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

Building common grounds

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Mar 062017
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Foucault

Everybody hates racists!

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Feb 042017
 

Graffiti in Pointe-St-Charles, Montreal

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Translation: the title is a play on the chant “Tout le monde déteste la police!” (Everybody hates the police) that was popularized in the rebellion in Paris last summer.

Last Sunday night, six people from the Muslim community in Quebec city were assassinated at their mosque. This shows that racist extreme-right ideology is very much alive in supposedly egalitarian and tolerant Quebec society, which currently participates in fostering an islamophobic climate in which racists are increasingly feeling emboldened to act. This time it’s not an act that can be ignored, unlike the pigs heads left on the steps of the same mosque several months ago and which interested practically nobody, or the daily verbal and physical aggressions in the street of racialized people.

On the day of the funeral for those killed in the shooting, a mosque in the Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-St-Charles had it’s windows broken. In response, a solidarity rally drew a hundred supporters in front of the mosque, anarchist graffiti expressing solidarity went up on advertisement paneling across the street, and anti-fascist posters were taped on the broken windows titled “Against racism, islamophobia and anti-semitism. Let’s be on the offensive”.

Many are asking themselves how is it possible that this could happen here. However, racism and hatred for the ‘other’ outside of Christianity is not something new in Canada. This country is founded on the genocide of indigenous people, and their ghettoization into reservations. Contrary to what we learn in school, the colonizers of so-called Quebec also participated in this mass genocide. Quebec society has its share of racism through the ages, whether it be with the new form of slavery of the mass incarceration of black and indigenous people, the residential schools, the exploitation of migrant works without papers, or the islamophobic Charter of Values. Of course, the rise in right-wing nationalist ideology in the last years has had a large impact on the murders that happened in Quebec, but we can’t forgot that this way of thinking existed even before someone like Trump took power in the US, or a politician like Marine Le Pen is polled to win 30% of the vote in the coming elections in France.

It’s not surprising that the xenophobic act that took place last Sunday happened in the capital of Quebec. Several racist groups have been diffusing their despicable ideology in broad-daylight for several years, with impunity. Groups like Atalante Québec or Soldats d’Odins (Soldiers of Odin) and several others can try to hide behind their false banner of “only denouncing radical Islam”, but we’re not falling for this manipulation. We know very well that these are people who act according to a racist logic. How can a group like Atalante say that it’s not racist while they organize a conference with neo-fascist Italian groups like Casapound who claim the legacy of Mussolini. Quebec City also has its share of “radio poubelles” (a term used for right-wing populist radio stations) listened to each day by thousands. The hosts of these shows can always wash their hands by saying that they don’t call for murder, but they contribute in a large way to the normalization of racism and islamophobia. Let’s be clear: these people also have blood on their hands and their discourses of hate must absolutely be confronted with all means necessary. Whether it be the pieing of people like Mathieu Bock-Côté, disrupting all their conferences, or by never allowing a racist demonstration to take the streets in peace.

The response to the extreme right must be determined and relentless, this people must be afraid to publicly poster their discourses of hate. We must not wait for any change coming from the political class that also contributes to the atmosphere of racism: through the normalization of hate towards muslims, the maintenance of inherently racist borders and policing , and the ongoing colonial violence that Canada is founded on. The struggle against the rise of fascism and the world that needs it will only come from ourselves and without the intermediary of any representatives – to fight organized fascists out of the streets at every opportunity and to attack everything that gives them legitimacy. We must make our anti-fascism radical by continuing to fight against the racist foundations of our society – colonial government and industrial civilization, nationalism, police, prisons, and borders.

150, 375: rebels come alive!

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Jan 132017
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

This year, Canada is celebrating its 150th year of colonial existence, and Montreal its 375th. Throughout the next year, we’re going to be celebrating the histories of resistance to the colonial project of Canada, by continuing to bring them into our struggles in the present. This is a call for anarchists across the territory of so-called Canada, and everyone fighting against colonial society, to combine our diverse capacities to fight this ongoing nightmare in all the ways that we can.

The project of Canada has been one of ongoing genocide against indigenous people through various forms, from the intentional spreading of small pox to the conditions that create staggering numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women and men. Canada attempts to impose dependence on colonial society by destroying the autonomy of indigenous people to live off of their land base (through the reservation system), and through cultural genocide to instill generational fracturing and collective amnesia (institutionalized through the residential school system up until the 90s).

We want to sabotage the machinery that makes this colonial legacy function. This machine’s infrastructure and development projects of exploitation mean devastating the land that all life is nourished by. It means the policing apparatus of Canada, from the onslaught at Gustafsen Lake to the widespread sexual violence against indigenous women by the SQ. It means the projects of social control necessary for Canada to function; the systematic forced sterilization, the reservation system, and the mass incarceration of indigenous and black people. This machinery is also social – the social identification with the city, the nation and with whiteness.

375: Montreal comes alive! is a tourism campaign where each neighbourhood of Montreal has been allotted money by the State for their celebrations. This will be used as an opportunity to further gentrification and social cleansing, and to normalize the State’s narrative of a benevolent and inevitable colonization. The program of events, and promotional videos, primarily feature white francophone artists and musicians – demonstrating who they’re staking their bets on in this new project of development and control through nationalist and hipster artists and Quebec popular culture. Though this campaign is unabashedly white supremacist in who they are trying to mobilize, we’re also overly familiar with the script of Canadian multiculturalism – of representing and integrating different identity categories into the genocidal project, for a more insidious social control.

At the very least, we can show that there are people who Canada is attempting to integrate into this white supremacist framework who are in rebellion against it. Let’s find whatever ways that we can to connect across the segregated lives that we feel every day. Through such connections, we can look toward creating a project of rebellion that people can identify with, outside of the right hand of white nationalism, and the left hand of liberal multiculturalism.

Here are several ideas for how people can self-organize to respond to this call:

– Disrupting the festivities of 375 and 150, in every neighborhood of Montreal and across Canada.
– Fostering relations of solidarity between people who want to fight the project of Canada. In this, we think it’s crucial to not reproduce passive ‘ally’ politics, where ‘allies’ don’t carry their own reasons for fighting. Everyone has a stake in defending the land from colonial destruction. For anarchists, we have innumerable reasons to fight and be in reciprocal solidarity with anyone struggling against the borders, police, resource extraction, and the economic domination that Canada requires. We think that statements like ‘being an ally to indigenous people’ is contradictory and meaningless when we recognize that homogeneous categories of people don’t exist. In fact, there are often conflicts within indigenous communities around goals and tactics that shouldn’t be sidestepped. For instance, at Standing Rock the Red Warrior Camp (which employed confrontational and disruptive tactics against the pipeline) was asked to leave the camp by the chiefs who condemned any action outside of non-violent civil disobedience that appeals to white and media legitimacy.
– Creating counter-information to communicate anti-colonial perspectives.
– Confronting, disrupting, attacking all manifestations of the colonial order: the functioning of the capitalist economy, resource extraction projects and infrastructure, the repressive apparatus of police and prisons, the dominant narratives of colonialism (in statues, museums, churches, etc.), and however colonialism is being maintained where you live.

The existence of Canada and Montreal is inherently a project of control and ecological devastation – this is what ‘progress’ and ‘development’ looks like. These processes further fracture any semblance of community that we can even try to nourish, which in turn profoundly impacts our capacities to rebel. We want to break with the social relations of production, consumption, citizenship and whiteness. We want to create the possibility to live different relations, which also means creating opportunities to be uncontrollable. We want to disrupt the narrative celebrating a benevolent and friendly Canada. Let’s fuck with them at every turn. Let’s shut down Montreal, let’s shut down Canada.

Defend the Hood

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Dec 222016
 

From subMedia.tv

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In 2016, numerous attacks were launched at diverse symbols of gentrification in the Montreal neighborhoods of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and Saint-Henri. We wanted to give space to the people involved so that they can explain a point of view, that corporate media consistently ignore or misrepresent. subMedia has obtained an exclusive interview with two anarchists involved in the actions.

To protect their identities, the voices have been dubbed by actors.

What does it mean for you to fight against gentrification?

1. Before anything else, we’re just talking for the two of us, not for anyone else who participated in the action. We don’t want to represent anything.

2. I don’t want to limit myself to fighting against gentrification, which I see as an intensification of the misery of capitalism. And I’m against capitalism in all its forms. I struggle against gentrification because it effects my life and the lives of many people, but also because it’s a context that allows the exchange of ideas and practices, to nourish a larger perspective of anarchist struggle. I’ve been inspired by anarchists in other cities who have anchored their struggles in where they live. They’ve managed to make certain neighbourhoods dangerous for the authorities and not very welcoming for capitalist businesses. I would like for the police to be afraid of being attacked when they patrol Hochelag, for small yuppie businesses to hesitate before setting up shop here because their insurance premiums will be super expensive, for people to think about how if they park their luxury cars in the neighbourhood overnight, they’re risking waking up to them being trashed, that as soon as graffiti or posters are cleaned, they’re back up.

1. And if we want these people to be afraid, it’s because we want the space to experiment with other ways of living, and cohabitation with them isn’t possible. Their world will always want the destruction of other worlds, those of freedom, of sharing and gifting, of relations outside of work and leisure, of the joy outside of consumption…

2. I think it’s worth being explicit about how the struggle against gentrification is inevitably a struggle against the police. The main tool that the city has to move forward with its project of social cleansing is the police and the pacification of residents. This reality is at the heart of the reflections that orient our actions. The pacification takes different forms: it’s the installation of cameras, the management of parks and streets, but also it’s the imaginary created by bullshit narratives like “social mixity”. The public consultations, the studies and projects of affordable housing are all just a facade: during this time, the social cleansing advances and more and more people are evicted. If these means of pacification don’t work, the city has recourse to repression, that’s to say, the police. It’s the police who evict tenants, prevent the existence of squats, etc. Every form of offensive organization that refuses the mediation attempts of the municipal authority will one day be faced with the police. So it’s also important to develop our capacity to defend initiatives against repression.

Without necessarily throwing aside community organizing, many anarchists prefer the method of direct action. Why?

1. We don’t have demands. We didn’t do this action to put pressure on power, so that they grant us certain things. For sure people should have access to housing, but I don’t think that we should wait for the State to respond to the demands for social housing that have existed since the 80s, in a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification. I’m more interested in seeing what it would look like for people to take space and defend it, without asking. I’m not interested in dialoguing with power.

2. Dialogue with the municipal authorities is, along with the threat of police repression, the principal method of pacification. To keep us in inaction, imprisoned in an imaginary where we can’t take anything or stop anything from happening.

1. What’s special about direct action is that you finally do away with the ultimate mediator, the State, by acting directly on the situation. Rather than giving agency to the city, in demanding something of it, we want to act for ourselves against the forces that gentrify the neighbourhood. The State is afraid of people refusing its role as the mediator.

Why choose a strategy of direct action outside of a context like those created during social movements?

2. Because we don’t want to wait for the ‘right context’. We think that it’s through intervening in fucked up situations in the world that we live in that we create contexts. The fact that this world is horrible is in itself a ‘good context’. Revolt is always worthwhile, every day.

1. I think that’s important to emphasize, I don’t believe in waiting for social movements to act. Acts of revolt have many impacts, even if they’re not inscribed in a social movement. And also, when the next moment of widespread revolt comes, we’ll be better prepared to participate.

Lastly, what do you say to those who say that gentrification is an inevitable process?

1. Gentrification is a process of capitalism and colonialism, among others. It makes itself seem inevitable, and maybe it is, but it’s nonetheless worthwhile to struggle against it and to not let ourselves be passive. In a world as unlivable as the one we’re in, I have the feeling that my life can only find meaning if I fight back.

2. At best, the process of gentrification will move elsewhere, if a neighbourhood resists. And yet, struggling against capitalism and the State opens up possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.


8.5 x 11″ | PDF

Theft, direct action, solidarity

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Jul 042016
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Today is July 1st, the day when the founding of the state of Canada is celebrated. We have chosen this day to announce that over the past months we have stolen and freely redistributed a number of quality objects and food obtained from bourgeois stores to marginalized individuals and families from oppressed communities in Montreal, occupied Kanien’kehá:ka territory. This text is to explain why we have done this, to express solidarity with related actions, and to encourage others to continue taking similar initiatives.

We publish this text on Canada Day because we are against all states, and in particular, against the violence of settler colonial states like Canada that are founded on genocide of indigenous nations, and on racist exclusion and exploitation of non-white people. We believe the well being of the majority of the world depends on fighting against industrial and imperial states like Canada that are the main promoters and beneficiaries of global capitalism. This is why we are breaking the laws of this state, stealing from capitalist businesses, and redistributing goods to communities who are being actively oppressed by this system. Theft is a direct action that so many of us carry out in our daily lives, to get what we need and want from a system that refuses to share. This time we have done it collectively and intentionally, as part of a broader struggle against oppression, and for freedom and self-determination for everyone.

We have been inspired by recent struggles that are both politically and geographically near to us, and we would like to express our solidarity with the brave actions we see all around. First, from Indigenous nations and communities continuing their centuries long struggles of for survival and defence of water, land and life. Algonquins against condo development along the Ottawa river, Innus against the hydroelectric damming of Muskrat Falls, Ojibway for the cleanup of mercury contamination at Grassy Narrows, and Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke continuing to prevent any niobium mining in their community. There have been numerous occupations in recent months of government offices by those fighting state killing and complicity in the deaths and violence against oppressed communities. The Black Lives Matter occupation in front of the Toronto police headquarters, the indigenous occupations of numerous INAC (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada) offices in solidarity with Attawapiskat, and the Solidarity Across Borders occupation of CBSA offices here in Montreal against the violence of immigrant deportation and detention.

We are equally inspired by the daily resistance of those struggling for dignity and survival in less visible ways without a ‘legal identity’, such as those who are undocumented, criminalized, homeless.

Finally, we applaud the impressive direct action by anti-gentrification looters in the Montreal neighbourhood of Saint-Henri who collectively expropriated thousands of dollars of food from a gentrifying grocery store. They are close to us not just in terms of their politics and geography, but also their choice of tactics. The forced displacement and marginalization of neighbourhood residents by gentrification is the direct result of the capitalism of urban real estate markets. Looting and attacks on gentrifying businesses is an important way of fighting back, alongside the numerous campaigns, actions, and organizing that have been challenging gentrification across Montreal for many years.

The Saint-Henri action was successful at drawing a large amount of media attention and public discussion to the issue of gentrification. Throughout this discussion, there have been arguments made to which we would like to respond. Some argue that gentrification is caused by big real estate developments, therefore small businesses should not be targeted. This stubbornly ignores the reality that although the condos are the driving force behind gentrification, the process is also facilitated and reinforced by the expensive new stores catering to the condo dwellers, the police that protect them, and the city government that gives their stamp of approval in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Others agree with opposing gentrification, but do not support illegal tactics like the looting of a gentrifying business. In response, we argue that the connected systems that we are struggling against, including gentrification, Canada, and global capitalism, inflict terrible violence and misery around the world every day, and have been doing so for hundreds of years. To survive means to stop and destroy these systems. It is a massive undertaking, one that is carried out daily by so many, and it is one of the most important things we can do on this planet. You say we have gone too far with our illegal actions? We say that we have not gone nearly far enough. Breaking a few laws is the least we can do. We hope for everyone’s sake that together we are able to do so much more, using whatever means are required.

In love and solidarity with all those in struggle!

POWER DOWN – No to the 735kV power line

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Apr 132016
 

sabotagedpylon-1024x543

From Interruption

735 000 volts. This is what will pass through the new very high tension line that Hydro-Quebec wants to construct as of this year. The trajectory of this line is 400km long and will transport electricity from the Chamouchouane central to Sanguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, passing through Lanaudiere, towards an eventual post that does not exist at the moment, in Terrebonne, called Judith-Jasmin. This will be linked to the Montreal region by a second segment of 19 km towards the Bout-de-l’Ile post. This is the most important hydro line in 20 years, estimated at 1,3 billion dollars. In fact, it’s the 12th line of this scale in so-called “Quebec”.

But firstly, they need to clear-cut the path where pylons will be planted. The deforestation has already begun in the north and in Lanaudiere. It has caused multiple expropriations and partially crosses the hunting grounds of Attikamekws in the north, St-Michel-des-Saints, St-Zenon, Ste-Emelie-de-l’Energie, St-Alphonse-de-Rodriguez, Rawdon, etc.

The project has been contested by many residents, farmers and ecologists for the past 6 years: “Useless, environmentally devastating and economically unjustified” (Citizens Under High-Tension). Beyond any doubts, it is a categorical refusal. The BAPE (Bureau of public audiences on the environment) has recommended the government wait until they have more information, to deepen the study of the impact and to take into consideration the opposition of the area. Nonetheless, the State has adopted a decree imposing the pursuit of the construction. Hydro-Quebec gave 4 million dollars in compensation to the Regional County Municipality of Lanaudiere and another one million to Manawan as compensation to make them swallow their salads. But there are still people who oppose; most have land concerns, they are angry property owners because the value of their houses will decrease or because they have farms and their animals can’t handle the strong electromagnetic fields of these high-tension lines. They refuse to sign the letters sent by Hydro-Quebec that requests residents permission to cut trees on their lands as Hydro will not have compensated them personally in cash. In response Hydro is harassing them and has obtained an injunction. Even if it is heartwarming for people to be mobilizing against Hydro-Quebec, this refusal only slows the process of systemic destruction and doesn’t aspire to halt it. We can even say that the motives of this opposition are absolutely contradictory to the desires of wild freedom that live in us. Our desire is to expand the field of possibilities, so we wish to propose other avenues to break the realization of this hydro project. As of this moment, the project is going ahead and the deforestation has already begun.

Another national myth

The Hydro-Quebec mafia has no interest in retreating faced with a project like this that represents enormous profit. In fact, the era of combustible fossil fuels is in decline. Facing the drying up of petroleum resources, the costs of extraction and transportation have become too high. The turn to green has been in the works for a few decades and in this context, hydro-electricity, perceived as a renewable and green energy, becomes a precious commodity. The large global corporations of commerce and finance are in the process of restructuring and transforming the industry and transportation in order to adapt to “green energies”. The new Minister of Transportation of Quebec has for an innovative mission the electrification of public transportation with new hybrid and electrical vehicles. Electrical cars become more and more accessible, Hydro installs battery recharge stations in every corner of so-called “Quebec”, even field vehicles will be electric in the near future. And all this with the objective to maintain the speed and the productivity of the industry. The infrastructure projects of energy transportation, as with roads, railroads, ports, pipelines and airports, are indispensable to the expansion of industry, a tentacular project in itself.

A myth is built around hydro-electricity as a green and renewable energy source. We brag about it almost as if it was the national joy of so-called “Quebec” with its numerous fresh water rivers of high flow. In reality, we should perceive hydro-electricity as an exploitable resource, commodifiable as much as iron, uranium or petroleum. Today, the territory is completely disfigured, there remains only a few high flow rivers that haven’t yet been invaded by dams. The electricity itself that they speak of is actually a gigantic enterprise of ecosystem destruction, of river pollution and the destruction of ways of life of communities that depend on the river for survival. When a dam is constructed, the river is blocked and a reservoir of water that floods a large surface of the territory is created. The river in question overflows from its bed near the dam and dries up along all its length. The trees and plants that have been flooded die and release methane and carbon dioxide into the water and the air. The methane and the carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases; it is reported that 12% of greenhouse gases emitted on the colonized lands of the Canadian State originate from hydro-electric dams. Another consequence of these floods is the methyl-mercury contamination of the water, originating from the release of fossilized inorganic mercury in the soil. Once the ground has been flooded by water, the mercury is released and transforms into methyl-mercury, a neurotoxin that is consequentially found in the food chain. The fish, animals and humans that consume it may develop a variety of illnesses, such as cardiovascular disorders and cancer. It has been accordingly discouraged for people to consume the fish of these rivers for a period of 30 years following the flooding of a basin. To summarize, the plentitude of fresh-water rivers of so-called “Quebec”, in the past potable, have all become toxic. The animals and the humans that depend on them for drinking water and food are poisoning themselves or losing a source of potable water. As a result: thousands year-old ecosystems and ancestral forms of life disturbed and destroyed.

The first intention of Hydro-Quebec is evidently the creation of consumer markets with the United-States, with a pretty discourse singing praise for hydro-electricy as being cleaner than coal electricity. On their website, they make the comparison. What they don’t say, is that its the shitty industry put in place with its logic of monopolization since the beginning of colonization by the Europeans 500 years ago that causes the destruction of life. Hydro-Quebec therefore explores all the american markets and talks of even undertaking other projects of dam construction for the few fresh water rivers still intact. They obviously don’t have any reservations regarding the real damages caused by their thirst for wealth.

The bleeding of electricity

Hydro-Quebec owns approximately 62 hydro-electric centres. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the great rivers of the James Bay area and the North Shore have been used to feed a hydro-electric complex (i.e. the Caniapiscau, the Opinaca, the Eastmain and Ruper), and seriously disrupted following the installation of hydro-electric centers (i.e. Sainte-Marguerite, the Romaine and Toulnustouc). These famous high tension lines transport the electricity coming from the North and supplied to the entire province, its urban centers, its suburbs, its industries and its mines. As an example, supplying a single mine in heating and electricity, to render its below ground environment inhabitable for the people who work in it, is the equivalent energy consumption of a city like Trois-Rivieres. As those who oppose the project say, the province has no need to produce more electricity. In fact, most of the electricity produced is already surplus. At the moment we consume only 15% of the electricity produced, the rest is lost through transportation, or even watered because it isn’t profitable to stockpile it in batteries. Actually, if the produced current isn’t consumed right away, its lost. Therefore, this 735 000 volt line will transport energy coming from the dams in the north: James Bay, Manicouagan, and the new dams of La Romaine on the North-Shore, projects that have faced intense resistance by the inhabitants of the region during the past years. The State accordingly justifies this project by saying the new dams provoke congestion on the existing lines.

Let’s not forget that Hydro-Quebec is a State company that has the monopoly on matters of electrify, that frequently gives contracts to companies with cloudy numbers, that imposes high fees, that expropriates land in exchange for ridiculously low compensation, and who works solely with the goal of favoring the industry. Here, what is important to us goes far beyond the value of houses. There is the annihilation of the environment, a reality erased by all kinds of false publicity of Hydro Quebec. Because in reality, the energy of the industry comes from a carbon thermal center, nuclear reactors or hydroelectricity,the paradigm stays the same: productivity, the pillage of territories and the expansion of the market. No energy dedicated to industry could be clean.

We are fighting to re-appropriate our lives. We have the intention of destroying what destroys nature, because we need it to be well and live healthily. Industry, dams, mines, and deforestation are devastating parasites. It suffices to imagine being a bird flying in the sky contemplating the scenery to realize the devastation that has been initiated is irreversible, to see the holes in the forest, to see the flooded lands in the bassins of the dams. We quickly understand that the ecology is far from being a priority of Hydro Quebec and its shareholders. They pay themselves hunting and fishing trips in resorts for the rich, and appropriate the rest of the lands by buying cottages, they build chains and fences, put up signs that say “private property, access forbidden”. Those responsible for these companies aren’t entitled to forgiveness.

We honour all acts of resistance, we salute the courage of communities struggling for self-determination and wild freedom. We are those who oppose the ravaging deforestation in the forest of Ouareau, with the Cree who are opposed to the clear-cuts in the forest of Broadback, with Six Nations who are also fighting against deforestation in the Red Hill Valley related to the high tension line in the south of so-called “Ontario”, with the Mi’kmaq who are fighting again fracked gas, with the Mohawks who threaten to block the Energy-East pipeline, with those who occupy Lax U’u’la (Lelu island) in blocking the construction of the Pacific Northwest LNG terminal and with all the accomplices with wild and combative spirits.

In this very moment, deforestation of the company of the region has begun, as well as the establishment of access roads. There is still time to stop the construction and it isn’t the State or any representative, even those with good will, who will help us. What are we waiting for?

To contact us: anti735[at]riseup.net

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Sounding out the void: reflections on the night-demos of December 2015

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Mar 312016
 

witchesThe three night-demos of this past November and December left a mark on us, a call for reflection. This is what we propose to share with you in the following pages.

Before and after these three demos, we were able to follow the unfolding of conversations – those that happened between friends as much as those we heard by chance in bars, living rooms and in the street – the furtive or noisy course of a feeling that seemed to be shared by many people: a feeling of emptiness. After the 200 person black bloc, after the broken windows, we heard “what else?” insistently. To the point where, when we asked friends if they were going to the third demo on December 18th, the majority answered that they had other things to do, like having dinner at a friend’s house.

So today, and in the past few months, we continue to ask ourselves what pushes those close to us, those who share the same desires to tear up the world and to nourish our rage, to chill with friends as we always do, rather than to seize the (rare) opportunity for a wild unleashing. This brings us to more questions: how can we think of these demos outside of the moments of strike which often push people to prioritize demos over dinners? What can our place be in these demos outside of social movements? What place do these demos take in our daily lives?

What is at the heart of our reflections, this feeling of emptiness, we have felt in all its force. These phrases repeated ad nauseam: “but where are we going with this?”, “what are these demos embedded in?”, “it’s not by breaking windows that we harm Capital”, “the State isn’t shaken by our nocturnal destructive wanderings”. The void, we feel it in the absurdity of gestures engaged for anyone other than ourselves, in the ridiculous silence of those we hate, in the infantilizing and numbing response of the Media that will only ever see us as violent imbeciles – not really dangerous. And worse still, they reflect to us a mirror image that strips away our power. This brings us to think that these demos, these moments of revolt that we open, can only be for us. If they are directed as messages for others, they become meaningless.

We refuse to fill the void that we felt with more demands addressed to those we wish to destroy. We don’t want to wait for the next mass movement to attack this world that does violence to us. We aren’t here to sacrifice ourselves for “the cause”, nor “because we have to”. In these demos, we draw strength from the feeling of deciding to live in the city differently. We take control, with the sense of chaos making us alert, the feeling that we are learning to navigate because it is the enemy of order and the normative universe. In these moments of chaos we no longer hear the trendy slogans repeated until they lose meaning, but bursts of destruction, fireworks and the howling that echoes them, windows shattered by rage and hammers. We feel the force of overturning this order, for the time that it lasts.

And if there is a feeling of emptiness that lives with this furious and ecstatic jouissance, it’s because we know that we seek to destroy more than windows. We can’t be content with the image of destruction. We don’t want to bask in in the spectacle of our own radness. We couldn’t, it rings false. This void, we feel it at our fingertips, because at the end, we are left bored. At the end, you’ve broken a window but this changes nothing; nothing but a sort of catharsis, finally hurting something other than ourselves. So how can we go further than breaking windows, how can we nourish these signs of power within us, against the world?

Already, we crave to see the demo as a space of exploration. To try a little to imagine beyond the gestures already learned – breaking windows, throwing rocks at cops, putting up graffiti, distributing flyers, shooting fireworks, etc. And for us, this doesn’t necessarily imply starting to seek new gestures, but perhaps to find in these gestures, repeated a thousand times by all kinds of people, a little more than their habit. To reflect on the intentions behind these gestures, looking for their unique meaning each time. Even if it is only in search of taking pleasure in them, a feeling of euphoria in the action. Making these gestures active, and not only reproducing them as images of themselves. Further, what this implies for us is to take demos seriously, to prepare ourselves for them before they are even called. Knowing that there will be others and we are already ready, already charged up, like springs only waiting for the moment of release.

What this also means for us is to avoid falling into this trap of living demos as pressure valves; moments where we feel like we are acting against the forces of this world and which then permit us to forget, to feel better so that we return to school and work. We want the demo to overflow into our lives, for it to be contagious and animate our daily gestures. For it to light fires in our lives so that we can then imagine a network of destructive and subversive actions; a web of rebellions that we give name to and tie together. So that we manage to make sense of all these spasms of resistance, without waiting to embed them in a social movement. For us, the demo can be a celebration that overturns and subverts lived time, that drags us out from the banality of daily life. We burn together, running where we wish in the streets and sidewalks with speed and determination, and we violently repel cops as soon as they approach us. We are here because we feel life differently in a demo, because we love the butterflies in our stomachs and our wildly pounding hearts, adrenaline rising.

We also wish to avoid that the demo only replies to itself and is contained to its own temporal-spatial limits and automatisms. We wish to avoid forgetting it the following day, because we have other things to do. We wish to carry the demo within us, to think about it, to talk about it with friends, to see what we would like to do the next time the opportunity presents itself, to always be alert. To not forget the feeling and exaltation possible when we give ourselves the chance, if we let ourselves actualize what we know we’re capable of when we prepare well. We don’t want to return to demos as if we don’t believe in them. Because by continually not believing in them, we bar ourselves from the possibility that the demo will be virulent and combative, that it will only be a parade of the normative order, whose dissenting role permits the maintenance of order. We don’t want to be fearfully lead by cops who are better prepared than us anymore, with our bags too heavy to run and our hands and ears frozen by cold because we forgot a hat and gloves, the too-recognizable clothing we wear everyday. We want every demo to create an unquenchable thirst for the next, because we are ready, because we are just waiting for the space to attack again with the weapons that we are sharpening every day.

We have also asked ourselves: why is it that we feel so called to by demos? Why not concentrate our energy on ninja-actions? Why wait for the next demo if we can do actions in the night with our trusted friends…? Because the demo has something of its own that these actions don’t; the demo is open, the demo is public. In the demo there are those we don’t know, who desire to be there. Like us at one point, who were alone and who came to demos. And who saw the distance between those who throw rocks and ourselves falter. Ourselves, who were there because we didn’t find any other space in our lives for insurgence, to “do something”. So, going to demos, and seeing ourselves become protagonists of this rebellion. No longer having in our minds this far off imaginary where others attack. Demos have opened up our possibilities, have allowed us to face our fear of cops, perhaps slowly, over the years, but always surely. To better understand the terrain, how the cops move, how to heal ourselves, when to run and how to stay calm. Where to hit, and how to see every bank, bourgeois car, and government building as a target. To no longer only see police as executioners, but as targets and beings that we can fight. The moment when we ceased to only be those who watched. And even, the moment when we looked at others, but when this was an active look. We were no longer spectators. If we didn’t pick up the stone, we nonetheless felt the euphoria of the gesture as the glass shattered. There was no longer distance between the throwers and ourselves, because the demo makes it possible to reduce this distance. It is us too, we are there, we are them, we are accomplices, we desire this, our being-spirit is in the rock that smashes.

We would lastly like to question the often-repeated strategy of calling a demo in the week following a successful demo, up until the last demo no longer kindles enthusiasm and is ferociously repressed. Because we feel it in advance, it was said, that the demo of December 18th would be less strong, that it wouldn’t have the same possibilities as the last. And some of us did not go to this demo; we gave power to the self-realizing prophecy that the third demo wouldn’t have the scope of the second or even surpass it in intensity.

And until the next demo, we aim to better plot the intentions that bring us to walk against the flow of traffic.

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