Anti-capitalist

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An interview with a now Bogota-based member of Projet Accompagnement Solidarité Colombie , a Quebec-based collective that works to build direct solidarity with Colombian communities, organizations and social movements. Topics include: - the meaning of internationalism and why and how we frame our struggles in an international context. - what North-South solidarity looks like. - political violence and how it relates to social struggles. - struggling alongside people who are not anarchists. ...

On May Day 2019 in Montreal there were four different demonstrations at different times and locations across the city. The CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes) called for their annual anti-capitalist May Day demonstration to be held in the theme of “No borders”, in the context of the rise of the xenophobic far right in Quebec and the ongoing attept to construct a new migrant prison in Laval, QC. We attended the CLAC’s No Borders May Day, which gathered at 6:30pm at Square Cabot in the west end of downtown Montreal. ...

April 24th and 25th, Montreal will host a “Nature Champions Summit” bringing together “major philanthropists, business leaders, non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies, Indigenous leaders and environment ministers from around the world”. While the planet burns, the poorest populations suffer the violent consequences of ecological disasters, and animal species rapidly disappear, politicians hope to gather peacefully for one more congress. We don’t need yet another summit organized by the Canadian state, known for its extractivist economy, and which just bought a pipeline for 4.5 billion dollars, telling us that a “new partnership” between a handful of ministers and major capitalists will save us from the climate crisis. These “Nature Champions” are responsible for the catastrophe in progress. There is no way we can let them continue to administer disaster with their hollow promises. ...

On Wednesday May 1st, at 6:30pm, in Square Cabot, the anticapitalist caravan is back at it again to say fuck your borders and fuck your prisons! For people fleeing miserable living conditions, what are borders if not fences around prisons? After all, what’s the difference between forcing people to live inside arbitrary perimeters against their will and imprisoning them? Being forced to work for a Canadian company in Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, or elsewhere isn’t much better than being detained. These companies produce all of the useless junk that forms the basis of our modern comfort. The fact that the factories are so far away from Canada makes the exploitation less visible for westerners, though it is clear that slavery has not vanished; it’s only been given a different label. Exploited people pick our fruits, sew our clothes, catch our fish, and die for the rich to get richer, day after day, after day, after day… ...

In addition to our organizing campaigns, the Montreal IWW also organizes Claim Your Pay campaigns, where our members help workers who have been robbed of their wage after being fired. These campaigns mostly happen in the restaurant business and involve a few hundred dollars. When a worker came into contact with us about some unpaid wages in a restaurant that had just closed, we were not expecting such an important case. ...

Montreal, December 10th – Protesters are currently blocking all the main entrances to the main Canada Post International Mail Processing Center near Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport (at 555 McArthur in Ville St-Laurent). At present, dozens of trucks are backed up at the main entrances, where three groups of protesters are using banners to block entrances. No trucks are able to leave the facility. ...

When you hear the word “Westmount”, temporary autonomous zones, dumpster barricades, and flaming effigies of Trudeau aren’t exactly what pops to mind. People often think of this drab neighborhood looming over St. Henri as purgatory where the absurdly wealthy listlessly drift between a loveless marriage, resentful children, and a soul-crushing job… But not anymore! Westmount is undergoing revitalization! Anarchists are transforming it into a mixed-attack neighborhood that offers many opportunities for comrades of every tendency. In desolate Westmount, there’s an activity for anarchists of any stripe—regardless if your flag flies black, half-red, or purple glitterbomb. ...

The Canadian state through its embassy in Athens constantly support the mining corporation Eldorado Gold, responsible for mass destruction of the natural habitat at Chalkidiki region and other places in north Greece. The mining activities destroy aging forests and pollute the earth and water. The mining industry, and in particular mining operations around the world, are one of the most profitable and at the same time shadow industries. Mining companies are by nature two levels on the scale of exploitation by joint ventures, because in addition to gaining surplus value from the workers, public wealth is harvested from the subsoil of the sites that are active to sell it as theirs, leaving behind dead land. There are many examples of mining companies that left behind huge environmental disasters, dissolved local societies and irreparable damage to human health. For example, the chemical contamination in the Baia Mare mine in Romania by AURUL or the enormous environmental disaster caused by MARCOPPER in the Philippines. In this context, an extraction could not be an exception in Greece. It is no coincidence that economically weak and corrupt countries are a good ground for such investments as they are more vulnerable to the elasticisation of their environmental legislation and the need for work makes workers easy prey to identify themselves with the interests of companies and to turn into their defenders by forgetting their class position. ...

[Editorial of the CUTE magazine, Fall 2018] The election period brings its own complications for those who wish to directly take part in a campaign like the one for paid internships and for the recognition of studies as a job. For many months now, interventions have burst forth from all sides, intentional or not, to hijack, divert or neutralize the organizational ability of interns in struggle, towards partisan or corporatist ends. These initiatives, in combination with manoeuvres by the government, come from partisan committees rather than national student associations. ...

On April 1 came into force the law 25 – “An Act to provide a better match between training and employment and to promote employment integration” – which was integrated with the current law on social assistance. We believe it is the early termination of welfare because the founding principles behind it, the right to live decently and access to income regardless of the cause of need, no longer considered. Its implementation will jeopardize people’s lives by imposing attempt to survive them with crumbs, and taking in the great objective employment project, whose purpose is to provide a cheap labor business. ...

While the police and their para-military weapons invaded the old city’s streets, looking for some obscure threat; some shadows slid out of their lair. They attacked the telecommunications system recently updated in Charlevoix by some generous and powerful people. The need for a good fiber-optic connection for the G7 festival relies on a few thousands poles and some big black wires. And no, it’s not the kind of thing that can ignite by itself… We also want to cheer the beaver who broke the fiber-optic network in 2013 and the ice which did the same in April of this year. We hope that by testing your network, we helped you miss a few tweets… ...