likely to understand whether what we’re reading actually makes sense. That said again, we are very interested in stories from further beyond, and our aspirations are such that comrades anywhere in the world would be able to find useful in what we’ve presented. On basically the same note, we aren’t necessarily opposed to a bunch of texts by white European cis dudes with some level of university education, so long as they’re all good, but we suspect this will… just… suck a little or a lot more than the alternative.

Deadline for proposals (not complete pieces) is TWO MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT (23h58, or 11:58pm) on March 20, 2017. Our email address is 420anarchie@riseup.net.

Building common grounds

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Mar 062017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

We’re hoping to engage in a dialogue we have until now chosen to avoid.

The cliques rub shoulders with each other, but struggle sometimes to communicate and often don’t speak the same language, in either words or gestures. The present text is about making clear what we have in common and what separates us. Certain unaddressed tensions have lead to far too much shit-talking, gossip, bad faith remarks, half-reflections, and security breaches. Some people want to see in these sometimes vehement exchanges simply interpersonal conflicts, but this understanding empties all political content of the critiques thus put forward. To avoid that all this be reduced to gossip and late-night debates, we want to identify the lines of tension, to politically name the points of rupture and look for which ways we can collectively grow more powerful. Our intention here isn’t to “denounce” certain practices or to discourage friends from reproducing them, but to avoid the fetishization of smashing windows and to constantly and collectively reflect the benefits and costs of our actions.

We start from the observation that we have a shared visions on the means of action: we have more than often met in the street, our living rooms or at the cafe to conspire. The point of friction isn’t the legitimacy of violence, of direct action, or the importance of public opinion. Illegalism allows to break with the figure of the citizen, with the State and capitalism, to escape their hegemony. We nonetheless think that direct action, destruction, or illegality doesn’t have a revolutionary significance in itself. There isn’t a magical reaction that happens when we break a window, no contagious destruction that goes beyond itself and proliferates without us understanding how. Propaganda by the deed is good, but still, it’s necessary to make sure it works. To have resonance, our actions must be communicable, to make sense for others, they must be intelligible. The mystique of an insurrection that spreads, we must understand it, demystify it, analyze it, and foresee it.

The idea is to identify how the political context and the relations of force shift to wisely guide our choices in our means of action. It means to be in constant search for acuteness. In our view, it’s only thus we can manage to inspire, to aspire to other possibilities. We are not advocating for patience and moderation, waiting for a context that will be more favourable for us. On the contrary, we’ve had enough being on the heels of a context, waiting for a student strike or the construction of a pipeline, enough to struggle to barely keep one’s head above water with each wave of repression and burning ourselves out in actions that don’t resonate outside of our clique of insiders. The context that favours us, the arena where we fight, the territory we inhabit, it’s ours to create. It’s necessary to understand it, to know it like the back of one’s hand, to learn to draw it’s contours, to trace it’s direction. It is necessary to always be one step ahead on the recuperation of our struggles, on repression, to be aware of the sensitive changes in the relations of force that we seek to overturn. It is necessary to predict the consequences of our actions, to learn to recognize what benefits us and what harms us, to play one’s card right no matter the situation – changing the rules to get there. It’s necessary to conspire, to be strategists and not only tacticians. Not strategists at the head of an army, but an army of strategists.

Certain discussions, notably during our gathering last summer, struck us with a disconcerting dogmatism. We don’t believe that there exist pure ‘anarchist practices’ nor anarchist struggles ‘in themselves’: there are anarchist perspectives on struggles. To hold onto the fantastical purity of certain types of action, outside of any relation to a context or a struggle, only elevates them as a dangerous fetish. Quickly, we start to think of action for action’s sake, rather than for the power that we can get from it. An accomplished action calls for the organization of the next, without ever anchoring itself in a more long term perspective. We then enter a spiral, where every question or critique is perceived as a disengagement from the struggle and the affinity group. A balade is organized without really asking ourselves if it’s a good idea to finish it in the middle of a children’s party.

To speak of an act of war while claiming the vandalism of five businesses also pertains to this fetishism of means of action as much as it is a pretentious and dangerous terminology. To content ourselves with this is to accept the staging[1. Transl. Mise en scène – to put on a performance, to stage a play] of our power, it’s to content ourselves with the spectacle of our own radicality. Creating a climate of insecurity in the neighbourhood by maintaining a constant level of vandalism is one thing, claiming actions in grand pomp and making sure it does waves in the public space is another.

What gives us power is not the level of preparation of a clique of experts in destruction. Power is found in the common, in the sharing of our subversive relationship with the world. As long as the anarchist project presents itself as an individual undertaking, even through an affinity group, it remains at most liberalism, no matter how radical. If the insurrection is not a concept, it’s also not the project of individuals in struggle. Power is the feeling to be part of a force that surpasses us, that transcends us, that defines us just as much as we define it. It’s not in social movements that we look for it, but rather in insurrectional moments. It is in these we understand the irremediably common aspect of the struggle, that the will to attack the police and capitalism is shared by all those who take part in it, that we recognize between friends. It is then that is created this shared feeling to take part in the perpetuation of a culture of resistance against capitalism, the relations of domination that result from it and all other systems of oppression. Power and community of struggle identify without residue.

We can’t content ourselves with the feeling of power and the joy that we feel when attacking a business or by lobbing stones at the police. It is mandatory that we give ourselves the means to win. Let us be clear, we demand nothing from the State or capital. It’s not a matter of asking for social housings and then a self-managed neighbourhood and then a life without work. Winning means to increase our collective power. Four years after the strike of 2012, we can affirm that the political friendships that we gathered made it a “victorious” struggle. The months of April and May of that year saw moments that were properly insurrectional, not only in the sense that shit was popping off every night, but also in the sense that our relations were defined in function of, by and for the strike. Certainly, we must not lose ourselves in the reproduction of past struggles, like so many recipes to reproduce, and it’s necessary to cultivate a feeling of rupture with power. But we must take ourselves seriously, to be at the height of our adversaries. This means sometimes attacking where they’re not waiting, to surprise them and fool the anti-insurrectional apparatus that begins to be bloody well functioning. Like it or not, we’ve got to admit to ourselves that if there’s one thing that power knows how to manage, as much in the discourse as in the effective repression, is a crew of friends who isolate themselves in illegalism. We must be talented, intelligent, sometimes inflexible, sometimes indulgent, but always strategists. We must stop planning our actions as if we’re doing them out of spite, by default at best. We must pierce through the spectacle of our power and our actions. It is thus we will make ourselves available to the joy of resisting, that is to say the will to win.

It doesn’t suffice to light matches randomly in the middle of the night, asking ourselves if this time the blaze will take. To start a fire, it takes wood and oxygen. This fire we want to start, it is the only one that can shed light on the fissures that crack capitalism. It’s that of revolution. Not the Revolution of the RCP or a Grand Soir. The revolution is the force that animates us, that gathers us and moves us. It’s that of meetings, of conspiracy, of caucuses, and of planning. It’s that of the putting in common[2.Mise en commun] as much the means of production or theft as the development of a power that is born in the trust that we share. It is not a horizon to reach, but a process in itself, a struggle against power ceaselessly being renewed. It is above all not the cessation of several grouped individualities opposing capitalism. It is the creation of a culture of struggle able to continuously bring wood to the fire, for a fire does well without matches.

The points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behaviour. Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remoulding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.

– Foucault

TD bank redecorated in solidarity with Standing Rock

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Mar 062017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Some swell friends visited the TD Bank on Chabanel during the night of March 3rd.

The TD has funds in the North Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). We found it useful to remind them of their reponsability in the eviction of the Standing Rock camp which happened this week in Sioux’ territory. Banks, through their funding of resource extraction projects, participate in colonialist devastation of lands and violence against Indigenous people.

Solidarity from Tio’tia:ke
No borders!
Their pipelines won’t pass!

Several unclaimed attacks on bougie businesses in Hochelaga

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Mar 042017

Le Lapin blanc

A restaurant on Sainte-Catherine street in Hochelega-Maisonneuve, the Lapin blanc, was the target of vandalism on Thursday night, between 26 and 27 January.

A few minutes after the business closed, a surveillance camera captured a masked individual writing some hardly flattering graffiti.

For the owner, Stéphane Allard, there is no doubt that it was a planned, anti-gentrification action.

“You see four individuals pass by with a backpack. Then you see a masked person write hateful graffiti”, explains Mr. Allard, who estimates he lost an entire day of work.

– Radio-Canada

Anticafé

Another business was targeted by vandals in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve who smashed the window of a café during the night of Saturday to Sunday, between 11 and 12 February.

In a video published on the Facebook page of the Anticafé Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, people from the café explain that the damage was discovered around 6 o’clock in the morning.

“These events are hard to control. We don’t really understand why. I don’t think the Anticafé is a business that can be described as gentrifying”, they say.

“We don’t know if these events are tied to a kind of anarchist action or if it’s simply an accident. Regardless, it costs the businesspeople money”, they add in the video.

At least 25 businesses were vandalized in nine months last year in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve by people aiming to denounce the gentrification of the neighborhood.

–TVA Nouvelles

Mon Gym Privé

The owner of a Hochelaga gym refuses to be intimidated after 4 acts of vandalism targeting him in only 5 months.

“They could very well break my window eight times, I won’t leave here”, says Michaël Couture, owner of the business Mon Gym Privé. “I’ll put up a wall of bricks if I need to in place of the window, but I won’t leave. It’s the neighborhood I chose, I’m staying.”

Thursday night, February 23rd around midnight, the police received a call about a broken window, at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Cuvillier streets. Arriving on site, Mr. Couture realized without much surprise that it was the window of his business. The reality repeats itself for this entrepreneur operating in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve since the summer and who has already experienced 4 acts of vandalism since the fall.

In October, a poster for the “Assembly of struggle against the gentrification of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve” was even glued to his brick wall, beside a tagged window.

– Journal de Montreal

On the night of Thursday to Friday (23 February), three businesses were vandalized. The next day, around thirty snow structures at the Winter Carnival were destroyed. By Monday morning, at least four more businesses on Sainte-Catherine Est had been tagged.

A few steps from Elektrik Kids, targeted last week, one could read “Asshole” on Showroom Montréal, “Death to cows” [anti-police slogan] on the front door of the MyRoom Gestion real estate agency, and a symbol of anarchism on the storefront of LavoieLuminaires.

– Journal de Montreal

How To: Wheatpaste

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Feb 162017

Wheatpasting is a simple, dirt-cheap way of spreading ideas, news, analyses, and creative expression outside of (and against) the pacified modes made available by the institutions that control and mangle our lives. Let’s reclaim, together, the means of expression from the media, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, and everything else that reduces us to mere observers of life. Poetry is in the streets!

WHAT YOU NEED
•1 cup of flour
•2 cups of water
•Stove or hotplate
•A pot or pan
•A large paintbrush
•A bucket or container
•Flyers that you want to put up
•Latex gloves (if you don’t wanna walk around with drippy hands)

(OR, you can use a gallon of pre-made “wallpaper paste,” which can be bought cheaply at hardware stores. If you do this, you can skip these first three directions.)

DIRECTIONS
•Mix the 1 cup of flour with 2 cups of water together in a pan and stir until there are no lumps.
•Heat the mixture by boiling it until it thickens.
•Cook for about half an hour, and then let it cool.
•Put the wheatpaste solution into a container, grab a paintbrush, some flyers, and head out into the night. Keep in mind that wheatpasting is not “legal” and therefore, it is best to go late at night and avoid being seen by cops.
•When you locate a visible, non-porous surface like metal or glass, use the paintbrush to apply the wheatpaste to either the back of the flyer or the surface itself and smooth the flyer down so there are little or no air bubbles. Put some more wheatpaste on the front of the flyer (especially the edges) to secure it to the surface.

Print PDF here, for making two-sided posters that have this short instructional guide on the back.

Source: Plain Words

Still Cameras, Still Targets

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Feb 142017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Anarchists hate cameras. We love games. That’s why some friends in the Sud-West took up the call to play CAMOVER. Masked up in black (obvi), we bagged a bunch of nosey CCTVs and painted over many others. No Face No Case! Shouts out to hommies in Hochelaga throwing down. Keep the good work up and the snitch cameras down.

From one participant:

CamOVER!? No Question. We hit the street four deep, two on the lookout, real casual, walkies and cigarettes, and got to bagging. Rope lines snaking through the air, cracks off streetlights as cams tumble down, we caught a side-eye from a citizen passerby and got back at it, like, FUCK YOU&YOUR CAMERAS. We dipped when the cops rolled up, stashed the cams alley-side, and swooped em up the next day.”

Montreal Banner Drop Opposes Trudeau Visit to Washington

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Feb 132017

From Resist Trump Montreal

On Monday, February 13th, activists calling for open borders dropped a banner over a busy Montreal highway reading “Trump fasciste, Trudeau complice” (Trump is fascist, Trudeau is complicit). The action, across from Justin Trudeau’s constituency office, comes as Trudeau visits Trump in Washington, D.C.

Read the full press release here, or see more photos and statements from the Open Borders Collective on facebook.

A grassroots movement that combines anti-colonial, anti-capitalist opposition to neoliberalism, while also supporting Indigenous sovereignty and migrant justice, is necessary to defeat Trump and the Far-Right, and the people who normalize him,” stated Grewal.

Both Arseneault and Grewal add together: “Today we drop a banner off a highway, a symbolic gesture of disobedience; but in the coming weeks and months, we need to engage in protracted civil disobedience and direct action to open the borders and ultimately defeat the rise of the far-right.”

Sabotage in Lanaudière

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Feb 102017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Rumors are circulating in the region of Lanaudière that a hydraulic excavator and a tractor were heavily sabotaged on the construction site of the new high-tension line at Ste-Émelie-de-l’Énergie. It seems that the sub-contractor of Hydro-Quebec will not be able to take his retirement as expected this year due to the costly damages to his machines. The site in this area is at the stage of preparing for the imminent deforestation of the corridor.

Also, at the beginning of the winter, a snow cannon at the ski resort Val Val St-Côme was sabotaged. It was cut into pieces and made useless.

It seems that the destroyers of the environment have no respite.

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