Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information

Call for International Solidarity: Storm Their Fragile Bastions of Power

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Jun 032020
 

From Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

Revolutionary greetings from the insurrection sweeping throughout the occupied territories of the so-called United States of America. We are asking comrades across the world for immediate and unrelenting acts of solidarity against the United States.

In the past few days, we have accumulated experiences that amount to decades of learning. In doing exactly what we previously thought was impossible, we have exposed this country for what it truly is: nothing more than a fragile paper tiger. Tearing at its massive technological police state, the black people of America have demonstrated that they will from hereon refuse to ever be intimidated by a power structure upheld by white terror and violence.

In its desperation, the State is now propagating the falsehood that this rebellion is being led by white outside agitators. We’ve all heard these lies before, most prominently in their history books, where they trot out fictional narratives about how Lincoln freed the slaves. This is nothing other than a more recent installment of an old paternalistic trick by the white supremacist establishment to deny black people the intelligence, the spirit, and the autonomous will to direct their own rebellion and free themselves. As the history of this miserable nation repeats itself once again, what has become clearly evident is that black people have been and will continue to be the only revolutionary force that is capable of toppling the oppressive status quo.

Everywhere the pigs have lost their will to fight. Their eyes, which only yesterday were windows to empty hatred and contempt, now display stultifying self-doubt and cowardice. For once, their behavior portrays their weakness as every step they take back is marked by hesitation.

Whether on the domestic or international front, we can see the Man’s backs up against the wall and so it is the time to be at our most tenacious. We cannot give him an inch to squirm wherever he has put pilfering uncalloused hands. This means that we are calling for all revolutionaries around the world to swarm with antagonistic actions and flood the streets with public demonstations.

Together, if we keep pushing, this land of chattel slavery, indigenous genocide, and foreign imperial aggression can finally be wiped out so that it will only be remembered as one of the more ugly chapters in human history. In turn, each step ushers in the freedom and the solidarity that crowds out the space of our once silent and unheard screams.

All power to the black insurgency!

Storm their vulnerable bastions of power!

Revolution now and always!

Bring the Uprising Home

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Jun 022020
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Supporting the uprising spreading across America over the police murder of George Floyd means bringing it home. We got a sustained glimpse of exactly that Sunday in Montreal, as for the first time in years, the police lost control of downtown for an extended period of time.

After the end of the organized march, a young and multi-racial crowd fought the police outside SPVM headquarters, responding to tear gas with rocks and bottles. People erected barricades and set fires to slow police movements. Over the following hours, hundreds of demonstrators continued to hold space in the street, as storefronts were smashed and goods expropriated up and down Ste-Catherine, the main shopping artery, including at Birks, a high-end jewelry store, which was also attacked with a molotov.

We’ll leave out a play-by-play of the night, to respond to a dynamic that we think could limit our capacity to resist, going forward. While Sunday proved that a wide of array of people are ready to fight back against a system that is rooted in genocide and the ongoing violence of racialized domination, some of the loudest voices during and after the action in the streets have been those clinging to “peaceful protest” as the only acceptable form of resistance.

Relying on rumors and false information, the narrative of white “outside agitators” borrows from white supremacist propaganda and erases the agency of Black people courageously resisting oppression by any means necessary. It’s a narrative aimed at dividing movements and delegitimizing our shared anger and resolve. As anarchist people of color in the United States wrote recently:

Self-pronounced leaders have tried to insinuate that anyone who desires conflict with the police after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis are “White people [who] DON’T get to use Black pain to justify living out riot fantasies.” As if the real white fantasy isn’t people of color policing their own behavior in order to save the white supremacist society from being destroyed. This is an old trick that is worth being exposed, again.

Against these narratives which make it easier for the police to maintain control and keep killing, let’s not hesitate to say clearly that the standard by which we choose how to fight will not be legality or civil-society respectability.

It’s legitimate to attack the police, an institution designed and dedicated to violently suppressing Black people’s freedom, enforcing the theft of native land, and defending those who get rich by exploiting us. By doing so, and by gaining the confidence and tactical capacity to win space and time, we show that we don’t need to accept their hold over our lives.

It’s legitimate to barricade the streets and set fires – to transform an urban environment built for policing into something that might give us a chance of success.

It’s legitimate to loot stores, because everyone should have nice things, and a world that values commercial property over Black lives continues to put people like George Floyd and Regis Korchinski-Paquet in grave danger of premature death.

These should form the starting point for all conversations about how to engage in a diversity of tactics in the streets, conversations which must also address the effects of our actions on those we’re sharing the streets with, how to keep each other safe, and the goal of developing a capacity for conflict with an understanding that we don’t all face the same level of risk.

Many of those policing other demonstrators’ actions go as far as to photograph or film them attacking the police or property, afterwards posting this information on the internet in an attempt to identify and put more people in the hands of the police. To resist this trend, we want to remind everyone present to intervene directly if you see people filming during riots; tell them to stop and if necessary make them stop. And to the brave people breaking glass and starting fires, remind one another to keep your faces covered.

A genuine insurrection is underway south of the border. While the uniquely bloody legacy of racism in the United States gives the rage boiling there a certain anchoring in geography, antagonism toward the police is undeniably universal, and anti-Black racism is deeply engrained in the history of Quebec and Canada. Will we face up to this history-bending moment and find meaningful ways to engage, to extend the revolt, or shrink into scripted, activist displays of superficial “solidarity”? The time is now to bring the uprising home.

Fascism and Antifascism during a Pandemic

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May 292020
 

Members of Portland-based anti-fascist collective PopMob and the Rosehip Medic Collective are producing hand sanitizer for distribution in the community.

From Montréal Antifasciste

The pandemic that hit the entire planet full force beginning in January 2020 has, at least temporarily, completely altered the political climate, given that the lockdown and the ban on gatherings mean that social movements cannot default to their traditional tactics, e.g., demonstrations to denounce injustice and propose solutions. Far from being some pause or time out, the pandemic constitutes, among other things, an increasingly intense political situation, during which class relations exhibit their inherent violence at its bluntest. Racialized minorities and poor neighbourhoods experience the carnage at its most brutal, domestic violence rises as the lockdown drags on, the police forces take advantage of the state of emergency to harass and abuse the people they usually target with even greater abandon, people from immigrant communities, particularly Asians, are even more stigmatized than usual, the state issues decree after decree to force large sections of the population to work in unsafe conditions for starvation wages in the name of its sacrosanct economy, and on it goes.

That being said, let’s start by taking a look at how the far right is spending its time during the pandemic before we talk about what the antifascist and antiracist movements are doing.

 

The Far Right and a Thousand and One Conspiracies

Even if the lockdown means it is quieter than usual, the far right is tripping over itself to advance conspiracy theories, each one more delusional than the last, sometimes even calling for an uprising, i.e., civil war, in the name of “the nation.” Even when largely confined to the social media universe, the brown plague remains toxic.

The far right is particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories and works overtime to spread them. According to one poll conducted in France from March 24 to 26, 2020, for example, 26 percent of the population of France believes that Covid-19 was intentionally manufactured in a laboratory (for a decent overview of the actual origin of the virus, click here). This already significant proportion of the population rises to 38 percent among Rassemblement National voters (RN, formerly the Front National, the main French far-right party). Only 32 percent of the French electorate think that the virus developed and spread naturally.

Similarly, in the US, a Pew Research Center poll conducted from March 10 to 16, 2020, found that 29 percent of the population believe that Covid-19 was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory (23 percent thinking it intentional and 6 percent believing it was an accident). As in France, it is younger and less educated people who are most prone to holding these beliefs. And, as in France, the most conservative sections of the right are the most susceptible: 21percent of Democrats believe the virus was manufactured in a laboratory, as opposed to 37 percent of Republicans, rising to 39 percent among more conservative Republicans.

The far right’s propensity for conspiracy theories is the product of an anti-intellectual and anti-scientific discourse based on the principle that globalist elites are working in the shadows (although some people on the far left share this perspective, the key influence of Marxism and materialist theory within the left means a greater tendency to prioritize structural dynamics and power relations). Furthermore, the far right employs biological metaphors when talking about “the nation,” often casting immigration as the introduction of foreign matter and pathogens —in short, as something akin to a virus. This creates a certain affinity between the far right’s xenophobic discourse and the way it understands the pandemic, essentially seeing the latter as an external threat manipulated by ill-intentioned forces rather than an unfortunate biological development.

Finally, conspiracy theories spread as a result of the contradictions and incoherencies of government policies, as well as the lack of transparency governments develop to conceal their true priorities and the errors they make in managing the pandemic. The grey areas that arise all allow various political actors to advance their prejudices and suspicions and facilitate bridge-building among conspiracy theories, including those surrounding vaccination (i.e., the anti-vaxxers) or 5G telecommunications technology.

These delusions cause the far right to vacillate between paranoia (Covid-19 was manufactured for nefarious purposes) and indifference (Covid-19is not as serious as governments or “globalist” entities like the World Health Organization [WHO] claim). Starting from there, an obvious conclusion is that the pandemic is a huge hoax and a strategic diversion allowing for the imposition of a hidden agenda: e.g., forcibly vaccinating the entire population (something that Bill Gates allegedly promotes), using phoney vaccinations to implant microchips, imposing socialism, or carrying out a coup d’état to install a “globalist” dictatorship.

 

Instrumentalizing the Pandemic

Whatever their approach, the far-right forces are using the pandemic to once again decry any renewed immigration (alleged to be responsible for the spread of the virus), to demand that the borders be closed, and to glorify “the nation” (the fact being that during the pandemic most of the far-right political forces have simply carried on trumpeting their usual cant, Marine LePen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy being cases in point.) Meanwhile, in Québec, as we recently wrote, the neo-fascist group Atalante has hung banners with slogans like“ Le Mondialisme Tue” [Globalism Kills] and “Le Vaccin Sera Nationaliste” [The Vaccine Will Be Nationalist]. In harmony with this message, right-wing journalists like Éric Duhaime have also implied that the catastrophic failure of the Legault government to contain the virus is, in fact, the fault of refugees, Duhaime  specifically linking the situation in Montreal to the irregular border crossings at Roxham Road.

Other sections of the far right go much further, notably the neo-Nazis influenced by James Mason, including the Atomwaffen Division and other protagonists of the so-called revolutionary “accelerationist” wing, who see Covid-19 as the antidote to the “great replacement” and “white genocide” and hope that the state will collapse, the idea being that this would lead in turn to an ethno-nationalist revival. From this point of view, the virus is seen as a biological weapon that can be used against ethnic and racialized minorities.

Anti-lockdown protesters in Quebec City, on May 17, 2019.

Since mid-April 2020, the political instrumentalization of the pandemic has taken on a new form, with the advent and spread of anti-lockdown demonstrations. Although participation has been infinitesimal, these demonstrations have often garnered significant media coverage. In Montréal, there was little interest and the demonstration only drew a handful of imbeciles. In Québec City, however, it did have a somewhat greater resonance. On Saturday, April 25, 2020, around one hundred people gathered outside the Assemblée Nationale to denounce the lockdown, vaccinations, and 5G technology . Then, on May 17, a convoy of between sixty and one hundred people drove from Montreal to Quebec City to protest the lockdown.

During the same period, there have been similar rallies in a number of cities in English Canada . While most of these rallies have primarily attracted people who are not active in the far right, there has been a (so far largely uncoordinated) far-right element that has taken the lead in some localities. In Calgary and Hamilton, members of the decentralized Yellow Vests movement have continued holding their weekly mini protests, integrating Covid-skeptic and anti-lockdown themes into their messaging and in some cases filming hospitals to “prove” that there is no real medical crisis. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, anti-lockdown rallies have included neo-Nazis yelling at passersby, calling them “Chicoms” (a slur for Chinese Communist), traitors, and “libtards”.

In the US, however, these demonstrations have grown quite a bit larger, benefiting from President Trump’s explicit support, including his use of Twitter to call for the “liberation” of Democratic states that had imposed a strict lockdown. Hundreds of people, in some cases thousands, have participated in car caravans, sometimes demonstrating outside of the legislature in the states in question, even pushing the envelope as far as going into the building armed to the teeth, as was the case in Michigan on Thursday, April 30, 2020. These demonstrations are of a whole cloth with neo-Nazi Timothy Wilson’s failed March 24, 2020, attempt to bomb a hospital in Benton, Missouri, to denounce the city mayor’s lockdown policy. He was killed by the FBI before he could carry out his plan.

These anti-lockdown demonstrations, where we find conspiracy theory placards next to anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist slogans, as well as Nazi flags, offer a meeting place and a potential basis of unity for the conservative right and the far-right. Far from being a spontaneous expression of the despondency caused by the lockdown, they are financed by wealthy families and Republican foundati, including the Dorr family and the Michigan Freedom Fund, which maintains a close relationship with secretary of education Betsy DeVos, et actively supported by conservative organizations like Freedom Works and the Tea Party Patriots, part of the “Save Our Country” coalition.

One organization that has played a central coordinating role in these demonstrations is American Revolution 2.0, which is not only directly tied to the organizations mentioned above but also to far-right websites, a number of which are specifically racist and promote paramilitary organizations like mymilitia.com .

The vast majority of participants in these anti-lockdown demonstrations are white, which is no accident. The fact is that Covid-19is particularly impacting ethnic and racialized minorities. In a number of US states, African American community   and Latinx communities are extremely overrepresented in the infection and death statistics. These numbers directly reflect the historical impact of social and racial inequalities in the US. African American and Latinx minorities are not only affected because they are statistically in worse health and less likely to have health insurance than the white population, but also because they are over-represented in employment sectors that cannot work from home, and are, therefore, more likely to be exposed to the virus. Similarly, centuries of genocidal policies have left Indigenous people particularly vulnerable to this pandemic. In the United States, as in Canada, many Indigenous communities have poor access to clean water and suffer from overcrowding, factors that greatly facilitate the spread of the virus. It is these very factors that are behind tragedies like the Navajo Nation currently having the highest per capita rate of Covid-19 infection in the United States.

We can, therefore, hypothesize that the whites participating in the anti-lockdown demonstrations do so, in part, because they don’t care about the carnage being experienced by minorities and are unwilling to pay the price necessary to protect them. This sacrificial logic renders the lives of minorities irrelevant. Given the givens, might it not be argued that, in the US, demonstrating against the lockdown is an expression of white privilege? Be that as it may, these demonstrations aid the spread of the virus and, therefore, actually increase the necessity of a lockdown.

Even if they are not necessarily behind them, far-right organizations see the demonstrations as fertile ground for expanding their influence. They see a way to capitalize on the situation, to clean up their image, to recruit new members, and to influence the post-pandemic era. Having supported the demonstrations on Telegram and Facebook, the far-right Proud Boys have now begun to reframe them on the basis of their visceral hostility to antifascists.

For example, they described the disruption of anti-lockdown caravans in Denver, Colorado, by nurses as antifascist actions, which from the point of view of the Proud Boys is the equivalent of anti-American. An article published on the Florida Proud Boys website was titled: “Antifa Healthcare Workers Clash with Anti-Lockdown Protesters in Colorado”. Obviously, the Proud Boys don’t know anything about the actual political views of the nurses and don’t really care about the complex issues underlying these socio-political conflicts. They are acting to both delegitimize their adversaries and to contribute to the normalization of a far-right discourse based on dichotomous categories.

The Proud Boys are adjacent to the networks that have developed a discourse around the concept of a coming second civil war in the US, which they call the “boogaloo,” referencing the 1984 film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, which they associate with wearing Hawaiian shirts… Obviously, it’s tempting to just mock this—suffice it to say, it has inspired numerous memes. Nonetheless, Tech Transparency Project, a non-profit that monitors the tech industry, has identified approximately 125 Facebook groups dedicated to the “boogaloo.” More than 60 percent of these groups were created in the last three months, i.e., since the beginning of the pandemic and the lockdown, and thousands of participants are blithely discussing weapons, explosives, military tactics, and civil war.

At this point, the far-right’s strategy does not appear to be bearing fruit. The vast majority of Europe’s far-right parties are stagnating and declining in the polls, and the various radical groupuscules remain marginal. In early May, a majority of public opinion remained favorable to the lockdown, prioritizing public health over the economy. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t underestimate the far-right’s capacity to quickly bounce back once the pandemic is under control and public debate turns to the cost of managing it. A massive rise in unemployment and years of austerity will provide them with a fertile setting. Furthermore, the significant growth of Telegram and Facebook groups associated with the far right testify to the force of attraction of the far-right discourse. That’s not going to disappear with the end of the pandemic. It is easy enough to imagine one pandemic being replaced by another; in this case a pandemic of nationalism and authoritarianism. There’s a reason for the frequent references to a “brown plague” when discussing the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

It is important to note that while the anti-lockdown demonstrations have a pernicious racism to them, the indifference to marginalized social groups has also been crystallized in the largely avoidable widespread death in long-term care facilities. These deaths are of a whole cloth with the open discussion of denying ventilators to disabled people in the event of a shortage. For example, on April 19, CBC reported:

“The Ontario guidelines also recommend withdrawal of ventilator support of those at higher mortality risk, in order to prioritize those at lower risk, depending on the level of scarcity. For example, under the most serious shortage scenario, a 60-year-old patient with moderate Parkinson’s would be refused access to a ventilator or be withdrawn from it in favour of one without this condition.”

Not surprisingly, given that this argument is utilitarian in a way the borders on eugenics, disabled people fear that this would mean they would be denied lifesaving measures if their care threatened the recovery of an able-bodied person. There is much that could be written about what it means about a society when it shows a ready willingness to sacrifice its elders and most vulnerable members at the first sign of crisis. At the very least it indicates an evaluation of human life based on productive capacity that has infiltrated popular thought as neoliberalism has shifted not only our economic and social systems but our very way of understanding the value of life.

 

For a Safe and Healthy Antiracism and Antifascism

The developments discussed above indicate the importance of continuing to monitor the far right, which means identifying the players involved, tracing the links among them, and documenting their activities, so that we are in a position to act when it becomes necessary. That said, the urgency of the situation created by the pandemic requires that the antifascist movement show solidarity and support and contribute to mutual aid projects. While far-right networks fantasize about using the virus against minorities and are embracing survivalism and stockpiling food and first aid products, far-left and antifascist networks and collectives have established systems for producing and distributing masks and antiviral gels, as well as staffing food banks. These divergent priorities and practices should serve as a rebuke to those people suffering from acute stupidity that for years have blindly repeated the line that the two extremes are simply reflections of one another, the far right and far left simply being two sides of a single coin, and other crap of that sort.

Mutual aid has a long history, stretching back as far as the “natural selection” described by Charles Darwin. In his classic work Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published as a series of articles in the nineteenth century, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin attempted to demonstrate the central importance of mutual aid for survival and prosperity, not only among humans but for a significant number of species. He wrote:

“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace and prosperity; but when even the greatest calamities befell men—when whole countries were laid waste by wars, and whole populations were decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke of tyranny—the same tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes in the towns; it still kept them together, and in the long run it reacted even upon those ruling, fighting, and devastating minorities which dismissed it as sentimental nonsense.”

The current epoch is not an exception to this rule, and this most recent calamity simply brings us once again face to face with the hardships that humanity has already encountered and overcome numerous times over the course of its history, as well as returning us to the principles that always underlie the solutions developed to address the recurrent challenges: solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid. In the face of the incompetence exhibited by governments and in opposition to the cruelty proposed by the ruling classes, it is more often than not at a community level that neighbours and autonomous mutual aid networks develop the most effective responses to the difficulties faced by the most vulnerable among us during periods of crisis. This is summed up in the title of a book by the feminist Rebecca Solnit, who was inspired by Kropotkin: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (Penguin 2009); also see her article on the subject published in The Guardian).

Members of Portland-based anti-fascist collective PopMob are producing hand sanitizer for distribution in the community.

A concrete example among many worth noting would be the work of the antifascist collective PopMob PopMob, in Portland, Oregon, which, working together with the Rosehip Medic Collective, is producing antiviral gel for distribution to frontline workers, to a number of community groups, and in poor neighbourhoods. Their production line, with a team of some ten people, works four to six hours a day, six days a week, at Q Space, an LGBTQ2SIA+ community space. All production is paid for with donations received by the Rosehip Medic Collective and through a GoFundMe campaign. As Effie Baum, a PopMob spokesperson, explains:

“A big part of anti-fascism is community defence and supporting your community. This was a way to provide supplies to communities who had no other way of getting them. There’s a lot of power in people power, community building.”

This reasoning presupposes a redefinition of what we mean by antifascist militancy, one that goes beyond macho clichés that focus on physical confrontation with far-right militants. It means opening our perspective up to genuinely include taking care of others—i.e., the work of “caring”—as part of antifascist action. Radical antifascism is certainly about struggle, but it is also about caring and solidarity.

Extending this reasoning to the terrain of struggle, another interesting example, this one from Europe, is the People’s Solidarity Brigades, which denounce government neoliberalism while distributing masks, antiviral gel, and food to people in precarious situations and those working on the frontlines. Just as the antifascist movement talks about popular self-defence when responding to the far right, these brigades root their undertaking within the continuity of previous struggles and talk about health and safety as forms of self-defense in the face of the pandemic. Initially formed in Milan, Italy, the brigades rapidly spread to numerous European cities. In France, the idea was taken up by militants in Action antifasciste Paris-banlieue and collectives of undocumented people like the Gilets Noirs and, by early May, counted approximately 750 members in Île-de-France, where the brigades were organized by neighbourhood . As a callout for the creation of brigades in France explains :

“We cannot simply wait passively either for tomorrow or for fresh institutional interventions. We cannot rely on those who are primarily responsible for the dramatic situation we find ourselves in. We cannot trust those who, for far too long, have managed hospitals as businesses that must monetized for maximum profit. No, the state can at best manage the crisis. As in all situations, we must rely on our own initiative.

“. . . [A]s revolutionary activists from the wave of movement over the past few years—from the spring struggle against the labour law to the Yellow Vests insurrection—we saw this disaster coming. Caregivers have been mobilizing for many months to denounce the lack of beds and resources. Workers die every year at work due to lack of protection. Elderly people die in completely unacceptable conditions of isolation devoid of dignity. Everything that we are now seeing in the blinding light of day already existed yesterday, shrouded in media darkness; it is the life of those whom the bourgeoisie and the mainstream media treat as nonexistent—nonexistent for a social organization defined by private interest, profit, and competition, within which an increasingly large section of the population, that without which life itself cannot carry on, counts for nothing. . .

“Given that large-scale measures are undoubtedly necessary, even vital, we urgently need to vastly increase the level of autonomous popular organization to give substance to the watchword of self-defence, i.e., we must immediately begin working in solidarity for and with the populations most affected by the crisis, those who are of no structural interest to the state. To do so, we must also remove the question of care from the private sphere within which it has been confined for centuries just as it has been determined by a gendered and racialized hierarchy, and make it the springboard for rethinking our collective organization and our social reproduction.

“Our task in this context is not to replace humanitarian organizations but to orient the already existing disparate groups and those that have sprung up since the announcement of the lockdown around common objectives—in short, to put them on a politically antagonistic trajectory that assumes a break with the existing capitalist order as the strategic objective, with popular self-organization on a territorial basis as the origin of effective counterpower. . . . The solidarity we are talking about is not an empty principle meant to transcend antagonisms but, rather, something that will allow us to strengthen our offensive capacity. . .

“Self-defense from below, based on elements of mutual aid, with a particular focus on people in extremely precarious situations and those who are the victims of isolation and repression calls into question the idea that the defense of our communities can only be ensured by the establishment.

“This health-related self-defence should not, therefore, constitute a perspective of struggle limited to the duration of the epidemic emergency, and even less should it be thought of as a sectoral struggle. . . . Our “health and safety” self-defence is, as such, actually popular self-defence, in that it constitutes the opportunity to rethink our relationship to the modalities of social reproduction as a whole, that is to say, to the organized way that day in and day out, we produce and reproduce our lives. In that light, we must also question ourselves about the nature of the life we would like to join together to produce.

“Resistance is vital!”

In many cities, antifascists are at the heart of these projects, helping to build alliances with other autonomous groups within the far left. For example, in Lyon, the Groupe antifasciste Lyon et environ (GALE) has allied with anti-gentrification collectives like La Guillotière n’est pas à vendre and l’Espace communal de la Guillotière. Telegram threads were quickly established, with a telephone number to be called, and there is thread on Discord to coordinate collecting and distributing food . Or, to offer another example, in Switzerland, Action Antifasciste Genève and the Jeunes Révolutionnaires Genève created the Geneva People’s Solidarity Brigade – Yvan Leyvraz in memory of an international brigade member assassinated in Nicaragua in 1986.

Members of the Cooperation Jackson solidarity network, in Mississippi, produce 3D-printed masks for community distribution.

Beyond antifascist groups, left-wing forces in racialized communities have taken the lead in filling the vacuum created by Trump’s policies of neglect. In Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative network of groups in the state’s capital city, with its roots in the New Afrikan nationalist movement, has been working for many years to establish an economic basis for autonomy from racist state and federal governments. As early as April, Cooperation Jackson was producing both hand-sewn and 3D-printed masks for community distribution. Other communist and nationalist organizations within Black and Brown communities across the US have similarly been providing free PPE and organizing food distribution to vulnerable members of the community.

Members of the Hoodstock collective, in Montreal North, are putting together health kits for community distribution.

In Montréal, while many antifascist militants are directly involved in the various mutual aid networks on an individual basis, one of the key autonomous initiatives was developed by Hoodstock, an antiracist collective in the poor Montréal North neighbourhood, which has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. Primarily focussed on the distribution of health and safety products and food to those in need, the Hoodstock campaign, nonetheless, explicitly places itself within the larger struggle for equality and social justice, as its callout makes clear :

“A health and safety crisis like the one we are currently experiencing shines a dramatic light on the systemic inequalities experienced by the population in Montréal North. Our borough is characterized by social problems that the authorities should have noticed sooner: insufficient health services and social services, food deserts, underfunded community organizations, a lack of alternatives to public transit, a lack of internet access, rundown housing, etc. Furthermore, Montréal North has an extremely high population density, which favours the spread of a virus. That’s why Hoodstock is taking action.”

Photo de Solidarité sans frontière/Solidarity across border/Solidaridad sin frontera.Also in Montréal, our comrades at Solidarity Across Borders, who ceaselessly denounce the detention centers for migrants, organized a caravan on April 19, 2020, to demand immediate freedom for all those being detained and status for all migrants . Imprisoning migrants is always unacceptable, but this is even more the case during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a similar vein, Solidarity Across Borders launched a fundraising campaign to support people without papers and help them to safely lock down during the pandemic:

“Our current system discriminates against migrants based on their immigration status, but the virus does not. If the recommended measures of physical distancing and self-isolation are to be effective, they must be accessible to all. This discrimination is untenable and cruel, as it puts an undue burden on the most vulnerable members of our community to contribute to the health and well-being of us all. Asking someone without status to make a choice between no longer being able to pay for their basic necessities or continuing to work is devastatingly unfair. And ultimately, this system puts us all at risk. The health of undocumented and precarious workers is the health of everyone, our lives are interconnected.”

This sort of campaign reminds us that respecting the lockdown and preventing the exacerbation of the pandemic requires specific social conditions. In short, it reminds us that health and safety issues are inseparable from social issues in general.

Beyond local specificities, the priorities are the same everywhere: find and distribute health and safety products, masks and gloves, non-perishable foodstuffs, books and toys, computers, etc. It is not simply of matter of responding to the pandemic with self-organization and mutual aid. Our response must also be political in nature, laying the groundwork for the struggles that will follow the end of the pandemic. We must also act to occupy the terrain and isolate the far-right forces, to make their post-lockdown remobilization efforts more difficult.

The political dimension can sometimes mean that particular mutual aid efforts are met with police repression. For example, On May 1, 2020, members of the People’s Solidarity Brigade in Brigade Montreuil, east of Paris, were kettled and harassed by the police while distributing food baskets; almost all of them were fined for “demonstrating.”  It’s worth noting in passing that Amnesty International has denounced illegal practices on the part of the French police during the lockdown, in particular, the illegal use of force, the use of dangerous intervention techniques, making racist statements, and the excess of controls in certain neighbourhoods (poor neighbourhoods are obviously subjected to greater control than bourgeois neighbourhoods). A similar situation has also been denounced in Montréal.

 

Some Thoughts About What Comes After the Pandemic

Given the nature of the pandemic, it’s hard to really imagine what will come after it, but we can nonetheless offer a few observations. To begin with, the stratospheric amounts spent to stabilize major corporations and, although much less so, to support the numerous people who have lost their jobs because of the lockdown, as well as the profound economic crisis that has already begun, mean that we can anticipate a brutal backlash in the months and years to come. All the rainbows in the world won’t protect populations that are already in a vulnerable and precarious situation because of aggressive austerity policies. The mutual aid networks that have appeared in recent months are essential and will be called upon to play a role in the post-pandemic period. As stated in the People’s Solidarity Brigades’ statement quoted above, defending our health and safety must go beyond the pandemic and the specific issues it raises to challenge the system of social reproduction and capitalism itself. Tomorrow, more than ever, our antifascism must be anti-capitalist!

The pandemic has also made it very clear just how dependent our societies are on the work of women, racialized people, and immigrants for their very survival. While the far right delights in macho fantasies and sees women as weak creatures who could not survive without men to protect them, it is precisely these women who are in the trenches of this pandemic, who do the essential work to keep our health care system afloat, and who pay the price for doing so. Furthermore, contrary to most of the world, in Québec, Covid-19 is hitting women harder than men; according to the Institut national de la santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), in early May 2020, women constituted 60 percent of infections and 54 of death. In the aftermath of the pandemic, it would be completely unacceptable for women to once again have their key contributions rendered invisible and their work devalued. Struggling for women’s work to be recognized is not only indispensable because it is just but is also necessary if we seek to prevent right-wing conservatives and the far right from reducing women’s liberation to a question of secularism, while downplaying the social and material dimensions of equal rights.

Similarly, while nationalists of every stripe talk ceaselessly about closing the borders, it is people who have immigrated who are in the frontlines at the hospitals, in the long-term care centres, and at the supermarkets, allowing the rest of us to lock down. Nonetheless, we’ve yet to hear any government acknowledge the benefits we gain from immigration and undocumented people during their daily press scrums, and, until we get some indication to the contrary, there’s no reason to believe that these “guardian angels” won’t be deported once the pandemic is under control. The independent MNA Catherine Fournier tabled a motion calling upon the Assemblée Nationale to recognize “the contribution of hundreds of asylum seekers, primarily of Haitian origin, who are currently working as health care attendants in Québec’s CHSLDs.” Fournier has also called upon the Canadian government “to quickly normalize their immigration status”, receiving majority support from all parties except the CAQ. Asked about this at a later press conference, François Legault disingenuously sidestepped the issue by suggesting that journalists not “confuse the separate issues of refugees, people who cross at Roxham Road, and the Haitian community”. Far from separate, these issues are, of course, intimately interconnected. [EDIT: Following widespread public outcry, on May 25th, Legault announced that his government was willing to “consider” allowing those workers to apply as immigrants rather than asylum seekers.]

It is incumbent upon us, beginning now, but, above all, continuing after the pandemic, to consistently stress both the benefits and the necessity of immigration. Faced with governments and nationalist forces that instrumentalize immigration for economic and/or electoral purposes, we must work to broaden the antiracist and antifascist front to effectively demand freedom of movement regardless of market needs and the mass normalization of status for both those with irregular status and non-status people.

We must also anticipate an ongoing concentration of state power in the name of controlling the pandemic, using emergency measures and instituting various far-reaching mechanisms for monitoring the population. While the identification and tracking of infected people can play an important role in preventing epidemics, we nonetheless seriously doubt that states and multinationals will use the data and information in a sound and disinterested way, but instead anticipate that they will use it control the population under the guise of addressing health and safety issues, which makes the struggle to maintain autonomous spaces beyond the scope of surveillance absolutely essential.

Finally, as it is likely the spectre of Covid-19 will return regularly to haunt us and that certain social distancing measures will remain in place for many months to come, possibly even many years, we need to find new ways of organizing and disrupting the dominant social order’s business as usual.

From Embers: History of Epidemics in Canadian Prisons

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May 242020
 

From From Embers

In the context of ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks in Canadian prisons and jails, I was curious about other times in history that prisoners have faced similar situations and especially times when prisoners have been released as a result. Today’s interview is with a local prison historian about epidemics and public health in Canadian prisons, mostly about the 19th and early 20th century. Also some stories about prisoners being released, what health care was like inside and outside of prison walls, and what kind of world people were returning to.

Family Members and Advocates Call for Action after the Death of a Prisoner at Bordeaux

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May 212020
 

From Anti-Carceral Group

20 May, Montreal – In the wake of today’s announcement that a 72-year-old prisoner at Bordeaux has died of COVID-19, family members and prisoner advocates are calling for immediate and significant actions to keep prisoners and the community safe. In doing so, they reject Minister of Public Security Geneviéve Guilbault’s claim at today’s press briefing that the preventive measures implemented by her ministry are working and that nothing more needs to be done.

Bordeaux is the provincial prison hardest hit by COVID-19 anywhere in Canada. The first case at the prison was recorded on April 24th. Since then, the number of prisoners infected has risen to 92 and the number of staff infected has risen to 35. In spite of the worsening situation, the response of prison officials and the Ministry of Public Security has been lackluster. Reports from inside suggest that prison guards have failed to wear masks and gloves consistently, while prisoners have never been provided adequate personal protective equipment. More importantly, prison staff have failed to provide testing or health care when prisoners have exhibited symptoms. Indeed, the deceased prisoner, believed to be Robert Langevin, had been deathly ill for more than a week before his death, and was never provided the care he needed.

“The circumstances surrounding this death are more than troubling. The Ministry of Public Security has demonstrated through its inaction that it is indifferent to the conditions of prisoners in this dangerous time,” said Jean-Louis Nguyen, whose partner is incarcerated at Bordeaux. “Bordeaux prison failed to provide adequate care to Mr. Langevin, despite repeated complaints from him regarding his state of health for the three days leading up to his death. This death was preventable and, in my eyes, scandalous.”

Rather than providing health care, the major response to the COVID-19 crisis at Bordeaux has been to confine prisoners to their cells 24 hours per day. Many prisoners have been on 24-hour lockdown since April 24th. This has meant no showers, no television, no reading material, and nothing to do. They were also unable to make phone calls to family members until May 12, when the prison began providing detainees a 5-minute phone call every two days.

24-hour confinement, in addition to violating prisoner’s human rights, also aggravates their physical and mental health. “From the start, the prison has put the health of detainees in danger and has never provided the care they need,” said a woman whose partner is in pretrial detention in Bordeaux. “My partner is in a sector that has been on 24-hour confinement since April 28. He suffers from chest pain and sought medical attention, but received nothing. Respect for human rights means improving health practices, providing medical care, and massively reducing the prison population.”

Prisoners at Bordeaux are forcibly exposed to COVID-19 and denied appropriate health care. Many prisoners feel they have been left to die. “We’re people too and we’re clearly being left here to die,“ said one prisoner. “No one is coming up with a real plan to stop COVID from spreading in here. We fear for our lives now more than ever.”

The concerns of prisoners are mirrored by their family members outside. “The prison treats people like animals,” said Valéry Goudreau, whose partner is on remand at Bordeaux. “My partner is sick, they refuse to take care of him, and the guards have been refusing him food for four days now because he will not get on his knees to receive the tray.”

The death of a prisoner should be a moment to reflect on the measures the Quebec government and prison officers have implemented to keep prisoners and the community safe. While Geneviève Guilbault believes that her ministry has taken appropriate measures and that nothing needs to change, family members and prisoner advocates believe otherwise. “From the beginning, people have been calling for the release of prisoners to allow proper social distancing,” noted Ted Rutland, a member of the Anti-Carceral Group.  “Ontario has released more than 3,000 prisoners, and four other provinces have released 25-45% of their prison populations. Quebec refuses to take such steps, even as Quebec’s prisons are the hardest-hit in the country and 75% of provincial prisoners are awaiting trial and could be released on bail.”

While MM. Guilbault announced on May 6th that a small number of prisoners would be eligible for release, these numbers are far too small to make a difference. “We now have proof that the minister’s announcement on May 6 was insufficient and ineffective on the ground,” said Jean-Luis Nguyen. “As a loved one, I urge the authorities to intervene, once and for all, to prevent such a tragedy from happening again within these walls. Quebec can no longer afford to continue to neglect incarcerated people.”

For more information contact:

Anti-Carceral Group
anticarceralgroup@riseup.net

As Laval Detention Centre Empties, CBSA Pushes Tracking Bracelets on Migrants

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May 142020
 

From Solidarity Across Borders

Community Update

#FreeThemAll #StatusForAll #HungerStrikeLaval #BordeauxHungerStrike

After two months of resistance by detainees and their supporters, the Laval Immigration Holding Centre now stands almost empty. Only 2 men and 1 woman remain inside, watched over by dozens of guards. While the struggle continues to empty this prison entirely, and to ensure it never reopens, we now confront other ways the state controls migrants and is even pushing forward new forms of surveillance under cover of the pandemic.

At the end of March, detainees in Laval’s migrant prison (run by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA)) undertook a brave, 8-day hunger strike demanding immediate release. Through written statements and daily audio updates, their call gathered support from Halifax to Vancouver. While the government refused to publicly concede to the demand to free them all – even after guards tested positive for COVID in both the Montreal and Toronto migrant prisons – the detainees’ releases were accelerated through individual detention review hearings. With deportations suspended, there seem to have been no new detentions and the centre has emptied.

However, migrants are also imprisoned in provincial jails. Quebec’s jails have the highest COVID-19 infection rate of any province, but the government has refused calls for a comprehensive release plan. Instead, guards have used pepper spray and force against prisoners who have taken action to protest the life-threatening conditions being forced on them. On May 5th, prisoners in Quebec’s Bordeaux jail responded to these conditions by beginning a brave hunger strike that continues at the time of this writing. Some migrant detainees have been transferred from Leclerc and Rivière-des-Prairies (RDP) provincial prisons to the Laval migrant prison and then released. As of April 28th, 15 men remained in RDP on immigration holds while over 100 more remain in provincial jails across the country.

For many migrants, getting out of the detention centre has not led to much greater security or freedom. Release often involves large cash bonds (in effect, some of the poorest in society are paying thousands of dollars to the state to secure their freedom). Many still face deportation and in the meantime live in precarious housing with no income. Work permit processing is currently suspended for those requiring biometric data and welfare takes weeks or even months to process for those who are eligible. Conditions of release may include frequent reporting to CBSA, living with one’s bondsperson, and even curfews and confinement to defined area perimeters. Moreover, through its new “Alternatives to Detention” programme, the CBSA is outsourcing control of migrants to third parties such as the John Howard Society, which oversees punitive parole-like “case management” programmes in Quebec, sometimes in combination with GPS-voice recognition tracking.

Under cover of the pandemic, the CBSA is now also attempting to introduce ankle bracelets to GPS-track migrants in Quebec, “offering” it to several detainees as the price of freedom. We do not know whether anyone has already been released under this condition. While lawyers can fight the bracelet being imposed on their clients, the legal fightback is time-consuming and may not appear worth the effort to all lawyers.

As Quebec moves to send more workers into dangerous conditions during the pandemic, construction work on CBSA’s new migrant prison in Laval is set to resume as well. While people continue to get sick and die in prisons and detention centres across the country, and while so many are struggling to get by, it is appalling that the state would choose to continue the construction of a new prison and divert resources into intensifying surveillance of migrants.

Free them all! Status for all!

Bordeaux Hunger Strike

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May 142020
 

From Anti-Carceral Group

Edit: On May 11, 2020 a group of prisoners at Bordeaux, who aim to create a prisoners committee, communicated a series of demands to their lawyer. You can read it here.

On May 5, a group of prisoners at the Etablissement de détention Montréal, better known as Bordeaux prison, began a hunger strike in response to the rapidly escalating COVID-19 crisis at the institution. As of May 8, the hunger strike has spread to at least four sectors of the prison and other acts of resistance have proliferated.

No formal demands have been presented to the public, as the conditions inside presently make it almost impossible for prisoners to communicate with one another. However, individual prisoners have communicated a series of demands. These include:

  • Provide prisoners with masks and hand sanitizer, ensure that prison staff wear their masks and gloves at all times, and ensure proper sanitation of cells and common spaces.

  • Provide prisoners with up-to-date and accurate information about COVID-19 infections and testing at Bordeaux and the safety measures implemented (including the isolation of infected prisoners).

  • Test all prisoners and prison staff for COVID-19 immediately and continually.

  • Expand access to medical release (for prisoners who have been sentenced) and provide expedited bail hearings (for those detained pre-trail). Release as many prisoners as possible to allow social distancing to be practiced in the community and better allow it within the prison (for those not released).

  • End 24-hour lockdown for prisoners who are not infected or symptomatic of COVID-19. Allow prisoners time on the range, and ensure daily access to prison telephones.

  • This list will be updated if and when a series of collective demands are made public

Background information

The dangerous conditions that prompted the strike at Bordeaux have been building for weeks. Bordeaux has quickly become the provincial prison second hardest-hit by COVID-19 in Canada (after Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton, Ontario). The first positive COVID-19 test among Bordeaux prisoners was registered on April 24. As of May 12, the number COVID-infected prisoners has risen to 55, while at least 30 prison staff have tested positive. From the beginning of the pandemic, moreover, prisoners have criticized the lack of COVID-related safety protocols implemented in the prison, as well as the lack of information provided to prisoners.

Information about the hunger strike is limited and difficult to obtain. Media reporting has largely relied on information from the Quebec prison guards union (Syndicat des agents de la paix en services correctionels du Québec), a deeply unreliable source. Information from prisoners is more reliable, but due to the full or partial lockdown in place (depending on the sector), it has been difficult for prisoners to get information out and, more than this, to ascertain what is happening across the prison’s multiple sectors.

The following provides the most comprehensive and reliable picture of the Bordeaux prison hunger strike, based on information relayed from prisoners to their family members, lawyers, and members of the Anti-Carceral Group.

The origins and spread of the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 virus first hit Sector E, which cages 170 people. This sector is where most prisoners who work in the kitchen and serve food are detained. The possibility that infected prisoners had made or touched the food served to the entire prison caused widespread concern when the news spread.

Sector E was placed on 24-hour a day lockdown (prisoners are confined to their cells) on April 24th. According to the most recent information, it remains on lockdown. Prisoners have no access to showers or prison telephones. Officially, they continue to have once-a-week access to the cantine (with goods delivered to their cells), but reports suggest that certain floors have missed cantine at least one week. Family members outside have been unable to contact their loved ones and have received no information from prison staff, including whether or not their loved one is infected. Some family members have been sending written letters, but do not know if the letters are being received and have not received any letters in return. One family member was finally told on May 8th that letters are being received, but that sending letters in return is prohibited.

Some lawyers who have clients in Sector E have been able to arrange a 10-minute phone call with their client. This has required persistent requests, in writing and by phone, to prison staff. In cases where they have been granted a phone call, a prison guard provides a cellular phone to the prisoner to have the 10-minute call from their cell.

It is unclear how many prisoners in Sector E have been tested. Reports suggest that prisoners in the sector who worked in the kitchen were quickly transferred to Sector A, without having been tested. A report from a prisoner suggests that, by the end of the day on May 8th, nearly all prisoners in that sector had finally been tested.

By May 2, the virus had spread to Sector C, which cages 180 people. The sector was immediately placed on lockdown, with the same restrictions as Sector E. The remainder of the prison was also placed on 23-hour per day lockdown, with prisoners permitted to leave their cells, but not their range, one hour per day. Since May 7, these restrictions have been loosened in Sector B, with prisoners allowed out of their cells for 4 hours per day.

On the evening of May 8th, some prisoners in Sector E and C were finally allowed to make a 5-minute telephone call – their first communication with the outside world in 15 days. As with calls to lawyers, this involved a prison guard providing a cellular phone to the prisoner to make the call.

Despite the dire situation, prison staff do not consistently wear masks and gloves when in proximity to prisoners, and there is no proper sanitation of the cells or ranges. A report from a prisoner on May 8th suggests that guards are finally wearing masks and gloves, but that prisoners still do not have access to PPE. Sectors E and C (and perhaps others) have been periodically deprived of running water for long stretches of time, making cleaning and using the toilet impossible. It is unclear whether guards are tested for COVID-19.

Guards also taunt prisoners, saying they will be infected and allowed to die. Guards in Sector C are demanding that prisoners kneel on the ground to receive their meals; a prisoner with hearing problems, who did not comprehend the order, has missed several meals as a result. A guard in Sector C taunted an 18 year-old detainee by showing him a cell phone and saying he had his mother on the line, and then walking away. The stress level for prisoners continues to mount, and multiple prisoners have expressed that they feel they are being left to die.

The hunger strike and other resistance

In response to the increasingly dangerous situation, acts of resistance at Bordeaux have proliferated. On the morning May 5, prisoners in Sector G began a hunger strike, refusing to eat the meal served to them. By the evening of May 5, prisoners on other wings had joined the strike.

Reports on which sectors are participating in the strike are inconsistent. Multiple sources have confirmed the participation of Sectors D and G. One source, a prisoner in Section B, claims sector B is participating as well. Some prisoners, while refusing to eat the meals served to them, continue to eat food from the cantine.

There are also reports of other acts of resistance at Bordeaux. The source of these reports is the prison guards union, and should therefore be treated with caution. The reported acts of resistance include: breaking windows, spitting on guards, breaking objects in cells, and flooding the ranges with water. Prisoners in Sector E were told their 24-hour per day lockdown would end on May 11, after 17 days. When the lockdown was not lifted, the prisoners reportedly set fire to toilet paper and magazines and overflowed their toilets. The prison responded by shutting off the water.

On May 10, a noise demonstration took place outside Bordeaux. A caravan of 30 cars, including three people with family members in Bordeaux, drove to the prison, honked their horns and waved protest signs to show support for the prisoners and denounce the inaction of the Quebec government.

The response of the Quebec Ministry of Public Security to the escalating COVID-19 crisis at Bordeaux has been minimal. On May 6, the Minister of Public Security, Geneviève Guilbault announced that certain categories of prisoners would be eligible for medical release. Her announcement specified that such releases might be possible for prisoners convicted of non-violent offences, with less than 30 days remaining on their sentence, with health complications. This announcement offers nothing to the 75% of Bordeaux prisoners who are being held pre-trial (and therefore have not been sentenced), and Quebec has consistently refused to follow the lead of provinces like Ontario and Nova Scotia in expediting bail hearings to release remanded prisoners.

 

2019 in review

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May 102020
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

In 2019, the far right in Québec was a lot quieter than it had been in 2018 and 2017, the year that Montréal Antifasciste was formed. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • the CAQ taking power in October 2018 demobilized a certain number of members in the organized groups, who found themselves with a government that was at least partially sympathetic to their identitarian demands (of course, this is not to in any way suggest that these far-right ideas and currents have magically disappeared);
  • major internal conflicts that had been building for some time finally exploded in the past year, particularly within La Meute but also within various groupuscules, including the Gardiens du Québec (LGDQ) and Groupe Sécurité Patriote (GSP), destabilizing the most important and best structured groups;
  • taking advantage of the weakening of the key groups, a certain number of marginal figures and “problematic leaders” (for example, Pierre Dion of the Quebec “Gilets jaunes” (Yellow Vests), Luc Desjardins and Michel Meunier of LGDQ, as well as other distasteful individuals like Diane Blain) have played a more important role, further discrediting and demobilizing the national-populist far right;
  • the sustained work of antifascists in identifying ad denouncing the more radical elements, meaning, the full-on fascists and neo-Nazis in Québec’s far right, which doubtless took the wind out of the sails of part of the base supporting Atalante and the alt-right groupuscules;
  • the antiracist and antifascist movement also continued its sustained mobilization against the national-populist current, particularly what was its key vehicle throughout 2019, the Vague bleue.

The decline in activity on Québec’s far right doesn’t signal a victory for antifascist forces. To the contrary, with a majority populist government in the Assemblée Nationale, a government that moved rapidly in its first year in power to pass the racist Bill 21 on state secularism, as well as gagging debate to adopt a variety of anti-immigrant measures, it is reasonable to postulate that the right-wing forces are simply taking a breather, because they feel they’ve achieved some of their main goals. That said, the relative calm has been an opportunity for us to do the work necessary to deepen and refine our analysis, which has led us to define two broad tendencies on the far right. (For more, see Between National Populism and Neofascism: The State of the Far Right in Québec in 2019.)

Now we’re going to take the opportunity present an overview of the most important groups active on the Québec far right in 2019 and of their key actions up to the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, which we can presume will be a key turning point (and not just for them).

///

 

The Nationalist-Populists

The Gilets jaunes du Québec (GJQ) and Pierre Dion

Part of the core of the so-called “Gilets jaunes du Québec”, in Montréal for the Pride parade, on August 18, 2019, where they hoped to heckle Justin Trudeau.

The GJQ is made up of a handful of identitarian militants with no ties to any organized group who share as a common denominator a “post-factual” and conspiratorial approach (the sort that suggests that G5 technology is part of a New World Order plot, to provide just one example) and an intellectual vapidity (Fred Pitt, Iwane “Akim” Blanchet, Michel “Piratriote” Ethier, and their ilk). They come together in different tiny groups networked together in different areas of Québec—at most there are two dozen of them in Montréal. The GJQ took shape on Facebook in December 2018 on the basis of a shared interest in the French Gilets jaunes. Their understanding of that movement is, however, entirely incorrect. They mistakenly think that it is a revolt against the “globalist” elite. They met online in December 2018, and, in 2019, they began assembling under the rubric of the GJQ in front of the TVA building in Montréal on the first Saturday of every month to denounce the network’s biased journalism. (Far be it from us to defend TVA or any other organ of the Québecor group, which we consider one of the primary vectors for the retreat into identitarianism and xenophobia that we have witnessed since the so-called reasonable accommodations crisis of 2007 and the resultant rise of national-populism in recent years. Whether the result of the obfuscation introduced by various conspiracy theories or of a basic intellectual mediocrity, the so-called Gilets jaunes du Québec don’t seem to understand that TVA and the Journal de Montréal are objectively their allies in consolidating an identitarian movement in Québec. It’s worth noting that the first Vague bleue also took place in front of TVA in Montréal, on May 4, 2019.)

Luc Desjardins and Pierre Dion, of the “Gilets jaunes du Québec”.

Some of the more strident Gilets jaunes (Michel Meunier and Luc Desjardins) subsequently joined the groupuscule known as les Gardiens du Québec (LGDQ, see below) and were among the most committed Vague bleue militants.

The uncategorizable crank Pierre Dion, who first appeared on our radar in 2018 when he tried to organize a and anti-immigrant demonstration in Laval, and who, in 2019, became widely known as a “troll” thanks to a Télé-Québec report, has been a sort of Gilets jaunes figurehead. (For more, see Report Back on the March 16 Solidarity Vigil/Counter-Demo in Montréal, March 16, 2019.)

On August 18, hoping to be able to heckle Justin Trudeau, Pierre Dion and a handful of Gilets jaunes du Québec knuckleheads went to Montréal’s Pride parade and harassed the participants.

 

The Gardiens du Québec (LGDQ)

(Left to right, wearing white t-shirts): Jean-Marc Lacombe, Stéfane Gauthier, Carl Dumont and Luc Desjardins, of the so-called “Gardiens du Québec”. Centre (with the blue hoodie), Jonathan Héroux, aka John Hex.

LGDQ is a small group of fifteen or so militants organized in the Bécancour/Trois-Rivières region. The group is centered around the couple Martine Tourigny and Stéfane Gauthier, and most members seem to be part of their extended family. Most likely, the members come from La Horde, an ephemeral La Meute splinter group. LGDQ has a team of medics and a security team judiciously dubbed the SOT (Sécurité opérationnelle sur le terrain [operational security in the field]; in reality this is the same gaggle of wannabe vigilante weirdos assembled by Stéfane Gauthier to “protect” national-populist gatherings.)

By rallying some Montréal militants (primarily members of the Gilets jaunes du Québec) and collaborating with John Hex (Jonathan Héroux, a militant with close ties to Storm Alliance), LGDQ became the main organizing force behind the Vague bleue in Montréal (in May) and in Trois-Rivières (in July).

Over the course of the year, LGDQ began to crumble under the toxic and racist influence of Michel “Mickey Mike” Meunier, who, most notably, recruited Joey McPhee (alias Joe Arcand, a neo-Nazi poser) into the group. Along with Luc Desjardins, he was probably behind the sad little gathering at the foot of the cross on Mont Royal in November 2019. From what we could see, this “demonstration” only included four individuals, all members of LGDQ, i.e., Michel Meunier, Luc Desjardins, Nathalie Vézina, and Joey McPhee. The group was apparently “all worked up” by a (false) rumour that McGill University was going to purchase and dismantle the cross on the mountain. No doubt in the hope of making the best of the situation, the “guardians” of Québec took the time to take selfies while doing Hitler salutes before descending.

(From left to right) Michel Meunier, Luc Desjardins, Nathalie Vézina and Joey McPhee, of the  “Gardiens du Québec”, do the nazi salute on the Mont Royal, November 3, 2019.

On November 22, a few days after their “masterstroke” on the Mont Royal, LGDQ got all worked up again. That day, a demonstration was called at Victoria Square against “l’ensemble des politiques identitaires portées par Simon Jolin-Barrette et la CAQ” [all the identitarian policies of Simon Jolin-Barette and the CAQ], particularly targeting reforms to the PEQ (the Programme de l’expérience québécoise, which allows foreign students to more rapidly be accepted in Québec, making them admissible as permanent residents in Canada). This demonstration was organized by UQAM student associations and the Syndicat des étudiants et étudiantes employé-e-s. About 150 people participated. Eight militants from the LGDQ and the Gilets jaunes du Québec orbit gathered a few metres from the demonstration, shouting “You must submit” and “Québec is secular” at the student protesters. As they approached the demonstration, LGDQ was confronted by some antifascists who were present. After a little bit of commotion, the police intervened to separate the two groups. The demonstration then proceeded without further incident but with a heavy police presence.

All year, a conflict was slowly brewing between LGDQ and the Groupe Sécurité Patriote (GSP—we’ll get to them below), until finally the two groups traded blows during the demonstration in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle on October 26.

Michel “Mickey Mike” Meunier

It is worth dwelling for a moment on the case of Michel “Mickey Mike” Meunier. In 2019, he established himself as one of the most active far-right militants in Montréal, and certainly one of the nuttiest of this collection of fruitcakes. Throughout the year, but particularly during the period leading up to the Vague bleue, Meunier was in the habit of wandering the streets of the Centre-Sud and Hochelaga neighbourhoods of Montréal tearing down or covering up any sign of a left presence, replacing it with stickers, posters, or graffiti of a racist and identitarian nature. He also posted numerous fairly surreal videos exhibiting an unhealthy obsession with antifascists—for example, one which showed him pissing on an antifascist sticker in the toilets of the Comité social Centre-Sud. In December, Meunier was arrested (but seemingly never charged) for threats he made online against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Since Meunier’s arrest, the “guardians” have been extremely discreet, which can be seen most clearly online. Meunier resurfaced recently on Facebook in a major beef with Storm Alliance, which he accuses of having betrayed him. . . He has also returned to his habitual identitarian stickering in Montréal’s Centre-Sud neighbourhood.

 

A sample of the stickers posted by Michel “Mickey Mike” Meunier all over the Centre-Sud and Hochelaga neighbourhoods of Montréal.

 

The “Vague bleue”

(From left to right) Guillaume Bélanger, Stéfane Gauthier, Michel Meunier, Jonathan Héroux and Luc Desjardins were some of the most enthusiastic promoters of the “Vague bleue”.

The so-called Vague bleue (Blue Wave) was primarily a mobilization of the national-populist groups that existed in 2019, at least of those outside of La Meute’s orbit as the latter group increasingly lost its pull. At its origin, the Vague bleue movement hoped to be some sort of popular vehicle for achieving a Québec “citizen’s constitution,” but it quickly took an Islamophobic turn and reoriented its message primarily around a fanatical support for Bill 21 and “a secular state.”

If the first iteration was a relative success (three to four hundred people in Montréal on May 4), in spite of an aggressive antiracist countermobilization, the second demonstration (in Trois-Rivières, on July 27) was a crushing defeat, not drawing more than eighty people. This is when Diane Blain gave her infamous speech oozing with racism, which received a certain amount of media coverage and probably undermined any potential future comeback for Vague bleue. (Diane Blain had already scored headlines when, as a La Meute member, she heckled Justin Trudeau on August 16, 2018, during a PR exercise in Sabrevois, not far from Lacolle. Like many others, she has since quit La Meute, but nonetheless remains very active in the far-right national-populist scene in Québec.)

The second edition of the “Vague Bleue”, in Trois-Rivières, on July 27,  2019, was a complete debacle.

Montréal Antifasciste produced a number of articles and communiqués about Vague bleue and its militants:

 

Storm Alliance (SA)

The absence of leadership in Storm Alliance was confirmed in 2019, proving that the group grew too quickly and never really found its feet after the departure of it founder Dave Tregget. With the implosion of La Meute, many defectors would follow the lead of Steeve “L’Artiss” Charland and gravitate toward SA.

SA is increasingly irrelevant and apart from its contribution to the Vague bleue bully squad didn’t do anything of note in 2019. Nonetheless, we can note the “for the children” demonstration in Québec City in September, under the impetus of the conspiracy theorist and serial litigant Mario Roy, who has been on a crusade against the Directeur de la Protection de la Jeunesse (DPJ) for years now. (Roy, a prominent SA member, made headlines earlier in 2019, when he received a quarter of the donations to a fund to support the family of a young girl killed in Granby to finance his personal crusade!) SA attempted a relaunch during the holiday season with a “food baskets for families in need” campaign, its umpteenth attempt to reinvent itself and clean up its image by showing a social conscience. At least the “stormers” aren’t foaming at the mouth about refugees down at the border when they are busy filling food baskets at IGA or demonstrating “for the children.” Meanwhile, their Facebook group, their main mobilizing tool, seems to be at death’s door.

 

La Meute

La Meute’s “security” contingent at the “Vague bleue” in Montreal, May 4th, 2019.

Not much to say about La Meute, by far the most important and best structured national-populist group, with the largest membership . . . until its breathtaking collapse in 2019. The previous year, 2018, had gone well for La Meute, with lots of media coverage when they released their manifesto and a number of high-visibility actions during the provincial election campaign. The group even took credit for the CAQ victory and the defeat of the Liberals under Philippe Couillard, and signaled their intent to be very present in 2019. The duo of Sylvain “Maikan” Brouillette, their ideological spokesman, and Steve “L’Artiss” Charland, keeping things together within the group, seemed to be working well, but in the end internal dissension proved to be stronger than group solidarity. In a dramatic gesture not lacking in panache, Charland left the group, burning his La Meute colours on June 24, 2019, in the company of a number of clan chiefs and members of the council. (It would be tedious of us to present a detailed description of the conflict, but anyone interested can consult the related endnote.)[i] At this point, Charland’s clan members seem to have either thrown in the towel or defected to Storm Alliance, leaving Sylvain Brouillette as uncontested leader of an online organization which he keeps under his thumb with the help of  “la Garde,” his red-pawed supporters.

In short, La Meute was largely insignificant in 2019, and nothing suggests the likely return of the organization in 2020.

 

Groupe Sécurité Patriote (GSP)

Groupe Sécurité Patriote poses with members of Québec’s so-called Three Percenters.

The GSP began as an (in)security group for the Front patriotique du Québec (FPQ), before gradually becoming independent, although the groups remain close and still collaborate from time to time. The GSP also patched over some members of the Montréal III%. It’s a small, highly structured group of some fifteen people under the leadership of Robert “Bob le Warrior” Proulx, who is known for his annoying propensity for waving the Mohawk Warrior flag at identitarian demonstrations, as well as for his affinity with the boneheads in the Soldiers of Odin.

GSP’s boss, Robert Proulx, cozying up to notorious neonazi Kevin Goudreau, in St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, August 24, 2019 .

Overall, the year brought a series of pronounced defeats for the GSP, including a pathetic pro–Bill 21 demonstration in Montréal on June 8 (twenty people turned out, basically consisting of the GSP’s active members), the FPQ’s annual July 1 demonstration, and their exclusion from the Vague bleue in Montréal on May 4, for what was seen as their overly paramilitary posture. In the late summer of 2019, the GSP had the notion of regularly demonstrating at the border in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle to protest irregular immigration and demand the closure of Roxham Road. In the end, the group organized two demonstrations. The first (August 24) was initially proposed by Lucie Poulin from the Parti Patriote and had fifty participants, including a number form Ontario, among them that sad little neo-Nazi Kevin Goudreau. The second (October 19) drew around 120 people, remobilizing a section of Québec’s far right, which had been very divided since the Vague bleue defeat and the collapse of La Meute.

This second demonstration could be seen as a success, leaving antiracist activists worried that this mobilization might gain some traction . . . but, in the end, it carried within it the disease of discord. In effect, the far-reaching tensions between the GSP and LGDQ, which had been to some degree kept under wraps until that point, burst out into the open at the demonstration and in its aftermath.

 

The People’s Party of Canada and the Federal Elections

On October 21, 2019, Justin Trudeau was re-elected Prime Minister du Canada, at the head of a minority Liberal government. These were the elections that brought Maxime Bernier and his political pretensions into direct contact with reality. Bernier had long been the Conservative MP for Beauce, before leaving the fold to create the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in 2018, hoping to outflank the Conservatives on the right.

From the outset, the PPC adopted anti-immigrant and climate change denial positions, and when its rallies were treated as legitimate targets by the radical left, Bernier was not shy to call out “antifa” as terrorists. The PPC gained the support of national-populists across Canada, although this support was somewhat undermined in Québec by a certain opposition to Canadian nationalism. (The minuscule and incompetent Parti Patriote, led by Donald Proulx, unsuccessfully attempted to consolidate this nationalist opposition.) Bernier was also frequently criticized for welcoming different elements of the far right with open arms, even posing for photos with members of the Northern Front and the Soldiers of Odin.

Despite its leader’s ambitions, the PPC failed miserably, not having a single candidate elected and winning only 2 percent of the popular vote (even its fearless leader Maxime Bernier only scored 3 percent in a riding he had held as a Conservative MP for thirteen years). This defeat was undoubtedly in part the result of a widespread sense on the right that the PPC had no chance of unseating the Liberals, which was their main priority. As a result, many ambivalent national-populists in Québec voted for the Conservative Party or the Bloc Québécois. (It should be noted that while the leadership of the Bloc said that it would not tolerate far-right militants in its ranks, the media uncovered a number of candidates who frequently posted racist and far-right messages on social media.)

 

The Neofascists

 Fédération des Québécois de Souche

This sticker depecting Québécois pianist André Mathieu, presumably produced in the entourage of the Fédération des Québécois de souche,  was posted by Atalante militants in Quebec City and Montréal over the summer 2019.

The FQS does not have an active public presence (it leaves that to its sister organization Atalante). It plays a role in providing a space for neofascists to network and spreading far-right ideology on its very active Facebook page and through its magazine Le Harfang. Over the course of the year, it produced stickers that were primarily seen in the Québec City area, carried out some postering actions, and organized a gathering in Québec City in support of the nascent Gilets jaunes movement. In April, the FQS’s “brief” on Bill 9 on immigration was deposited with the commission by the CAQ deputy for Châteauguay Marie Chantal Chassé. The brief was removed from the Assemblée Nationale’s website the next day, when Québec Solidaire pointed out the racist nature of the FQS.

 

Atalante

A couple dozen fans attend a concert by Atalante’s flagship band Légitime Violence and French NSBM outfit Baise Ma Hache, at Bar le Duck in Québec City, on June 8, 2019; earlier that day anti-fascists pressured the management of a local community center to cancel a reservation made for this concert under false pretences.

 

Atalante continued its normal activities (nature hikes, postering, distributing sandwiches on the street, and workshops), primarily in Québec City and Montréal, where its attempts to sink roots do not, however, seem to be working. We have been able to observe stagnation in its membership, and some paltry recruiting efforts in Saguenay, where the organization doesn’t have more than a handful of sympathizers. The two main incidents of note involving Atalante in the last year were its role in a concert by the French National Socialist Black Metal band Baise Ma Hache in June 2019 (partially disrupted by the antifascist milieu) and the trial of its leader Raphaël Lévesque.[2]

Antifascists dogged them incessantly:

 

 

The Alt-Right

Julien Côté Lussier called his nazi pal Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald for backup, in Verdun, October 19, 2019.

The organizational core of the Montréal alt-right blew apart in 2018, and most of its key figures fled Québec or disappeared into the shadows. The news of the year was Julien Côté running in the federal elections and his call for backup from his neo-Nazi comrade Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald, also an Atalante militant. In the meantime, we found out that Beauvais-MacDonald had left his Securitas job to spend some time at the Centre intégré de mécanique, de métallurgie et d’électricité, which, we learned, earned him a visit from antifascist militants. Other than that, the alt-right has followed the same arc in Montréal as elsewhere in North America and has practically no IRL existence, besides harassing the owners of a café in Val David, which, in all likelihood, was the work of members of the alt-right living in the area.

Additionally, the leak of the discussion logs from the Iron March forum in November made it possible to identify some Québécois alt-right activists, some of whom were also active in the Alt-Right Montréal chatroom on Discord.

2020 so far. . .

In 2020 the political spotlight was captured by a wave of Indigenous resistance across Canada. This unanticipated but in many ways inevitable historic development clearly took the far right by surprise.[3]

In English Canada, national-populists and neofascists were united in their ferocious opposition to the demands of Indigenous people defending their sovereignty. In Edmonton, on February 19, elements of the far right associated with the group United We Roll dismantled a solidarity blockade, calling for others to do the same across the country. There were also numerous bomb threats against Indigenous militants, and Indigenous communities across Canada were targeted by an endless stream of racist commentary, both at the blockades and on the street. The English Canadian far right was pretty much unanimous in its hostility to solidarity blockades, drawing on both its trademark racism and a strong current of climate change denial anchored in conspiracy theories about “globalist” elites secretly financing these disturbances, international conflicts, ecological movements, etc.

In Québec, the initial reaction was quite different. Even if many Québec national-populists are racists, climate change deniers, and aficionados of the ridiculous conspiracy theories developed by their cousins in other provinces, their reaction to the blockades was generally one of confusion. In the early days of this wave of resistance, one of the primary issues raised in their networks was the alleged “double standard,” as they felt that if they did blockades they would be arrested and repressed, whereas they saw the solidarity blockades as being tolerated. At the same time, there were isolated examples of far-right activists expressing their solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en struggle. The distinctions between the reactions inside of and outside of Québec is doubtless the result the different postures adopted by national-populists in Québec and those in English Canada toward the Canadian nation-state.

Nonetheless, after the first week of solidarity actions, particularly the key blockade in Kahnawake and the solidarity blockade in Saint-Lambert, the national-populists rediscovered their historic antipathy for the Mohawk nation. This reversal put an abrupt end to the hypocritical pantomime we’ve been forced to live with for several years now, whereby the far-right leadership and many rank-and-file far-right militants pretended to be the natural allies of Indigenous people in their struggle with the Canadian state. Suddenly, this was no longer the case, and the anti-Indigenous comments and threats began to multiply in Québec far-right social media networks. None of which translated into any tangible action, however, in part because some of the key players still couldn’t figure out how to position themselves. Beyond that, the far right was organizationally too poorly prepared to effectively intervene.

In mid-March 2020, as COVID-19 quickly went from being news from far away to a global pandemic necessitating a near-global lockdown, the Quebec far right was similarly incapable of acting. While left-wing forces organized mutual aid groups and even carried out “car demonstrations” in solidarity with migrants facing murderous conditions in detention centers, far rightists were confined to social media, their chief occupation being to debate and propagate various conspiracy theories about the virus, for instance the idea that it is spread by 5g wireless technology.

 

A future defined by uncertainty. . .

The specific wave of far right activity that began in 2016 seems to have finally collapsed in 2019, and what we have been dealing with since then have been a series of largely unsuccessful or unsustainable attempts to regroup and move forward. This weakness of our opponents can be seen in their inability to respond to either of the two main issues in 2020 so far. That said, their base shows no sign of dissipating, and conspiratorial and racist thinking offer a wide base of potential support far beyond their current ranks.

As we stated above, their current disarray cannot be viewed simply as a victory on our part. Today, two of the main demands of the far right for the past several years have been satisfied – Law 21 prohibits people wearing “religious clothing” from working in various public sector jobs (this primarily targets Muslim women who might wear hijab), and in the context of the pandemic Roxham Road has been closed off to asylum seekers. The radical left, inside but also beyond the antifascist milieu, has its work cut out for it.

The new situation created by the pandemic is replete with danger and uncertainty. In the coming months, new political opportunities will be accompanied by a strong wave of politics based in fear and scapegoating. In that light, we encourage you to read our Covid-19: Preliminary Thoughts on the Current Situation (March 30, 2020).

Both vigilance and solidarity remain essential.

 

[1] For posterity, and for those of you with a morbid fascination for this sort of train wreck, here’s the broad strokes of what went down.

A conflict within La Meute burst into the open in May 2019, when it became clear the group’s spokesman (and de facto leader) Sylvain Brouillette was unable to provide the necessary paperwork for the La Meute Inc. financial year 2017–2018. Members of the executive where disturbed by how it would look if they were unable to answer clan members’ questions (regional La Meute sections are called clans) and by the fact that this, once again, prevented La Meute from applying for nonprofit status. Meanwhile, Brouillette defended himself by hiding behind personal problems (a contentious divorce and professional difficulties) and whining about never having wanted to be responsible for accounting. For their part, other members of the executive accused him of monopolizing power, controlling information, and running La Meute like it was his private fiefdom.

As the tensions increased, all of the members of the executive (except Brouillette) quit. Brouillette stripped Stéphane Roch of his role as La Meute’s public Facebook administrator, and, as a reprisal, Brouillette was stripped of his administrative responsibility for the organization’s secret Facebook page. On June 19, 2019, it seemed as if Brouillette had been ousted from the organization, with his critics (grouped around Steeve “L’Artiss” Charland) seizing the reins, but, a few days later, Brouillette managed to regain control of the secret Facebook page, and Charland and his cohort found themselves looking at the door.

One of Brouillette’s first actions, once he regained control, was to publish the figures from 2017–2018 financial year. Even if this report wasn’t detailed enough to satisfy the demands of Revenue Canada, it revealed an organization functioning on a shoestring budget, with receipts in the neighbourhood $10,000. Half this budget was logged as “donations from the Chinese,” probably a reference to the Chinese Canadian Alliance, an “astroturf” group that organized the demonstration at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on February 18, 2018, which La Meute, Storm Alliance, and other groups joined. (At the time, Brouillette said: “La Meute has built a solid alliance that we believe opens the door to alliances with other communities in the near future” . . . presuming they’re ready to pay for the honour, we conjecture!)

To dramatize the conflict, many former members made it a point of honour to celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day by burning and destroying their La Meute clothes and baubles (ballcaps, leather vests, flags, etc.), declaring La Meute “dead.” Nonetheless, the clans seem to have accepted Brouillette’s return.

Whatever the case may be, at the time of writing (April 2020), the group has been inactive since the events described above.

[2] Raphaël Lévesque is accused of break and enter, mischief, and criminal harassment of the journalist Simon Coutu and other VICE employees. The thirty-six-year-old man is also accused of intimidating Simon Coutu to pressure him to abstain from “covering the activities of the group Atalante Québec”. Coutu had published several articles about the far right in the previous weeks. See https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-faits-divers/201912/09/01-5253022-intimidation-a-vice-le-leader-dun-groupe-dextreme-droite-en-cour.php.

[3] As Solidarity Across Borders explained: “In December, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge granted an injunction against the land defenders at the Unist’ot’en Camp, who have for years maintained a blockade to prevent construction of the Coastal GasLink (TransCanada) pipeline project, which would run through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. A second blockade camp has been established by another Wet’suwet’en clan, the Gidimt’en, showing united opposition to the pipeline within their traditional governance structures and in defiance of a legal ruling that refuses to acknowledge their sovereignty and title. In the last few days the RCMP has imposed a media blackout as they stage a large-scale invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory to dismantle the blockades. Land defenders have made an urgent call for solidarity and support, in the face of what they have called “an act of war,” and “a violation of human rights, a siege, and an extension of the genocide that Wet’suwet’en have survived since contact.””

 

What’s Worth Dying for?

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Apr 242020
 

From CrimethInc.

Some things are worth risking death for. Perpetuating capitalism is not one of them. Going back to work—at risk of spreading COVID-19 or dying from it—so that the rich can continue accruing profits is not worth dying for.

If the problem is that people are suffering from the economy being shut down, the solution is clear. People were already suffering as a consequence of the economy running. The inequalities it created are one of the reasons some people are so desperate to go back to work—but in a profit-driven economy, the more we do business, the greater the inequalities become.

Practically all the resources people need exist already or could be produced by voluntary labor on a much safer basis, rather than forcing the poorest and most vulnerable to work for peanuts at great risk of spreading the virus. Rather than going back to business as usual, we need to abolish capitalism once and for all.

Why Do Some People Want to Let COVID-19 Spread?

Supporters of Donald Trump are calling for the economy to resume immediately at any cost: they are gambling that, like Rand Paul and Boris Johnson, they won’t be the ones to die.

An image familiar from history: a banner reading “Get back to work” attended by a man with a gun.

It’s easy to understand why the beneficiaries of capitalism would welcome a pandemic that could kill off a part of the unruly population. The distinction between “essential” and “inessential” workers has laid this bare for all to see: a large part of the population is no longer essential to industrial production and the logistics of international distribution. In a volatile world, increasingly affordable automation has reduced the angry and precarious to a mere liability for those who hold power.

We are not yet desensitized enough to this notion that those who govern us can speak openly about it, but there have been attempts on Fox News to shift to a discourse that takes millions of additional deaths in stride as a worthwhile price to pay to keep the economy functioning. Aren’t we already desensitized to workplace accidents, air pollution, global climate change, and the like?

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

–A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

But why would workers call for the reopening of the economy?

When the most you can imagine asking for is to be exploited once again.

If the logical result of a large part of the population being superfluous to capitalism is a greater willingness among the ruling class to sacrifice our lives, it is not surprising that workers who cannot imagine anything other than capitalism would also be more willing to see other workers die.

Discussing the economic impact of the bubonic plague in Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that “the scarcity of labor which the epidemic caused shifted the power relation to the advantage of the lower classes.” Federici meant to call attention to the powerful labor movements at the end of the Middle Ages, but today we can derive grim implications from this analysis. In the same way that bigots wrongly imagine that shutting down immigration will secure high-paying jobs for white citizens, they might conclude that the smaller the working class, the better the deal for the survivors.

This is the same segment of the working class that has always welcomed wars and championed unthinking obedience to authority—the ones who accepted white privilege as a bribe not to show solidarity with other workers. Lacking longstanding bonds or a deep-rooted tradition of collective resistance, workers in the United States have always been especially willing to play the lottery when it comes to questions of survival and economic advancement. Many conservative whites seem to have given up entirely on realizing the dream of economic security that their parents sought, settling instead for seeing others suffer even worse than them. As we argued early in the Trump era, Trump did not promise to redistribute wealth in the United States, but rather to redistribute violence.

This willingness to risk death in hopes of seeing other (likely less privileged) workers die might be disguised as conspiracy theories about the virus, or even as outright denial of its existence—but at base it is schadenfreude of the worst kind.

Defending Liberty?

Yet there is something else going on here, as well. To some extent, those who have protested the lockdown over the past few days have understood themselves as defending their “rights” as citizens—though, senselessly, they are serving as shills for the reigning authoritarian government of the United States to intensify the control via which it will go on exposing them to risk. Their slogan might as well be “Kill all the immigrants and prisoners—set yourself up as dictator in the name of freedom—just let me die of COVID-19 in the comfort of my boss’s workplace!”

Ballots and bullets—the two means by which white privilege has always been imposed as a means to divide the exploited.

In this regard, in a confused way, the protests against the lockdown are part of a worldwide pushback against state authority in response to lockdown measures during the pandemic.

In Russia, demonstrations in response to the quarantine conditions have led to open confrontations, something rare indeed in Putin’s totalitarian regime. In France, riots have broken out in several cities and suburbs, such as in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, in response to the police taking advantage of the lockdown to murder five people and injure many more, the latest victim being a motorcyclist ; during the ongoing repression, officers shot a 5-year-old girl with a LBD40 rubber bullet, fracturing her skull. In Peru, police have attacked crowds of impoverished refugees attempting to flee the capital to their home villages, having run out of resources during the lockdown.

All of these examples show how poorly capitalist governments founded on coercive violence are equipped to maintain the sort of quarantines that can prevent a pandemic from spreading. In a society in which almost all wealth is concentrated in a few hands, in which state edicts are enforced by violence, a large part of the population lacks the resources to ride out a disaster like this in isolation. Most people who have maintained social distancing have done so out of concern for all humanity, at great cost to themselves, not because of the force employed against them by the state. State enforcement of the quarantine has been uneven, to say the least, with the governor of Florida declaring professional wrestling an essential function and police around the world turning a blind eye to conservatives who flout the shutdown.

In the absence of a powerful movement against rising authoritarianism, people who are concerned about the power grabs of the state may join “protests” like the ones encouraging Trump to lift the lockdown. This is one of the hallmarks of an authoritarian society: that people have no options to choose from other than to support one of the factions of the government, all of whom are pursuing totalitarian visions.1 Rather than choosing between subjugation under a technocratic state and risking death to continue our economic subjugation, we have to pose another option: a grassroots struggle against capitalism and authoritarianism of all kinds.

To some extent, the protests in favor of reopening the economy are an astroturf phenomenon, aimed at expanding the Overton window in order to make it easier for Trump to restart the economy at whatever cost. Both Trump and his Democratic rivals share the same fundamental program. They only disagree about the details.

Just as capitalism does not exist for the sake of meeting all our needs, there never was any plan to keep us all safe.

There was never any plan to protect us all from COVID-19. The Democrats just wanted to pace the impact of the virus on healthcare infrastructure for the sake of maintaining public order. They, too, take for granted that the capitalist market must continue—even as it impoverishes and kills us in greater and greater numbers. They won’t revolt against Trump’s ban on immigration any more than Trump will object to the surveillance measures they aim to introduce. Supporting either party means accepting the arrival of a totalitarianism in which it will be taken for granted that workers will risk death simply for the privilege of letting capitalists earn a profit off their labor.

To protect our lives and the lives of our neighbors, to gain access to resources, to attain freedom—there is only one way to accomplish all of these things. We have to revolt.

Click on the image to download the poster.

Capitalism Is a Death Cult

Nothing matters to the market but profit. Forests only have value as timber or toilet paper; animals only have value as hot dogs or hamburgers. The precious, unrepeatable moments of your life only have value as labor hours determined by the imperatives of commerce. The market rewards landlords for evicting families, bosses for exploiting employees, engineers for inventing death machines. It separates mothers from their children, drives species into extinction, shuts down hospitals to open up privatized prisons. It reduces entire ecosystems to ash, spewing out smog and stock options. Left to itself, it will turn the whole world into a graveyard.

Some things are worth risking our lives for. Perpetuating capitalism is not one of them. If we have to risk our lives, let’s risk them for something worthwhile, like creating a world in which no one has to risk death for a paycheck. Life for the market means death for us.

Further Reading

  1. Proponents of rival authoritarianism seek to trap us in such binary choices: for example, if we turn a blind eye to Facebook censoring the pro-Trump “protests,” we can be sure that such censorship will be used against our own demonstrations in the future. ↩

Opportunity in Every Crisis: A Call For Decentralized May Day Actions

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Apr 222020
 

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

However you tell the tale of May Day, one thing is consistent: it is a time people gather together, to march in the streets or to celebrate a new spring. Although most of us are enjoying the warmer weather blowing in, we are mostly stuck in our homes. Reading the news, trying to figure out the right thing to do, watching May 1st creep closer and wondering what it will look like this year if we can’t take over downtown and revel in May Day as we have come to know it: a celebration of anticapitalism.

Life is an evolving story, an ever-changing landscape. We have always had to adapt and shift our tactics to new realities as they crop up. This is no different. The context in which we find ourselves is affected by both the coronavirus and the repressive actions taken by the state around it, but the need for resistance is still just as present.

Even if we can’t gather, there are still ways to mark the day, to feel part of a larger whole that has always honoured the spring, always resisted oppressors, and always carried a new world in their hearts.

Decentralized direct action is a skill we already have, and it can be taken in small groups, which is convenient when the pandemic makes it reasonable to reduce the number of people we’re close to. We propose a two week window centered on May 1st for going out and attacking capitalism – tags, breaking things, liberating stuff, use your imaginination. We are also excited for celebratory actions that honour resistance history and the land. Or both.

There are opportunities in every crisis. For us and for the forces we oppose. It is a delightful new reality that it no longer cocks eyebrows when you’re just someone out for a night jog in a mask and hoodie down the empty, empty streets. And coming out of the Wet’suwet’en solidarity movement, there is a lot of resistance to celebrate, as well as new skills and contacts to build on.

The context as well casts new light on old forms of domination: borders become harder, the police gain new powers to manage small details of our lives, tech and telecom companies excitedly participate in ever more tracking (for our health), bosses rejoice as their low-wage workers are designated “essential” allowing them to profit off the crisis, money lenders (like banks and payday loans) get to sell desperate people new forms of debt, and the state sets itself as the only legitimate actor.

So we invite you to gather together a few friends, take to the night and celebrate the fires that burn within us. Share your stories on websites like North Shore Counter-Info, Montreal Counter-Info, and It’s Going Down, so we all get the reminder that when we resist, we’re never alone.

NS note: Calls for a decentralized May Day are multiplying. This one from Seattle predates covid: https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/for-an-autonomous-decentralized-may-day-in-seattle/

And this international call for a dangerous May has been circulating: https://mtlcounterinfo.org/international-call-for-a-dangerous-may/

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