Comments Off on A Response to the Commentary on “When There Are Many of Us, We Do What We Want”
Apr252025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Following the repeated failures of so-called “combative” demonstrations in Montreal between 2023 and 2025, two militant texts sought to offer, on the one hand, a strategic analysis focused on massification through autonomous structures, and on the other, a skeptical critique of that orientation, denouncing the fetishization of demonstrations and militant voluntarism. Both texts share a common diagnosis: our collective weakness in the face of the state, our isolation, and the routinization of our mobilizations. The present text is a critique of the second piece, written by N.
The Fetishization of Spontaneity: A Critique of Anti-Strategy
The core disagreement between the two texts seems to me to hinge on a central strategic question: how can we explain the fact that the majority of the working class—including its most exploited segments—does not spontaneously respond to calls for radical mobilization, and instead, in advanced capitalist countries, remains largely passive or aligned with various forms of reformism?
N. rightly points out the routinized and sometimes performative nature of certain activist practices. However, in attempting to explain this passivity, his response leans into a kind of mechanical determinism that legitimizes a cynical skepticism—one that dismisses any form of political mediation as a futile avant-garde project: “It is the social contradictions themselves that produce struggles, not a group of revolutionary evangelists trying to convince proletarians dulled by capitalism one by one.”
If it is necessary to break with the “fetishization of the demonstration”—the idea that it constitutes the core of our political practice—it is equally important to be wary of the fetishization of spontaneity, which consists in rejecting the necessity of organization in favour of a passive expectation, based on the illusion that the contradictions of capitalism will mechanically trigger a mass uprising. This posture amounts to a strategic retreat that cloaks political powerlessness in the mystique of spontaneity.
The Passivity of the Exploited Classes
The passivity or reformist orientation of the working class is largely explained by the fundamentally episodic nature of the class struggle. The contradictions of capitalism are not, in themselves, sufficient to make workers revolutionary. As Charles Post argues, class consciousness does not arise mechanically from exploitation, but rather emerges primarily through the lived experience of self-organization and collective struggle—experiences that open space for receptivity to radical ideas.
However, this foundational condition for the development of class consciousness—active participation in mass struggles—can only ever be partial, rare, and temporary. Structurally, the vast majority of workers cannot sustain long-term engagement in the struggle, since their position within capitalist social relations requires them to sell their labour power in order to ensure their own material reproduction. The imperative of individual survival therefore limits, under normal conditions, the possibility of sustained collective engagement.
In the absence of collective struggles, capitalist logics, reformism, and the institutional forms of liberal politics tend to regain hegemonic status. Workers are then less inclined to seek a transformation of the system and instead aim to secure what they perceive as a fair share of it—without challenging its underlying structures of power. Worse still, when reformism fails and no credible radical alternative is available, capitalism is able to produce the very material conditions for its own ideological reinforcement: individualization, social fragmentation, and competition among the exploited. In this vacuum, reactionary, racist, and patriarchal movements flourish—even within segments of the working class itself.
It is therefore deeply irresponsible to abandon the self-organization of direct action and the construction of alternatives—whether in the name of reformism or out of a fetishization of spontaneity. The contradictions of capitalism, on their own, do not generate class consciousness, nor do they lead to human emancipation.
The Avant-Garde
The inherently episodic nature of class struggle means that only a small minority of the working class remains durably engaged in militant activity. What we might call an “avant-garde”—without any dogmatic overtones—refers here to those who, in the lulls between waves of struggle, strive to keep alive practices of solidarity and confrontation, whether in the workplace or within communities.
To avoid any misunderstanding, this is not a classical “Leninist” or “Trotskyist” notion of the avant-garde as an enlightened minority bearing a political truth to impose upon the masses. Rather, it is a way to designate a concrete role: that of individuals who, despite isolation, exhaustion, and defeat, persist in sustaining institutions, practices, and imaginaries of struggle—often invisible, yet essential to the reproduction of a militant collective memory. This role can—and should—be debated, renamed, and critiqued. But to abandon it altogether would be to surrender to strategic disarmament.
It is true that some militant figures, in certain contexts, become the social base of a working-class bureaucracy, detached from the concrete realities of waged labour and prone to the logic of reformism: distance from sites of production, freedom from the constraints of wage labour, and the adoption of organizational jargon and apparatus-driven practices.
But there are many others who continue to organize while living the contradictions of capitalist work: precarity, alienation, subordination. These are militants embedded in the everyday life of the class, patiently organizing their co-workers, neighbours, and communities.
Any organization, no matter how well intentioned, can generate its own inertia, rigidity, and hierarchical tendencies. But this should not serve as a justification for rejecting political mediation altogether. The fetishization of spontaneity, which draws a strict line between conscious militancy and popular authenticity, runs the risk of discrediting organic militant activity—that is, the kind of organizing that emerges from the lived experience of the oppressed—by reducing it to a suspicious form of avant-gardism, or even to a so-called “revolutionary racket.”
N.’s article illustrates this tendency when it cites contemporary movements perceived as spontaneous—such as the BLM/George Floyd uprisings, the Yellow vests movement, or the social revolts in Chile—highlighting the absence of mass organizations guiding them from the outset. However, it is highly unlikely that these movements emerged without the active involvement of a core group of experienced individuals, shaped by various militant traditions, whether or not they explicitly identified with a revolutionary consciousness.
Moreover, despite their strength, these movements did not articulate a clear revolutionary project—which might in fact serve as an argument in favour of the initial text. In the absence of autonomous mass structures grounded in explicitly anti-capitalist practises and discourse, social conflict tends to express itself in reformist, incoherent, or contradictory ways. Had a structured revolutionary counter-power existed over the past two decades—one rooted in collective memory, political culture, and autonomous forms of organization—it is likely that the political consciousness emerging from these popular movements would have been more clearly oriented toward systemic rupture.
Post-Industrial Society and Class Consciousness
Social classes are historically dynamic relations, and their political expression requires both a shared experience of exploitation and an organizational effort to build a collective force conscious of its own interests.
Yet many activists today resist the project of constructing class consciousness, often drawing on assumptions rooted in post-industrial society theories. According to these perspectives, the expansion of the service sector, the growing complexity of professional structures, the rise of theoretical knowledge, increased living standards, and the emergence of state regulation have reshaped social conflict around the control of information. This, in turn, is said to have enabled the emergence of a new middle class composed of managers and skilled employees. For these approaches, contemporary society is no longer structured primarily by class conflict, but rather by identities and discourses capable of defining themselves. As such, our societies are seen as less constrained by socioeconomic factors like class, and as offering greater room for individual agency—unlike the more rigid industrial societies of the past.
Nevertheless, these analyses tend to overestimate the impact of changes in the division of labour on relations of exploitation. As Peter Meiksins aptly puts it, “capitalism has never, not in the past, and not now, generated a homogeneous working class. On the contrary, it has consistently created a varied, highly stratified working class, and capitalists have had an inherent interest in making sure that it is as divided as it possibly can be.” Likewise, the increasing complexity of the contemporary division of labour does not eliminate the structural conditions of reproduction for the working class—namely, the obligation to perform surplus labour by selling one’s labour power on the market.
Although specific relations of exploitation characterize particular sociohistorical conditions and shape class formation, class consciousness has always been a contingent, relational, and collective process—constantly in flux between formation and disintegration. In this sense, class consciousness is not a mechanical product of socioeconomic factors, but the outcome of conscious agents acting within given social, political, and economic conditions. In the past as today, the development of a collective class consciousness has been a difficult and demanding process, forged through sustained and deliberate efforts of militant organization.
In short, capitalism still generates “fields of attraction” that polarize society into lived class positions. Sociohistorical processes can—and have—led to the emergence of groups becoming conscious of themselves as a class opposed to another. The challenge today is to bring about such a process through sustained organizational efforts, as was achieved in previous periods.
Self-Organization as a Conclusion
The lack of people in our demonstrations is a symptom of the current passivity of the working classes, in the sense that the street is an extension, not the centre, of social conflict. This passivity is rooted in the absence of collective struggles that provide an alternative to individualized or reactionary responses.
To claim that we should avoid organizational efforts for fear of becoming “revolutionary evangelists” is irresponsible. It condemns us to remain what we have been for the past three decades in Quebec: a radical fringe within reformist social movements; a weak political mediation with no real capacity to constitute a social force capable of threatening the existing order.
What is needed is not a dogmatic return to a rigid form of organization, nor a moralistic conception of militancy, but a materialist strategy for rebuilding the autonomous social power of the working class. This is not about imposing a universal model, but about affirming that without durable forms of mediation between experiences of exploitation and a political horizon, no counter-power can take shape.
A coherent revolutionary politics today should:
Identify the sites where exploitation is most intense, visible, and collectively experienced;
Build struggles that aim to democratize and repoliticize production and social reproduction;
Make the street an extension, not the centre, of social conflict;
Focus on the patient construction of class consciousness as a historical process;
Build popular organizations capable of demanding democratic control over economic spheres, through the unification, not the mere juxtaposition, of struggles.
Comments Off on Among the Fragments – A Response to Inaction
Apr252025
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.
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.
Well, this is quite the dishonest and self-serving post. I’m pretty surprised and disappointed, and there’s a lot that deserves a response, but I’m just going to focus on a few things.
1) You use incredibly vague and yet loaded language to talk about the conflict in the bookfair collective, and this is deliberately deceptive. You want to have us believe that some serious harm occurred, and not something that makes you look silly, like, for instance, members of your collective being unable to handle disagreement about your decision to ban tarot cards at the 2023 bookfair.
To hide this basic fact – that some people melted down when others didn’t simply accept their assertion that tarot is cultural appropriation – you are talking about “behaviours rooted in the logic of white supremacy.” Yes, issues of identity can be hard and disagreement around ideas can be stressful, but dressing up your attempts at shutting down criticism as anti-racism is truly a depressing comment on the anarchist space.
2) You don’t own the bookfair. It has been organized by lots of different people over time and takes tons of different kinds of contributions to thrive. You decided to use the money needed for the bookfair on mediation to seek “accountability” for people disagreeing with you about tarot cards rather than organize a bookfair, and other people stepped up and made it happen. And they did a great job. That they planned to do Constellation again is only natural, especially considering it took you 18 months to be honest about why you actually tried to cancel the bookfair in 2024. And what do you do? Do you support their initiative? Do you see that your collective is not needed right now and focus on other things? No – you decide to hold your own event and announce that you will be competing with Constellation for their time slot next year. Fucking bizarre.
3) All your discourse about community and care rings pretty hollow in a post that is basically just an attempt at settling scores – and these words are hopelessly vague at the best of times. You offer nothing on the level of ideas about how an event organized by your collective would be distinct and instead just list the race, religion, or ethnicity of the members of your collective. This is the worst form of identity politics, where identity has completely replaced politics. If vague platitudes and weak identity politics are what your collective stands for – after a year and a half to decide what makes you distinct – then it is hard to see the value in the event you’re proposing. This is doubly true when you are basically saying you are going to fight another collective for their project. It is hard to see your attempts at taking over the bookfair again as anything but ego.
You should delete your post and then do some thinking about how you got to the point of publishing something like this.
Donald Trump is not only completely unhinged, he is completely obsessed with Canada. It will be remembered that throughout the last election campaign, he talked about tariffs but said nothing about the US absorbing Canada. Only after becoming president did Donald don his imperialist hat, threatening Greenland. Panama, Gaza and Canada.
Trudeau, Carney and the Liberals meanwhile have abandoned postnationalism to become flag waving nationalists. Pierre Poilievre of the Conservatives has adopted the slogan Canada First, having abandoned Canada is Broken, which now echoes Trump’s claim that Canada is not viable if it is not part of the States.
Trump has adopted a spheres of influence approach in which North America is destined to be dominated by the US, and Canada and Greenland are to be annexed to access their natural resources. His approach to Mexico is different. Trump does not want more Latinos, he wants fewer Latinos, so annexing Mexico is out of the question. However, he is putting pressure on Mexico in various ways, including attacking Mexico’s sovereignty by threatening military action against the cartels, a move rejected by Mexico’s new president.
Canadians have reacted to the trumpian assault with shock, fear, anger and a sense of betrayal, An upsurge in Canadian nationalism has taken place as well as a questioning of Canadian identity.
On the issue of identity of interest are statements by Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, an Irish-Canadian Catholic. After attending the Saint Patrick’s parade in Montreal, Carney flew to Europe, where he visited Notre Dame Cathedral and met Emmanuel Macron. He then met King Charles and the British prime minister. On the trip Carney emphasized Canada’s European roots and described Canada as being founded by three groups, the British, the French and indigenous peoples, giving the impression of an equality of influence. In reality, the British and French, along with the Spanish and Portuguese, arrived in the Americas as conquerors, subjugating indigenous peoples and warring against each other here in the Americas as they had in Europe. The founding of Canada signified a continuation of an assimilationist approach towards indigenous peoples embodied in the residential school system, designed specifically to
eradicate native cultures. This sad legacy weighs heavily when it is a question of Canadian identity.
Today’s Canadian cities are multicultural and complex. How Canadian identity fits in with other cultural and identity aspects is complicated, but a reaction to Trump is evident in cancelled trips to the States and boycotts of American products. However, information is largely anecdotal, making it difficult to know what is happening. There are still lots of New York Yankees baseball caps, I’ve noticed, although I have never been able to figure out what they are supposed to mean.
I personally have not experienced an upsurge in Canadian nationalism. I am not Canadian or Québécois or part of any state. But like most Canadians I detest Trump, a dangerous predator and would-be dictator. The U.S. is presently in turmoil as Trump attempts to radically reshape the country.
Carney, Ford, Smith
As I write a Canadian election has just begun and as one would expect, the Trump factor is playing a big role. The Liberal Party has seen a remarkable rebound, going from more than twenty points behind to even with or leading the Conservatives. Support for Quebec sovereignty has fallen from 35% to 29%.
Trump presents himself as a strongman, although it seems he never stops whining. Unfortunately but understandably, the tendency is to search for a counter-strongman. a savior.
Trump is not the only strongman model out there. Carney represents another model, a financial strongman as it were. It is claimed that he has the chops to go mano a mano with Trump. Brain versus brawn.
All this is a reminder of the centralization of power inherent in electoralism. Trump cranks out dozens of executive orders and fancies himself a king. As prime minister, Carney formally incarnates the nation.
Premier Doug Ford of Ontario represents a strongman model closer to Trump. In effect Ford was a Trump supporter until the tariff threat intervened, which Ford has characterized as “like a family member stabbing you in the heart.” He apparently doesn’t get that America First means America First. Ford subsequently became Captain Canada, appearing on American cable news networks, and calling a snap election to take advantage of the situation. He attempted to impose a 25% surcharge on electricity Ontario exports to several American states, but quickly backed down when Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Canada from 25 to 50 percent. Trump “needed to break some guy in Ontario“ was how American commerce secretary Howard Lutnick disparagingly and crudely put it.
Danielle Smith of Alberta, clearly the Canadian premier ideologically closest to trumpism, has travelled to Mar-a-Lago to cozy up to Trump and has appeared on far right American podcasts. She has ruled out curtailing oil shipments to the U.S., the potential trade war weapon that would have the most damaging effect. She has argued on a far right American podcast that Trump should put off his tariffs until after the elections in order to assist Poilievre’s electoral chances.
Techno-industrial Nightmare
“Drill, baby, drill,” his mantra on the campaign trail, sums up trumpism: oil barons and billionaires. Claiming that climate change is a “hoax,” Trump has declared a no holds barred war on the environment. Located next to the U.S., Canada will be severely affected.
Trump says Canada has nothing the U.S. needs and at the same time that Canada must become a “cherished” U.S. state. He may not need Canada but it seems there are lots of things he wants. His goal is to destroy Canadian manufacturing in order to to bolster American manufacturing, making Canada purely a provider of natural resources.
But wherever it is produced, a car remains an earth destroying monster. We are already too industrialized and digitalized.
Canada is lakes and rivers and forests and mountains. Natural resources are better off left in the ground.
For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.
\\\\\\\\\\\\ FRONT & BACK TEXT BELOW \\\\\\\\\\\\
REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN
Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.
Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.
2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.
1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.
Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.
« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres. In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder. Peace By Piece (A) »
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! ¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!
Comments Off on What’s Happening in Turkey — From an anti-Authoritarian Perspective
Mar312025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Why the current uprising in Turkey deserves our support.
Background
The Republic of Turkey, which was founded on the genocide of the Armenians in the region with a nationalist and murderous leaven, has not changed much in the past century. For non-Muslims, Kurds, Alevis and women who did not hold the majority and power in their hands, the state and its successfully constructed society were always a source of oppression. But starting in 2002, as a consequence of Erdoğan’s dictatorship, oppression, poverty, violence and exploitation started to be felt also by the majority of the society. In 2013, after increasing bans and oppressions, millions of people stood up for their freedoms in the Gezi Park riot that took place in cities all over the country. The months-long resistance ended with unprecedented national-scale police attacks in which eight young people aged 15-22 were killed and thousands detained. Since 2014, the Turkish state has become a police state, and after the 2016 fictitious coup attempt, it has been ruled with absolute authoritarianism under the state of emergency. Since 2021, as a result of the economic crisis that has escalated with great momentum, 60% of the population now lives below the hunger line.
Millions of people, forced into more misery every year, believed that the government and this situation would change in every election, but Erdoğan, who controls the media and the justice system, has never allowed this to happen through fear and manipulation. In the meantime, in order to prevent oppressed groups from coming together, he created a deep hatred within society, labeling each day a new community as terrorist-enemy-foreign agent: Kurds, Alevis, university students, syndicators, lawyers, journalists, academics. While these people were imprisoned on terrorism charges through state courts, those who were still out of prison were fooled by the propaganda that those imprisoned were terrorists. ‘Terror’ became a magic word for Erdoğan to maintain his power, while people who challenged authority ended up in prison, exile or death. In this way, he created zombified individuals and society that is losing its power day by day and collapsing politically, economically and morally. It is exactly in this context that the current uprising is being driven by the youth, who have never seen a mass uprising in their lives, but who have taken to the streets saying ‘nothing can be worse than living this way’. Millions of young people who have been brought up with the teaching that the previous rebels were terrorists and that the state and the police were friends, at least in theoretical terms, are now facing a different reality. Let us take a closer look at these protests.
Towards the 19 March ‘coup’
On the morning of 19 March 2025, hundreds of police arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu from his home – the mayor of Istanbul, who is believed to be a presidential candidate in the next election and to defeat Erdoğan- on terrorism and corruption charges. While the incident sparked widespread outrage in Turkey and around the world, Imamoğlu was not the first metropolitan mayor in Turkey to be dismissed and detained by the Turkish courts. Since 2016, many elected mayors from Kurdish cities have been dismissed, arrested and replaced by a government official in similar operations. The fact that these Kurdish mayors have been accused of these magical terrorism offenses has convinced the majority of Turkish public to legitimize this and not to oppose it. The silence against this injustice in Kurdish cities empowered Erdoğan to do the same to other mayors run by the CHP (second largest political party, turkish-nationalist centre-left) and prepared the ground for this ‘coup’ on 19 March. The detention of even this highly popular, politically powerful, rich, Turkish, Sunni, privileged man on magical terrorism charges for opposing Erdogan has caused great shock and outrage. Now the honour of being a terrorist could be awarded not only to marginalised people, but to anyone who did not take Erdoğan’s side.
While the public dissent was being destroyed a little more every year, the people who had kept silent in deference to the state, the media and the courts had now found themselves in the target list. Thus, thousands of young people who had even forgotten how to dream under poverty, restrictions and oppression, and who had not yet been labeled as terrorists, suddenly woke up from their sleep or finally exploded in anger and took to the streets in many cities across Turkey on 19 March to start protests. Although it is difficult to say that the protesters are homogeneous, it is possible to say that the majority of them are gen-z who have no previous protest experience for the reasons described above, who have not been able to get out of the fear bubble created by the government, who have been exposed to the very intense social engineering of the Turkish state through institutions such as school, media, family, etc., but who are now unable to breathe out of despair and want change. Although the detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu was a spark for these young people to take to the streets, they started to express their anger and demands on many issues by saying ‘the issue is not only about imamoğlu, have you not understood yet?’.
Encountering the state and overcoming the fear wall
Like almost every other gathering in Turkey, these protests were responded with massive violence by the police. For the first time, the protesters encountered the police, who not only wanted to disperse the crowd, but also to make everyone there pay a price for being there; who saw themselves as having the authority to punish people without the need for judgment, who were arrogant, bully, brutal, who had a personal hatred for the protesters and personal pleasure in torturing them, who were sure that they would not be held accountable for any of their violence. The protesters, who until then had regarded the police as a regular job like teaching, nursing or engineering, were unaware of how the police had become more mafia-like and monster-like every year, by hunting down ‘yesterday’s terrorists’. Thousands of youth seeing enemy law being applied to them too were brutally attacked by the police using an unbelievable amount of tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons in one night. Faced with a massive attack, the majority of these young people did not know how to protect themselves in such an attack, how to care for each other, how to organise themselves. For some of them, responding to the police would mean being a ‘traitor’ or a ‘terrorist’, so they just froze, while a larger number, thinking that they had nothing to lose, broke the legitimacy of the police and responded to police violence with resistance. Having had the opportunity to express their anger for the first time, they covered their faces and threw everything they could at the police, danced in front of the water cannons instead of running away from them, and discovered that the power and legitimacy of the police was something that could be overcome. They did not seem to have a strategic plan for where this protest was going, nor did they seem to have a well-thought-out political consciousness. But the night was dominated by anger and a sense of having been heard for once, and this in itself was highly political, and the night ended with many injuries and arrests.
It was the first time since 2013 that there was such a massive protest with hours of resistance against the police. Although the protests were not shown on any TV channel, they were followed by many people through social media. The wall of fear was crossed for many people who realised that it was possible to oppose, to challenge the state, to rebel. The next day, more and more people took to the streets in more cities in Turkey to protest. At the same time, the Turkish state nationwide restricted the internet bands, taking minutes to upload even a ten-second video to the internet. Experienced protesters who supported the protests both at the streets and online informed people that this problem could be overcome with a VPN. And this time, the Turkish state blocked access to about 200 X accounts of journalists, legal associations, media collectives and political parties through Elon Musk. On the same day, the High Council of Radio and Television (RTÜK) prohibited any live broadcasts on TV channels. Again on the same day, although not directly related to the protests, the Board of Directors of the Istanbul Bar Association, known to oppose Erdoğan, was dismissed by a court decision.
At the same time, many lawyers from different cities who wanted to defend the detained protesters were also detained in police stations and courthouses. The number of detainees was increasing all the time, and some were ordered to be imprisoned or house arrest. The mayor, Ekrem Imamoğlu and around a hundred politicians, who had been detained the previous day, were still being questioned at the police station. All this oppression and fear did not discourage people from protesting in the streets, but only fueled it. During the protests, MPs who took the microphone and gave speeches hoping for help from the election and the law were booed. The youth were pressuring the MPs to make a call to the streets, not to the ballot box, and this was accepted. This moment itself was another threshold point because ‘calling for the streets’ had been recognised as illegitimate in the law and society fabricated by Erdoğan for years. The fact that MPs who were engaged in ‘legal’ politics dared to do so was itself quite surprising for everyone. It was as if thousands of people, one by one, were crossing the invisible wall that the whole society did not know whether it really existed or not, but no one dared to go beyond it, and they were looking around in bewilderment in this land they had never set foot in, wondering what would happen to them.
Nothing is more horrible than living this way.
Strategy of the Turkish State
Many long-established social opposition actors in Turkey made widespread calls for these protests, condemned the arrest of imamoğlu, supported the youth’s legitimate demands for justice, democracy and freedom, and stood up against police violence and bans. On the other hand, the Kurdish political movement (DEM Party), one of the strongest established actors of street protest, chose to limit its support to its high-level party leaders. Only party representatives made a symbolic visit to the centre of the protest, and released a statement declaring Imamoğlu’s detention as a coup d’état. The DEM Party’s support for such a large and widespread uprising, where ‘ordinary citizens’ were able to protest for the first time in years, could have been a game changer for the fate of the country and could have put Erdoğan in a harder position than ever before. From today’s perspective, it is not difficult to guess what was behind Erdoğan’s intention to start a peace process with the PKK in the past few weeks. However, why the DEM Party took such a stance remains a more complex question, the answer to which is left to be answered by history. Nevertheless, at this stage I think it is more important to talk about the results rather than the reasons, because the DEM Party’s distance has had two important consequences. The police on the street as well as Erdoğan in the political Arena, managed to escape from a very important threat. The participation of the DEM party and the Kurdish youth in the protest could have make Erdoğan’s job very more difficult. Compared to the Gezi Park riots, the lack of experience, resilience, organizational skills and determination that the DEM Party and Kurdish youth could have brought in the protest was clearly noticeable.
I think that if Erdoğan and his police had one single wish for this time, they would use it to keep the Kurds away from these protests. The second of the results explains this better: The absence of the Kurds as a collective in this field gave more space to the nationalist and statist tendency, which was already quite strong among the protesters. Leaving aside the argument that this is both a cause and a consequence of the absence of the DEM Party, it should be noted that this crowd, which was uniformised in terms of ethnic identity, tended to be uniformised in other issues as well, with the result that those among the protesters who struggle with an intersectional approach, such as Kurds, feminists, LGBTI+s, socialists, anarchists, animal rights defenders, etc., became even more ‘marginalised’ in the protests and were understandably hesitant to be visible with these identities, for example, to hold up a rainbow flag, for their own safety. In most cities, LGBTI+ people did not feel safe to come to the protests collectively, nor an individual queer could figure out with whom they would feel safe at the protests. If Erdoğan and his police could make a second wish, they would definitely choose to wish that an intersectional struggle would not emerge from these protests. Because intersectionality, both in terms of the number and the quality it would bring, was Erdoğan’s worst nightmare. Because the future, the sustainability and the direction of this legitimate anger that emerged in the protests and whether it would ever threaten the state or not depended on its intersectional character. As explained at length above, Erdoğan had manage to achieve his current absolute authority through his precise policy of destroying the grounds of intersectionality. There was no doubt that the joining forces of all the oppressed in these protests would benefit all the oppressed and disadvantage their common enemy. However, I regret to say that Erdoğan and his police seem to be having good luck and their two most desirable wishes are being realised in the uprising that has been taking place since 19 March.
Happening now: widespread resistance against a very violent repression
As of today, 27 March, the protests still continue with the character I mentioned above. In the past week, queers, feminists, anarchists, socialists… have made significant progress in becoming more visible and giving the protests a revolutionary character. Simultaneously, the launching of a massive boycott campaign against many government related companies caused a great panic. On the same day, seeing high-ranking government officials giving pose in boycotted companies and advertising their products in support of these companies proved once again that we were officially at war: The Turkish state criminal organisation and its capital had declared a war against everyone they perceived as a threat to their interests. Apparently, their priority was not even to arrest people in this war, but to collect data on who was on the opposing front. It was not for nothing that the police, who surrounded the demonstration at the universities yesterday, said that they would release the protesters in exchange for removing their masks. Meanwhile, several guides on personal data security posted on social media by those who have been on the streets for years have been life-saving. While Erdoğan’s professors at some universities have been sharing attendance sheets with the police to mark students who are not attending classes these days, many professors who supported the call for an academic boycott have already been dismissed from their posts. Although I have said that arrests are not the first priority, the prisons around Istanbul have reached their capacity and new detainees are expected to be sent to prisons in nearby cities. It is surprising only for those who do not know the real function of the law that dozens of people have now been arrested for the minor offense of ‘violation of the law on meetings and demonstrations’, which was not taken seriously in previous years because most of the time people did not even receive a fine as a result of the trial.
Resist queer!
The necessity to take the side of the stone thrown at the police, not the person who throws it
We are at a point where it is once again clear that the approach taught to us by classical justice system and politicians, that we should unconditionally take the side of one of those in conflict, or that the status of victim and perpetrator should be two different people/identities that are strictly separated from each other, is leading us into a trap. It is so striking to watch how so many of 16-24 year old protesters, who are ready to threaten and expel Kurds or LGBTI+s who would come to the protests with their open identities and visibility, based on the mandatory education they have received from Erdoğan’s school, media and family, become perpetrators and victims at the same time. Since 19 March, as victims of the state in this uprising, if more than 2000 people have been detained, thousands of people have been injured – some of them fatally -, dozens of people have already been put in prison, unknown numbers of people have been kicked out of their families’ homes, universities, jobs, and have been labeled as terrorists by the intelligence services, this is partly because of the power they have lost as a result of their role as perpetrators. I see that this trap has caught on among some ‘yesterday’s terrorists’ and that a significant part of them, in particular in the Kurdish political party, which have spent their lives fighting against the state are at best indifferent to the violence of the state and the justified demands of the protesters. I also interpret the lack of knowledge and the silence of the antifascist movement in Switzerland and Europe in this light. Therefore, I feel a responsibility to explain what is happening in this uprising to other rebels around the world, because explaining that the current uprising, despite its complexity, deserves international support and solidarity can only be possible with an anti-authoritarian perspective that does not fall into the trap of taking sides, which is about to disappear in Turkey. It is possible to support this uprising without victim blaming of someone for being tortured by the police and without excusing the same person as a perpetrator for attempting to suppress the Kurdish banner.
Where to place such a controversial uprising?
This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported, because the protesters are not only nationalist/apolitical generation z. Many queer, Kurdish, anarchist, socialist, anti-speciesist, feminist, people who believe in intersectional struggle… are raising their voices against injustice and resisting the Turkish state in the streets today as they have been doing for years. Despite their fear of the majority of protesters, they prefer to be on the streets and they are bearing a heavier share from state violence. The complexity of this uprising means that they need support more than ever. Backing this uprising is essential for them to come out of it with some regained ground or at least without being further pushed back. This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported because, one by one, the protesters, even if they harbour counter-revolutionary ideas, are legitimate in what they are revolting against, and this is what determines the legitimacy of an uprising: The organs and policies of the Turkish state, symbolised by Erdoğan. It does not matter that the majority of protesters want the dictator Erdoğan to fall and be replaced by the nationalist Imamoğlu. Today, we can stand shoulder to shoulder in the fight to bring down Erdoğan and tomorrow, we can part ways when the demand is to replace him with İmamoğlu. Once we have destroyed the biggest existing power, then we will fight to destroy the second biggest power, and then the third, until there is no power above us. This anarchist point of view calls for the support of any threat to Erdoğan, his state, his police, his judiciary. Criticism of these protests shouldn’t serve to isolate the uprising, but rather to inform the debates that will follow if it succeeds.
This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported because a dictator is using all the power and resources of the Turkish state, which has become a ‘criminal organisation’, to massacre people who do not have these power and resources, regardless of who they are. Not only protesters, but also their lawyers, journalists documenting torture, doctors treating the wounded at the protests, those who speak out about it, those who open their doors to people affected by the tear gas, anyone who is not in absolute obedience is now being punished. In the Turkey of 2025, where the state controls all private and public aspects of life and all our potential support is dismantled, Erdoğan surviving this uprising would mean leaving everyone who has ever questioned his authority locked in a burning building. This might be the first, only, and last chance we’ve had in years to act against Erdoğan’s power. That’s why any support for this uprising or any blow struck against its target, the Turkish state carries vital significance. This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported because for those who do not hold power and the majority, women, Kurds, Alevis, queers, the poor, youth, immigrants, ‘yesterday’s terrorists’, the first step toward breathing, being heard, and gaining freedom is the collapse of the current order. This uprising in Turkey still deserves to be supported, because this may be the last chance for us ‘yesterday’s terrorists’, who have already been imprisoned and forced into exile for rebelling for years, to see the daylight again in the country we were born.
Comments Off on Statement On Arrest, Police Raid and Dropped Charges
Mar112025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On October 23rd, 2024, at 6:50 AM, I was arrested by the SPVM (Service de police de la Ville de Montréal) for allegedly “uttering threats to burn or damage property”. They forced their way into my apartment, and several pieces of my technology were seized. I was interrogated for hours, pushed to the edge, but despite the state’s efforts, the Crown Prosecutor ultimately failed to gather enough evidence to move forward with any charges, even before a pre-trial was conducted. This is a victory, not just for me, but for all those fighting within the movement, and the broader militant community. The sudden dropping of charges is a clear reflection of the over-policing, over-surveillance, that militants within our movement have been experiencing since the huge surge of Pro-Palestine organizing. My arrest came after a wave of repression that occurred across so-called “Canada”, with house raids being issued against militants in Toronto and the sanctioning of Samidoun, a Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. It is clear, that my arrest was apart of a broader strategy to intimidate and demobilize us, to fracture the solidarity and resistance we’re attempting to build. They believed by targeting individuals could disrupt our efforts. But they failed.
What repression at this level does mentally is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it firsthand. I’m still attempting to find the correct words as I write this. The emotional and psychological toll is immense. The guilt of “being caught”, of sucking up the little resources we barely have and the overall shame still hangs over me. The weight of knowing you’ve been watched, followed, and targeted takes a toll that is far beyond the physical. The trauma of being detained, interrogated, and silenced for so long leaves scars that don’t just vanish with the dropping of charges. I could not speak publicly until now as legal conditions had restricted me, furthering the violence imposed by the state. For months, my ability to express myself was controlled, and it left me completely powerless.
Repression can provoke a range of reactions that only escalate an already fragile situation. Historically, the tactics used by the police to destabilize movements often lead people to act in ways that harm both those who are arrested and the broader community. It fosters distrust, wastes time on petty conflicts, and diverts attention from our true adversaries. When unchecked egos and harmful behaviour take hold, they inadvertently play into the hands of the state and its goals. Our movement is built on trust—without it, we have nothing, and repression triumphs. In the future, I hope that, alongside thinking about what’s best for the movement, we also consider empathy. I hope we can prioritize creating a community that supports arrestees, without infantilizing them or dismissing them based on the misguided assumption that they are “too traumatized” to make sound decisions.
The overwhelming majority of the community supported me without hesitation. I express my deepest gratitude to those who stood by me through this ordeal. To those who brought me groceries, helped put my life back together or gave me a shoulder to cry on — you are the reason I am standing here today. You saved me during the darkest period of my life. Your support was not just a comfort— it was a life line. Without your help, I would not have survived.
Let me be clear: the movement is far from over. The charges being dropped does not mean that this is the end. This is proof of our collective resilience, it is a sign that the state’s efforts to repress us were in vain. What happened to me is not an isolated incident, but a testament to the overall strength among us all. Repression is a temporary setback, a minor bump on the road, not a nail in the coffin. It will not stop us. It will only fuel us.
We will not be broken. We will keep fighting. We will continue to build a movement grounded in solidarity and resistance. The work we do is far from finished, and this experience will only strengthen our resolve to keep pushing forward. I hope my story, can be seen not as some cautionary tale but rather a ray of hope that there is a life after repression. The threat of jail time, being kicked out of school, losing your job, is not the end, it’s the beginning of the next chapter in our fight.
Comments Off on Call to Action Against the Canadian Mining Company Aclara: #FueraMineraAclara
Feb272025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
In the Spanish-language document annexed below, the campaign identifies Aclara’s Canadian mailing address as 666 Burrard Street, Suite 1700, in Vancouver, BC. In addition, the University of Toronto has cooperated with the company on research.
We want the hills of Penco free from extractivism.
Communities from Penco, Lirqué, Tomé and surrounding areas have been struggling against a rare earth mining project for more than ten years.
It was called Biolantánidos at first, now Minera Aclara.
We intend to revitalize this struggle against these death facilities, inform communities about its dangers and consequences, and to weave active networks. For this reason, together with collectives and movements in defense of the hills of Penco, we’ve created the #FueraMineraAclara campaign, in circulation across alternative media, free radios and newsites from Abya Yala (the so-called American continent) and the planet.
Against a strong intervention from this corporation over Penco, resistance continues within a community that loves, values and coexists with the natural environment, generating a continued land defense, versus the military and technological interests of global power and devastation companies.
Currently Penco is in the sight of global extractivism. The Aclara Resource company, publicly traded in Toronto, would offer the US and Canada rare earth production levels competitive to China, after two extraction facilities are built, one in Penco (Chile) and another in Goiás (Brazil).
We call everyone to join this campaign with activities, propaganda, talks, graffiti, rallies and everything within our imaginations, to stop the destruction of the hills of Penco. This is only the start of an extractivist vanguard looking for rare earths in the South.
Join us and together we’ll defend the forests and hills of Penco.
#FueraMineraAclara
We want the hills of Penco free from extractivism.
MINERA ACLARA: Tierras Raras, geopolítica y extracción en Abya Yala*
Minera Aclara, es un proyecto impulsado por la empresa REE UNO SPA, hoy presentada como ACLARA Resources, en el que se pretende extraer Tierras Raras desde dos módulos, uno en los cerros de Penco, territorio ocupado por el estado chileno y en Goiás, territorio brasilero. Las tierras raras son un conjunto de 17 minerales principalmente utilizados para el armamentismo y la industria tecnológica (baterías, autos eléctricos de lujo, turbinas eólicas, etc.) todo lo que se vende hoy como tecnologías verdes. Estas tecnologías, que no son de uso masivo, sino de las industrias, las élites militares y económicas, se sostienen en base a la extracción de materias primas de Abya Yala y otros territorios, que han enfrentado históricamente la colonización por parte de las potencias mundiales. Actualmente Penco y Goiás son territorios que se encuentran en el ojo mundial del extractivismo, representando un punto estratégico en la guerra por el control de la producción de estas sustancias.
El proyecto que se pretende instalar en Penco, consiste en tres zonas de extracción de Tierras Raras, que consisten en minas de tajo abierto que tendrán un diámetro aproximado de 45 hectáreas, lo que equivale a 45 canchas de futbol y una profundidad de entre 40 a 60 metros, que es donde se encuentran las concentraciones de estos minerales. Por otra parte el módulo que pretenden instalar en Goiás, comprende un área expansible de 1500 hectáreas.
¿Qué sabemos de la extracción de Tierras Raras?
Por años China ha tenido el control de la extracción de las tierras raras, generando más del 95% de la producción mundial de esta aleación de minerales. Un terrible ejemplo de las consecuencias de esta industria, fue lo que sucedió en Baotou, el mayor proveedor de Tierras Raras en el mundo, en donde un antiguo pastizal fue convertido en un lago tóxico de residuos del proceso de extracción “compuesto por un cóctel de ácidos, metales pesados, carcinógenos y material radiactivo utilizado para procesar los 17 minerales más buscados en el mundo” [1]
Pero este monopolio está siendo amenazado por otras potencias del capital: EEUU y Canadá, quienes pretenden competir contra China para controlar la extracción de tierras raras. Es ahí donde los territorios de Abya Yala, desde la mirada colonialista de estos dos países, aparecen como proveedores fundamentales para llevar a cabo este plan, al igual que Boutu lo fue para China. Actualmente la empresa Minera Aclara, se muestra hacia el exterior como una alternativa “sustentable” al mercado extractivista Chino, y pretende competir contra el control chino a partir de la extracción de Tierras Raras en Goiás, Brasil y en Penco, $hile.
En $hile sólo en la región del Biobío, la empresa Aclara Resourse ha obtenido derechos de agua de Penco Tomé y Florida [2], así como también concesiones de exploración minera en 24.300 hectáreas sólo en Florida (39% de la comuna), con un total de 27.000 hectáreas constituidas en diferentes territorios y 23.500 hectáreas en tramitación, sumando a territorios como: Santa Juana, Concepción, Tomé, Chiguayante, Hualqui, Ranquil y Quillón. Durante el mes de noviembre del 2024 Minera Aclara
por medio de su director general Ramón Barúa, anunció el aumento de estas exploraciones, tras una millonaria subvención entregada por la CORFO (Corporación de fomento de la producción) a la empresa para “desarrollar tecnología de exploración utilizando modelos de inteligencia artificial”[3] la cual consiste ni mas ni menos que en US $730.000.
En Brasil, Aclara busca extraer 191 toneladas de minerales desde el yacimiento Carina, ubicado en Nova Roma al noreste del estado de Goiás, en la zona central de Brasil. Esta cantidad representa el 13% de la producción de China. Actualmente este proyecto también se encuentra en proceso de evaluación y según la empresa, este 2025 tras seguir una serie de pasos, entregarían su Estudio de Impacto Ambiental. El módulo Carina, sería de mayor proporción que el de los cerros de Penco.
¿Quienes son los dueños de Aclara Resourse?
Aclara Resources es una empresa inscrita en la bolsa de valores de Toronto, Pero ha pasado por muchas manos. El año 2011 se constituyó en $hile la Sociedad REE Uno Spa, creada por ex asesor de la sub secretaría del medio ambiente del primer gobierno de Piñera, Manuel José Barros Lecaros. Para el 2012 los únicos accionistas eran Barros Lecaros y el Fondo de inversión privado Lantánidos. En este momento la firma inscribe 200 mil hectáreas de tierra para la posible explotación minera en $hile, repartidas entre las regiones del Maule, Ñuble, Biobío y La Araucanía.
Posteriormente la firma incorporó capitales extranjeros del grupo Hochschild, de origen peruano, con casa matriz en Londres. El año 2018 este grupo pasa a ser el dueño de la empresa tras adquirir el 93,8% de las acciones y con esto el control de REE Uno Spa.
El año 2021 HochschildMining transfirió la propiedad de REE Uno Spa desde Londres, por medio de un paraíso fiscal, a la bolsa de valores de Toronto, Canadá, donde es manejada por Aclara Resouce.
Posteriormente, según informó el periódico Resumen.cl en abril del 2024, la empresa anunció que el grupo CAP (anteriormente a cargo de la siderúrgica chilena Huachipato, cerrada por ellos mismos recientemente) paso a ser propietario de un 20% de REE Uno Spa, quedando como “subsidiaria a cargo del proyecto que pretende instalarse en los cerros de Penco”. Esto sucedió meses antes del cierre de Huachipato, hecho que fue aprovechado por el ampresariado chileno y el estado para levantar el llamado “Plan de Fortalecimiento Industrial” que califica al proyecto de extracción de tierras raras de Aclara Resource como prioritario.[4]
Esta maraña de traspasos, se podría resumir finalmente en que la empresa siempre ha sido REE Uno Spa, que el grupo Hochschild es el accionista mayoritario, que las empresas accionistas como CAP quedan en vinculación con Hochschild y todos los proyectos mineros que estos se encuentran desarrollando en relación a las tierras raras y que REE Uno Spa está siendo operada por medio de Aclara Resouce desde Toronto.
Las personas que hoy están manejando este proyecto
Hochschildactualmente es manejado por Eduardo Hochschild, presidente, mayor accionista y heredero del conglomerado (que se origina en 1911). También es presidente de Cementos Pacasmayo S.A.A., Director del Banco de Crédito del Perú y Presidente del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima.
En el directorio compuesto por 8 directores y un secretario, llama la atención la participación de Tracey Kerr, directora no ejecutiva independiente, que ha sido partede múltiples exploraciones mineras. Fue jefa de exploración de la firma Angloamerican, liderando exploraciones en 15 países, entre ellos $hile, en donde esa empresa ya tiene conflictos ambientales, como el de minera Los Bronces Integrado, por dañar y contaminar irreparablemente glaciares.Así mismo, Kerr es directora no ejecutiva de antofagast PLC. del grupo Lucksic dedicada a la extracción de cobre.
Respecto a Aclara Resource, en enero del 2025 la empresa nombró como director nacional para Brasil a Murilo Nagato, quien fue bienvenido por el actual director general de Aclara en Chile: Ramón Barúa, quien anteriormente era el director financiero del grupo Hochschild.
A su vez, en $hile quien representa a la empresa en su cometido de persuadir a la comunidad de Penco es Nelson Donoso, gerente general de la minera, que asume el cargo tras la renuncia de Rodrigo Ceballos (en medio del rechazo generalizado de Penco y Lirquén al proyecto). Donoso es también director de la Cámara de Producción y Comercio Biobío y parte del directorio del CFT (Centro de Formación Técnica) Estatal Región del Biobío. A Nelson Donoso lo acompañan un equipo de “profesionales” jóvenes al momento de confrontar a la comunidad. En este sentido Fernando Illanes, gerente de valor social, es un personaje ya reconocido y participe de las estrategias de intervención social y comunitaria de la minera.
LXS ANIMALES…
Animales que sufrirían las consecuencias en Penco:
Las zonas de extracción y la de deposición, alterarán profundamente las rutas de traslado y movimiento del Pudú, y con esto dañarían sus procesos de alimentación y reproducción. Este mismo efecto se vería en otros animales altamente vulnerables gracias al antropocentrismo, entre los cuales encontramos Pumas, Güiñas y Monitos del Monte. En el lugar también habitan aves como el Chucao, Cherkán, Fiofío, Sietecolores, Lechuzas, Buhos, entre otros, además de ser zona de flujo y descanzo de miles de aves costeras. De igual manera, podemos encontrar reptiles como la Lagartija de Shroeder y la Rana Rosacea de Hojarasca.
Animales que sufrirían las consecuencias en Goiás:
La instalación de Módulo Carina alterará el habitat de múltiples especies. En esta zona se verán afectados animales endémicos como los zorros de campo, el armadillo potepeute del norte, actualmente en estado de vulnerabilidad, culebras como la Anilius Scytale, el Mico estrella, y peces como el Caballo de la Vea y Corydoras Aeneus, entre otros.
PRESENCIA EN DISTINTOS PAÍSES
En Penco, Región de biobío, $hile, la empresa instaló una sede que llaman “Casa Aclara” ubicada en calle Las Heras 565, a una cuadra de la plaza de Penco, utilizada para lavar su imagen y generar estrategias de intervención comunitaria.
De igual manera, la empresa instaló una planta que llaman “Centro demostrativo”, ubicada en San Pedro de La Paz, específicamente en el KM 10 del camino a Coronel, en la bodega 8 C y D, en donde la empresa aparte de experimentar con el proceso que llama hipócritamente “Cosecha Circular de Minerales”, hace recorridos a grupos de personas (como forma de intervención y persuasión social). En declaraciones la firma ha anunciado que en esta planta se procesarán arcillas traídas desde el Módulo Carina desde Brasil.
Sus oficinas publicadas son en Santiago, $hile, Av. Cerro el Plomo 5630, Piso 15 Las Condes. En Belo Horizontesus oficinas parecen ubicadas enRua Bernardo Guimarães, 245, 8º andar, sala 701 Funcionários, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, CEP 30140-080, Brasil. Y como la firma es manejada desde Canadá, en su página figura la dirección Suite 1700, 666 Burrard Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6C 2X8, Canadá.
El grupo Hochschild Mining, dueño de Aclara Resource, registra en la dirección 21 Gloucester Place, London, W1U 8HR, United Kingdom. En Perú en Calle La Colonia No. 180 Urb. El Vivero de Monterrico, Santiago de Surco, Lima 15023. En Argentina en Av. Santa Fe 2755 piso 9 (C1425BGC) Capital Federal y en Brasil en Rua Antônio de Albuquerque 330 sala 601, Savassi Belo Horizonte Minas Gerais – CEP: 30112-010.
La empresa mantiene cooperación con la Universidad de Toronto, Canadá, debido a su inscripción en la bolsa de valores de dicha ciudad. En Chile mantienen alianzas con la Universidad San Sebastián, Universidad de Concepción e Inacap.
La extracción de Tierras Raras es continuidad del colonialismo y de la devastación capitalista. Hoy la extracción de estas sustancias es la base para la reproducción del capitalismo verde y su falsa sustentabilidad que no es más que muerte, armamentismo, control y especismo.
Comments Off on Solidarity Collectives – Call for Action week – February 24 – 3 march
Jan302025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Dear comrades and friends,
As we enter the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the urgency to act has never been greater. The situation grows increasingly dire, with the toll of the war deepening both on the battlefield and within the fabric of Ukrainian society. So today we need your voices, your solidarity, and your actions to amplify our actions for justice and resistance.
From 24 February we call on all our friends, partners and all anti-authoritarian groups in all parts of the world for a week of action! We encourage you to organize rallies, fundraisers, and public events that draw attention to the Ukrainian resistance struggle against Russian imperialism.
Whether it’s a public demonstration, a direct action the case (https://www.vice.com/en/article/russian-mansion-occupied-police-cost/) of squatting in a Russian oligarch’s mansion inspires us), a music concert, a movie screening or an art exhibition, a fundraising campaign or a panel discussion, your efforts are vital to keep Ukrainians’ struggle visible and supported.
The topic of the Russian shadow fleet and its environmental impact or international security challenges could be topics of such discussions. You could paint graffiti in the street of your city and send us a picture of it or even make a series of photos. We would be grateful for any kind of participation.
The alarming rise of far-right movements around the world demands that we stand together to counter these forces to fight imperialism and oppression. Supporting Ukrainians fighting Russian imperialism should be one of the priorities of the anti-authoritarian movement, and this goes hand in hand with supporting all refugees and immigrants in the West.
We believe that we should exchange practices and ideas internationally in order to develop our common struggles. And our team is ready to participate in your events, exchange knowledge, discuss difficult issues and assist in any way we can to make your initiatives impactful. Together, we can build a global network of solidarity that echoes beyond borders and languages.
