As the rain finally returns and the temperatures drop, we would like to celebrate the change in season by announcing that Creeker Volume 3 has been released.
In the summer of 2021 on so-called Vancouver Island, thousands of people moved through a de-facto autonomous zone spanning multiple watersheds. An entire constellation of struggle burned bright, welcoming into its fold a new generation of land defenders. Creeker is a grassroots, anti-authoritarian zine series that aims to bring depth, variety, critique and continuity to the ongoing process of reflecting on the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek blockade. It’s intended for creekers themselves, land defenders elsewhere, and the land defenders yet to come.
The variety of submissions over the series has meant that, like the blockades themselves, each volume is many things. However, slight themes seem to have emerged: if Volume 1 was more celebratory and Volume 2 was more critical, Volume 3 is perhaps more reflective.
The newest installment in the series includes history, poetry, collages, analysis, and reflection, plus a whole section dedicated to the inspiring forest defense currently happening in Atlanta.
A newly remastered version of a zine coming out of the Elaho blockade of 2001 has also been made available.
Creeker Vol 4 is slowly being put together and submissions are encouraged. Stories and art are especially welcome, but everything received will be considered. Send submissions to creekerzine@protonmail.com by November 31.
Go to creekerzine.wordpress.com to view or print all zines in the series.
Printed copies are available at Camas Books in Victoria and Spartacus Books in Vancouver.
Comments Off on Tenants Resist Renoviction by Cromwell, Anarchist Solidarity is Key
Oct232022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
The views expressed within this text are not those of the Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union (SLAM). The following is an account and analysis by one union member. SLAM is built on anarcho-syndicalist principles but is not an explicitly anarchist organization and contains many (if not mostly) non-anarchist militants. Working together has not been a question of compromising our principles, but of growing our strength based on tactical agreement.
A short documentary, based on a community tour of 3605 st-urbain discussed further into this text, explores the conditions of Cromwell tenants.
The residents of 3605 St. Urbain are fighting back against a renoviction by Cromwell Management. Their corporate owner, one of Quebec’s richest men, is George Gantcheff. Gantcheff and Cromwell’s relentless, unpredictable, and initially unlawful renovation project has reached a boiling point. Since January, more than 100 tenants have been renovicted from a 130 unit highrise. This construction has required turning off the building’s heating. Tenants are bracing for a freezing cold winter. Their only heat will come from space heaters provided by Cromwell.
All but 14 tenants in the 130 unit building have left. Many tenants accepted the landlord’s offer to end their lease early and abandon their homes rather than live out intrusive renovations. Many elderly tenants had been living in the building for years. Cromwell has a history of performing renovictions and hiking rent in both Montreal and Toronto units.
Renovictions provide an excuse for a landlord to drastically increase rent. This contributes significantly to gentrification and the acceleration of rent increases. The consequence is the enrichment of landlords at the expense of the continued impoverishment of working class people.
3605’s landlord initially justified construction work as needed to fix the building’s heating system. Cromwell then took the opportunity to carry out massive renovations. Construction was further delayed and expanded. Tenants’ have since faced a lack of hot water, rusty water, dust and dirt everywhere, unbearable constant noise, and power outages. Cromwell turned the building into an unbearable construction zone– and used these conditions to pressure tenants to leave their units. One by one tenants moved out. Once a unit was cleared, the apartment would be gutted, allowing for construction to continually expand.
The majority of remaining tenants at 3605 have formed a tenants council that has been meeting regularly over the past two months. A member of the Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union, who has been active in organizing tenant councils in nearby buildings, assists at their meetings and coordinates between their council and the broader union. Hundreds of flyers and posters have since been distributed through the Plateau neighborhood, alerting the tenants’ neighbours to the situation and calling for solidarity.
The current tenants of 3605 refuse to be displaced for the sake of corporate profit.
Revolutionary Tenant Unionism: Organizing on the Ground
The Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union, which is organizing with the building’s tenants is a union based on internal non-hierarchy, solidarity, the use of direct action, and tenant leadership. The broader goal is of a mass movement that can dramatically remove the power relations between people, not just for tenants, but everyone. SLAM (its French acronym) is devoted to the construction of tenant councils in tenants’ buildings and blocks. Members from SLAM attend these autonomous council meetings. Their role is to encourage and educate on direct action, provide advice when asked, and to help coordinate actions or support with the broader union apparatus without dominating discussion.
At the moment of writing, SLAM, which is less than a year old, has helped organize tenant councils in close to a dozen buildings across Montreal. Active tenants include over 40 unionists or participants in councils. There is a broader support network of some 100-150 that have signed petitions or come to events.
The two-and-a-half months of organizing in 3605 St-Urbain (the building under renoviction), has been a rewarding challenge for organizers. The remaining tenants are all older than 40. They come from a plethora of backgrounds. The meetings are unconventional. Group discussion is only sustainable for as much as 30 seconds before interruptions lead to impromptu side conversations. Attention and “the floor” are very difficult to hold. Added to this is the fact that, because of this working class crew’s disjunctered set of schedules, meetings are held late at night. They can sometimes drag past 11pm.
When the union first heard from a tenant in 3605, they were contacted by a kind and respected leader figure in the building. This person already organized a first meeting between tenants. With only small encouragement from the union these council meetings continued.
When SLAM’s organizer first entered the group, tenants were primarily axed on using housing Tribunals to resolve their issues with Cromwell. This was too bad. Without getting too much into the weeds, it’s fair to say that a mass and combative movement capable of replacing corporate control with tenant control will not come from starting court cases. Engaging with tribunals is individualization of social problems at its finest.
In the early meetings of 3605’s council, SLAM’s organizer brought several samples of collective letters other tenant councils had written to their landlord, discussed the benefits of collective action, and even played videos of direct action and showed news clippings. These videos included SLAM’s June march on Cogir’s head offices. The march won tenants thousands of dollars in reparations, rent savings, and construction work without tenants opening a single case at the Tribunal. Through continuous discussion, some proposals for above-ground collective action were finally proposed and accepted by 3605’s tenants. These resolutions were catered to tenants’ specific situation and comfort zones.
Once some actions were decided, SLAM helped call a general assembly of its tenant organizers and supporters. Roughly 16 tenants crammed into the union’s usual meeting space, including several older working class tenants. These older tenants had involved themselves in the union out of need, became leaders in their councils, and were now ready for more. At this meeting, two banner paintings were planned, media liaisoning, a social media strategy, and a guided tour of 3605.
The banners turned out beautifully and several were strung up Saturday in the lobby and on the exterior of 3605. The tour of the rundown building was attended by more than 30 neighbours, union members, and supporters. Some neighbours had been contacted during the door knocking of apartments on the same street showed up. They were absolutely enraged and engaged. They had their own analysis and experiences and wanted to support in any way they could. One woman requested to join SLAM.
Tenants have been encouraged by these initial actions (the company, on the other hand, had met the plan for a tour with a firm and aggressive response, posting threatening semi-legal notices and showing up at tenants doors in response). As the campaign moves forward past these first steps, the union will countinue to push for further direct action and escalation. Tenants continue to be increasingly open to these tactics as they feel the power of solidarity from tenants outside their building.
Conclusion
The purpose of this short anecdote about organizing the beginnings of this campaign against Cromwell is to emphasize the importance of anarchists creating and inserting within groups where class antagonism is the clearest. We stand to help create councils, meeting places that build everyone’s collective power and autonomy. We aim also to push the struggle deeper and strengthen it. Maybe our ideology of non-hierarchy and combative revolutionary spirit does not make sense to everyone, but our tactics when proposed to people’s specific situations always should. This syndicalist strategy allows us to build respect and popularity for our methods among non-anarchists and become local “robin hoods” (in the words of one tenant from 3605).
The benefit of this form of syndicalism countinues to prove itself for SLAM. The union is not just the usual crowd of monolithic, ideologically inclined, younger, consciously committed organizers (although this demographic is important, and in majority at biweekly meetings). It has the capacity to organize in the diverse circles that make up the real core of our oppressed classes.
Continued support and activation of anarchist comrades across Montreal remains as important as ever. Solidarity is essential!
Our goal is not just the amelioration of conditions. As Lorenzo Kom-Boa Ervin writes in Anarchism and the Black Revolution, “we should throw out the rich bums and just take over! Of course we will have to fight the cops and security guards for the crooked landlords, but we can do that too! We can… build an independent tenants’ movement that will self-manage all the facilities, not for the government… but for themselves!”
Comments Off on Between Storms: Anarchist Reflections of Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en Resistance
Oct232022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
We have assembled this publication in solidarity with the ongoing Wet’suwet’en resistance to industrial expansion. This struggle for Indigenous self determination and land defence has become a landmark moment of rupture across the colonial nation of Canada and beyond. We felt the need to compile this zine in an effort to take a step back and witness the breadth and fierceness of these last few years – with a particular focus on the year that has just passed since the start of ‘Coyote Camp’ and the specific battle against the attempt to drill under Wedzin Kwa. Not to produce some stale collection for the history shelves, but to inspire and learn from these events as they continue to unfold. As we go to print, CGL has just begun the drilling under the river that many have fought so hard to prevent. It’s a sad day and this part of their destruction will have devastating effects. But this doesn’t mean that this fight has been in vain, the project is not complete and opportunities for intervention abound.
Inside you will find an overview of Wet’suwet’en resistance from the emergence of Unistot’en Camp until the most recent endeavors on the Gidumt’en yintah, as well as the closely related Lihkts’amisyu actions and Gitxsan rail blockades nearby. We’ve included a centerfold map outlining the widespread scope of coast to coast solidarity actions from fall 2021 to summer 2022, along with communiques found online that offer reflections and analysis from people behind some of these actions. The topic of antirepression and overturning the state’s attempts to isolate and criminalize us is also explored. A Well Oiled Trap introduces the history of the British common law, tracing it as foundational to the Canadian state, its justice system and colonial projects, outlining their incompatibility with our dreams. Lastly, we address another antipipeline fight brewing up in Gitxsan territory (Wet’suwet’ens neighbors and ancient allies); An analysis of the proposed related projects is presented in the article Face to Face with the Enemy: An Introduction to WCCGT line, PRGT line and Ksi Lisims LNG Terminal.
This publication is intended to be printed on 11×17 size paper, if printed using normal paper size its likely to become difficult to read.
Comments Off on map.negate.ca: An Interactive Map of Extractive Infrastructure in BC
Oct032022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
There is a ever growing amount of pipelines and other extractive projects within so-called “british columbia”. It is challenging to understand the scope of this infrastructure and how each project relates to others.
We collected information about planned, in construction, and completed projects and combined them into one map. We also include all freight rail lines.
We publish this map to gain collective perspective on the state of extractive industry in bc. We will continue adding new data as it emerges. If there are any projects that you want added you can email map@negate.ca.
The map is entirely hosted on our server. Your browser won’t connect to google or open street map. If it is slow, this is probably why :-)
https://bccounterinfo.org is now live! We at BC counter-info have gone to great lengths to create a secure and accessible platform for anarchist and anti-authoritarians of all stripes to upload their stories of inspirational revolutionary actions happening across so called ‘BC’ and eventually to help broadcast others from around the world. We encourage all ‘BC’ comrades to submit their handiwork using the portal provided in the submit section of the website, after reading the security tips provided. If you have any suggestions on ways to improve the site, especially around security, or to tell us how much we suck, don’t hesitate to email us at bccounterinfo@riseup.net or alternatively you can use the submission portal for one-way secure messages. If you have submissions that fall outside the area known as ‘BC’ please submit to existing sites, and we will share them automatically in a separate feed. Stay tuned for further updates to the site, we have big plans! BC counter-info is an onion service with a public facing URL. Our onion address is: bcinfosst3tgmyfar6sessdkpkaxrc5sdjagvxvkbu6z74yhin7e5gid.onion
Comments Off on Your Cancer, Courtesy of Capitalism
Sep092022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Many cities in Quebec are home to one or more industries that destroy the environment and make the inhabitants sick.
In Rouyn-Noranda, Glencore benefits from a right to pollute that has allowed it to pocket billions for decades. The flora, the fauna, and all living things are affected. Vulnerable people, pregnant women, babies, and children, are particularly affected. All of this is indirectly with the permission of the Ministry of the Environment, who issues the remediation certificate that allows for exceeding the standards for emissions of a cocktail of heavy metals: arsenic, lead, nickel, chromium, cadmium, etc. These exceptions to compliance with provincial standards are an easy way for shareholders to profit.
We are an affinity group from Rouyn-Noranda. Today, we are starting a series of symbolic and direct actions against Glencore. We will no longer accept dying to enrich this kind of of ruthless multinational corporation! We have dropped this banner on the cancer research center that is delaying its operations because of hiring difficulties – and we understand! People who work in the health field do not want to come to Rouyn-Noranda to be poisoned.
Comments Off on Announcing Creeker Vol 2 and The Creeker Companion Vol 2
Sep062022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Creeker is a grassroots, anti-authoritarian zine series that aims to bring depth, variety, critique and continuity to the ongoing process of reflecting on the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek blockade and related efforts. It is intended for creekers themselves, land defenders elsewhere, and the land defenders yet to come.
Last summer on so-called Vancouver Island, thousands of people moved through a de-facto autonomous zone spanning multiple watersheds. A constellation of struggle burned bright, welcoming into its fold a new generation of land defenders. We cannot begin to fathom the amount of stories of collective and individual experience that have piled up, but we also recognize how sleep deprivation, trauma loops, burnout, and the shock of returning to society can preoccupy our minds.
In response to an open invitation to contribute to this zine project, many have shared some of what they have begun to process. Creeker Vol 1 and Vol 2 include art, analysis, photography, history, personal reflection and poetry that were anonymously sourced from participants at the blockade.
Creeker Vol 2 expands on some of the themes of Vol 1 with eloquent and hard-hitting writing exploring the dynamics of autonomous forest defense in conflict with recuperative tendencies at Fairy Creek, and the ever-present treachery of environmental NGOs and the non profit industrial complex. Vol 2 also begins to revive vital histories of radical, uncontrollable resistance in the nearby Kax:iks/Walbran and Elaho Valleys, helping to bridge emerging generation gaps caused in part by decades of pacifist liberal whitewashing.
The Creeker Companion zines are curated to complement the Creeker zines with material that’s relevant to Ada’itsx and similar movements, but much broader in scope. Companion Vol 1 and Vol 2 both explore topics such as movement history, state repression, and thoughtfully critical approaches to identity politics. Vol 1 features mostly longer form pieces, while Vol 2 samples briefly from various material including essays, poetry, communiques and more, joined together with a playfully insurrectionary vibe.
In 1973, Pierre Elliott Trudeau enacted a regularization program resulting in 39,000 undocumented migrants living in so-called canada being eventually recognized as citizen. While there have been other regularization programs over the years, this was, by far, the largest one implemented [1].
You might have noticed that this large regularization program took place almost 50 years ago, by the father of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau. And if there’s something that Trudeau can be relied upon, is to do some grand commemorative gesture for the occasion.
Because we are really in a perfect storm situation for migrant regularization. First, we are facing a serious labor shortage. Many essential jobs cannot find any takers because of the difficult work conditions and bad salaries. Undocumented migrants are currently working, of course, since most people cannot survive in canada without a job. But without a valid Social Insurance Number, many jobs remain inaccessible, most especially in government positions.
Second, there are already a lot of undocumented migrants in essential healthcare and food production jobs, because they are the shittiest jobs anyone can do. And we need them to continue to function as a society, a lot more than we need grubby bankers, tax haven accountants and slimy corporate lawyers, anyway. But it’s getting kinda shameful how the government ends up paying undocumented migrants for these jobs. Downright embarassing, even, given how badly they are treated.
And third, Trudeau’s minority government is in dire need of stealing votes from the left. Therefore, the Liberal government introduced Motion M-44 in May 2021 to get the ball rolling [2]. But while it might sound like a wide sweeping regularization program, let’s not be fooled: they want to steal votes to the left, while not alienating their racist right. As it stands now, it might only be a liberal regularization program: by and for the industry, the bankers, the stock market. And not for, you know, the actual people being currently refused entry to citizenship.
The reality of undocumented migrant lives
Ok, so why would we care? We want to destroy the so-called canadian state anyway, why would we want to see more people accepted by it? Why does citizenship in a colonial state matters?
Well, for starters, we don’t have in so-called canada the same infrastructure of support for undocumented migrants that there is south of the border. There are not that many non-profit organizations in here, and those present are often overwhelmed with people still clinging to the official citizenship pipelines. On the legal end of things, our racist provincial governments have not enabled the kind of loopholes we can see in California. And municipalities have very little power, especially since the police is controlled at the provincial and federal levels. Not that Projet Montreal’s “let’s fund the pigs no matter what they ask for” would have changed anything anyway.
Healthcare for undocumented migrants is a macabre joke. If you don’y have your “sun card”, you’re pretty much doomed. You either have to pay through the nose to see a doctor and get a prescription, and you still have to pay full price for medication. And that is if the doctor doesn’t denounce you to the pigs. Them doctors sur take that Hypocrite Oat to heart…
Anarchists in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal) will recall one undocumented comrade who gradually went blind, as she could not afford the doctors’ appointments and medications which were available to all of us. And another comrade, whose leg almost burst open from blood circulation problems, and who could not affort to get treated either. Living undocumented has a cost, a cost measured in human lives.
School ain’t much better either. Undocumented migrants recently won the right for their children to attend middle and high school, but it remains very limited [3]. They are always at risk of being denounced. Some schools will break government guidelines and refuse undocument children nonetheless. Because why a racist government would sanction a racist administrator? For those who overcome these hurdles and manage to finish high school, few prospects await them. And what opportunities are open nowadays to someone with just a high school degree?
Because work is ever so much worse. Undocumented migrants cannot complain to the CNESST, and are therefore not protected by health and safety guidelines, nor by minimum wage laws. Recent articles showed how official temporary migrant workers are mistreated in fields and farms, what do you think happens to undocumented migrants?
And that’s not covering the worst of the worst, the fucking police. Undocumented migrants are constantly one police stop away from getting deported. And guess what happens when they actually need to be protected from a rapist or a violent spouse? The SPVM is well-known as a “Deportation Machine That Hunts Down Non-Status Immigrants”, to quote an article from the McGill Daily [4]. And they probably jerk off while doing it too.
So yeah, fuck the state, destroy it, burn it to the fucking ground. But still, that shitty piece of citizenship paper still means a world of difference between life and death for a lot of people. And with a theorized 500,000 undocument migrants here, that’s a lot of pain and suffering that could be alleviated.
The fascists and liberals have no problem sleeping on the blood and bones of undocumented migrants. Can we?
What are the obstacles to expect?
If you follow federal politics, then it is obvious that Trudeau is quite heavy on symbolism, and pretty light on substance. The Trudeau government makes a lot of grandiose gestures but is often lackluster when it comes to actual action. After all, their goal here is not to actually regularize migrants, but just to steal some vote to the left. And maybe provide some cheap labour to their financiers.
So there’s a real chance that the regularization proposed might only be window dressing. That it might only regularize people who would be regularized eventually anyway. So we must put pressure on the government to ensure this regularization proposal is as wide and inclusive as possible. the canadian-based “Migrants Rights Network” has compiled a list of demands, their main ones being [5]:
The goal of the program must be regularization of all undocumented people residing in Canada.
The program should be permanent and available on an ongoing basis because the factors leading to people becoming undocumented will continue for the foreseeable future.
Applications must be simple, such that undocumented people are able to apply themselves, online via mobile devices or on paper. There should be a large selection of acceptable documents for the purposes of establishing identity and residence in Canada, none should be mandatory.
People should not be excluded based on past failures to comply with immigration law.
There must be a prohibition on detentions and deportations throughout the course of the regularization program; without this, the regularization program will fail as undocumented people will not apply.
No one should be deported if their application is rejected.
///
The other major obstacle is, quite obviously, the racist and white supremacist provincial CAQ government. The CAQ made no secret that they want full control of immigration in Quebec. They have already made legally dubious moves against immigrants, whether through:
Bill 9, which threw 18,000 immigration dossiers in the trash,
Bill 21, which blocks many non-christians from teaching jobs,
Bill 96, which forces migrants to learn french in six months.
The CAQ would almost certainly try to block any regularization efforts, unless the undocumented migrants were both french and white.
///
And finally, the other obstacle would probably be your unfriendly neighborhood fascist. The far-right propaganda against migrant workers is widespread, the most popular being that more foreign workers means lower wages and fewer housing opportunities.
First, let’s be honest about wages. The pandemic convinced a lot of baby boomers to retire a bit earlier than expected, leaving a large number of jobs available. Simple free market economics would theorizes that a workers’ shortage would therefore mean salaray raises. Obviously, that hasn’t been the case so far, and nothing shows that it will improve in the future. Or even match the inflation.
Evidently, our capitalist masters will not increase wages, no matter what. They would rather let the job left undone, and pile the work on the remaining workers, than pay us a penny more. The only significant gains made in recent months were in unionized jobs, and only after difficult struggles, and often long strikes. As the IWW slogan goes: if we want better work conditions, we need to organize. The “free market” has always been stacked against workers: a few more migrants, who are already here and already working anyway won’t change a damn thing.
Second, housing. As housing committees in Tio’tia:ke and elsewhere keep hammering: we don’t have a housing shortage, we have an affordable housing shortage. There are a shittons of apartments held empty for speculation purposes. The financiarization of the housing market means that you are no longer dealing with your regular scummy landlord, but with a scummy stock market broker landlord. Our old landlords could pressure us as much as they wanted, but in the end they needed at least some money to pay their mortgage at the end of the month. Deals could be cooerced, and limited rent strikes could work. Our new landlords have 50,000 appartments and don’t give a shit if a few of them don’t pay them for a few months, while they fill the paperwork to throw your ass out in the street at 2AM in -40 weather. Again, more migrants who already live here won’t change a thing either.
Or in other words, don’t punch down on comrades down on their luck. Punch up to the bosses and the landlords: they’re the own making all our lives miserable. And maybe punch your local fascist while your there.
What should we do?
The Trudeau government should publish a first draft of their regularization law in late September 2022. This should gives us an idea on where Trudeau want to go with that program, and subsequent reactions from the CAQ and the far-right should give us an idea of what kind of obstacles we would be facing.
It was easier to pressure the government in 1973 because the undocumented migrants included a large portion of white people, mostly war resisters from the united states fleeing the vietnam draft. We don’t have this luxury today. Any gain we make will have to be made despite the white supremacists currently vying for power.
But thankfully, others have paved the way before us. The 39,000 persons regularized in 1973 might sound like a lot, but it was merely 0.1% of the population of canada at the time. These 39,000 are massively dwarfed compared to recent regularization programs in other countries. In 1981, france regularized 132,000 migrants, or 0.2% of their population at the time, twice as many as canada. In 2005, spain regularized 570,000 people, or 1.3% of their population at the time. It is therefore possible to do it much better than in 1973, and the mobilization behind the regularization campaigns in france and spain can provide us with a lot of good arguments.
After all, these undocumented migrants are already here. They work with us, eat with us, live with us. It’s time they enjoyed the same rights that we all do.
///
The canadian-based Migrant Rights Network calls for days of action on Agust 16th and September 18th: https://migrantrights.ca/
[1] See: https://www.kairoscanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Regularization-of-NonStatus-Immigrants-in-Canada-1960-2004.pdf for the different programs.
[2] See: https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/89339/motions/11528727 This was followed by a mandate letter to the minister of immigration: https://pm.gc.ca/en/mandate-letters/2021/12/16/minister-immigration-refugees-and-citizenship-mandate-letter It laconically only mentions “Build on existing pilot programs to further explore ways of regularizing status for undocumented workers who are contributing to Canadian communities”.
[3] See: http://www.assnat.qc.ca/fr/travaux-parlementaires/projets-loi/projet-loi-144-41-1.html (in French only).
Comments Off on Against Your Demands: Lessons from Occupy McGill
Aug012022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
In 2022, I was an active anarchist in the two week occupation of McGill University. In the months prior to the occupation, I was part of the meetings that discussed the idea of pitching up tents in the Arts building. Back then, we were just 6 people at a picnic table. I witnessed the successes and failures of the occupation (and of its offshoots at Concordia and UdeM) but until now have not written anything on the subject.
Earlier this month, an international call to action was launched: “End Fossil – Occupy“. In a Guardian opinion piece, students are urged to “occupy our campuses to demand the end of the fossil economy.” This call seems to follow the example set by McGill, which has received somewhat broad attention. However, it fails to take key lessons from the McGill experience. By explaining these lessons, I am hoping to influence people who are thinking of organizing an occupation (which I still strongly encourage), and to challenge dominant notions of what a movement needs to be. Above all, we are past making End Fossil’s demands.
Purely and simply, the success of the McGill occupation was rooted in two guiding principles: 1) it refused to just be about the climate, and 2) it refused to make demands. Without a doubt, the occupation was successful. Up to 25 people a night slept in the lobby of the Arts building. Our public assemblies surpassed one hundred attendees. Audiences were often several dozen at film screenings, workshops, reading circles, and discussions which happened on a daily basis.* Every day you could show up, no matter who you were, and be fed breakfast, lunch and dinner. A few days into the occupation, several crews ran riot with spray paint through McGill, tagging up security vans and walls with slogans like “Occupy Everything” and “Students: Remember your Power.”
People showed up, not because of the specific issues we brought up, but because of the insurrectionary energy that was created. We printed and handed out hundreds of zines on pretty much everything but the climate. Educational sessions were also hardly-ever climate-related. Instead, the ideas being discussed centred around anarchist pedgagogy. People’s worldviews were not just being reemphasized (as they are when listening to yet another droning rad-lib environmentalist speech), but challenged or developed.
As a student movement, it was important that we did not make demands or centre on any specific issue. We were a place to locate people with a variety of concerns. Some of the most loyal comrades at the occupation were not there because of climate-related anxieties. Participants in assemblies often discussed issues under the sun that touched on anything-but. We cast a broad net, and created a broad base. This wider focus allowed us to then bring to bear a radical critique of all hierarchy, all forms of domination, and to propose revolution, not reform (no matter how green).
I am going to be honest here. If I were to see another purely narrow environmentalist occupation – I’d keep walking. Most working class people also rightly distrust this messaging. From Occupy, Shut Down Canada, to the George Floyd uprising, it is clear that people want insurrection. You still want reforms? Fine. But let’s not ask for reforms. Let’s build a revolutionary movement and allow politicians to panic and try frantically to slow us down with concessions. That is, let’s not be ineffectively boring.
I do not want to pretend that every participant in the McGill occupation was a born-again anarchist. In fact, many campers complained that our intentions were outwardly vague. Some raised concerns that people were not participating because, without demands, they couldn’t understand what was going on. First, it’s worth saying that virtually everyone who claimed not to understand what we were doing were more conservative or liberal students who would never have participated anyway. But more crucially, we fail to bring people into our movement not because we lack demands, but because we are not effective enough at illustrating to others why joining our projects will change the world. This is harder to do: it takes good discussions, fun actions, effective assemblies, clear strategy, strong zines, and organizing. But it is possible.
It is certain that some of our camp organizers did not have a strong enough grasp of radical politics to explain convincingly why we don’t make demands but struggle for insurrection. However, this is not a barricade; it’s a small hurdle that one or two deliberate group conversations could have fixed.
The experience of Concordia’s short occupation was entirely different. The occupation at Concordia was quickly co-opted by the student union. Power and responsibilities became increasingly concentrated in a small set of vocal elected students who, already burdened with union responsibilities, could hardly carry out the tasks they took on. Union representatives began asking opponents to leave the occupation. Other students left by themselves — fed-up by the union or not at all enchanted. Any initial radical insurrectionary energy was sapped out by narrow syndicalist politics. I briefly attended the University of Montreal occupation. From what I observed (although more pleasant), the singular focus on the school’s fossil fuel investments had become hegemonic; and the occupation concentrated in an offshoot of Greenpeace.
There was, of course, a core limitation to Occupy McGill’s strategy. The occupation was only powerful as an attractive / communal symbol of resistance and rallying point for radical ideas. To break past this point, it would have had to go on to actually shut down the university, spread into a strike, create new combative student organizations, practice new tactics like property destruction, or spill into neighbouring communities. These are also training, coordination, and mobilization tactics for revolutionary action. They go further and rally more people. We do so until we hit a moment where we finally revolt – and start winning.
We have a world to win. Not just the end of the fossil economy, but a whole society that could be created from solidarity. The landlords, police, capitalists, politicians, machos, and anyone calling themselves “authority-figures,” will be abandoned and replaced by cooperation. The university will not just be green but be transformed beyond the alienation, the work-to-death ethic, and the carreerism that infects it today. Unless we take direct control, we will be lied to, taken advantage of, and used for others’ political ends. We don’t have patience for the piecemeal reforms that have failed us for hundreds of years. There is so much to do and so little time to do so. It is time we strike.
That is our only demand, not to authorities, but to one another.
*Films viewed included Street Politics 101 (by Submedia), and two documentaries on the Rojavan Revolution. Reading circles read a selection on revolutionary education from Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, and Autonomous Education in the Zapatista Communities: Schools to Cure Ignorance. Discussions included a discussion on anarchist pedagogy, a discussion on anarchism, a workshop on the just transition framework, a workshop on accessibility, and a talk by a long-time Mohawk activist. Zines included “Education for Liberation not Corporation” (by Divest McGill) “Anarchism: Towards a Revolution in Montreal,” “Blockade, Occupy, Strike Back,” and “A Recipe for Nocturnal Direct Action.”
Comments Off on Call for an International Anarchist Week of Fun August 14th-21st
Jul202022
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
We are tired of being serious. We are bored with dry meetings, solemn marches, and being told to read this or that text written to convince people that anarchism is worth their time. We are exhausted with inaction being the consequence of feeling like we have to get everything right.
As anarchists, what we truly want is everything, but in this very moment, what we really want is to have some fun.
We believe that anarchy should be a verb; not just a set of ideas one thinks inside one’s head but of actual follow through on those ideas. We think that being anarchists means that we should fight for a world worth living in, and we believe that any world worth living in absolutely requires insurmountable feelings of joy. Only we can make it happen.
This is a call to action for an Anarchist Week of Fun. August 14th-21st, we want to see anarchists of all stripes to participate in throwing parties, pulling pranks, letting loose, and having some motherfucking fun.
There are many ways to participate and we encourage creativity & innovation. But, if you’re at a loss for how to have fun (as we tend to be), here are some suggestions;
Throw a party. Have an orgy. Ding dong ditch the mayor. Break stuff. Make a fancy meal for your friends. Climb something real high and see what it looks like up there. Pull a friendly prank on another milieu. Pull a mean spirited prank on the city. Have a dance party in the street. Throw a surprise party for a dog. See if you can put your whole fist in your mouth. Render a parking meter useless. Try hormones for fun. Do a banner drop. Piss on a cop’s grave. Troll an open house in your neighborhood. Shitpost irl. The world is your playground. Get out there and have a good time.
Write a report back & submit it to your favorite counter-info website.
