Five Year Reflection [Archive]

The Garbage Disposal Unit

7th November 2013, 07:28

Five years ago, I'd just moved back to my hometown after a couple years in Canada's Babylon (Southern Ontario - as opposed to Canada's Mordor, the tar sands). Since I'm about to move back again, and since I'm the new practice and propaganda mod, it seems like a good time to look back over the last five years of practicing and propagandizing.

Some things are going to be left out - little ongoing things (I'm not going to say what got served every week at Food Not Bombs), and things like banner drops of dubious legality. I figure, anyway, those things are less interesting. It's, like, really, every anarchist in Canada dropped, like, five banners about "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land" in early 2010. It's important, but, like, c'mon. Even then this isn't exactly a small task, so I'm going to be writing and posting one year at a time (hopefully one a day). Certainly, don't feel obligated to wait until the whole thing is posted in order to chime in with your thoughts, critiques, and questions!

11/09 - 11/10
The big event of the month, this time five years ago, was the second annual meeting of NATO defense ministers and other assholes, hosted by the German Marshall Fund at a waterfront hotel. The organizing was spearheaded by the Marxist-Leninist Party and the Halifax Peace Coalition, but the ML's, acting in a spirit of non-sectarianism that is, I think, exemplary, approached local anarchists to encourage us to participate. We almost immediately wheatpasted this all over the city:

http://i41.tinypic.com/30aw7rl.jpg

Around this time I was working at a call centre, doing tech support for Harmony Remote Controls (http://www.logitech.com/en-ca/harmony-remotes), and riding the bus every day with other folk working shit wages in the big industrial/commercial parks on either side of the city. In an effort to push forward conversations on the buses, a few of us put together a broadsheet, which we called The Call Centre Express. I'd just read Ian Bone's autobiography, and, though I thought he seemed like a bit of an arse, I was really inspired by Class War's approach. Other folk came from different perspectives - there was even a weird pro-situ comic, and a techie's instructions on how to get around internet blocking software.

SWIM stole several hundred copies from a local Kinkos, and several people distributed them on the aforementioned bus, typically getting on, handing them out, getting off, and riding back in the other direction doing the same.

The two articles running immediately below the masthead were, like every other front page that month, about Swine Flu. One of them was written by me:
WE DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SWINE FLU*
Statistics would suggest that most of us are at a higher risk of being murdered by the pigs** than we are of succumbing to the latest pandemic craze (remember SARS?). At least with swine flu, there’s no profiling - it might get a few of the people we’d like to see get got.
For example? The bastards at GlaxoSmithKline - the world’s second largest drug manufacturer. CEO Andrew Witty said it’s likely that the corporation will pull in about a billion British pounds selling the H1N1 vaccine, Pandemrix.

Pandemrix? It might keep you from getting the flu (you wouldn’t want to miss work ), but, on the other hand, the trade off is in the aluminum, formaldehyde, thiomersal, and other terrifying poisonous shit being injected into your body. Yes, these things may well put some new holes in your brain, but what can we expect?

Pop quiz Select all that apply
GlaxoSmithKline ______________

(1) are the folk who made Paxil - an antidepresent that has a nasty history of driving people to kill themselves. Though they now admit serious discontinuation symptoms may occur, they marketed Paxil for years as not habit forming .

(2) threatened and harrased Dr. John Buse, who dared to posit the link between GSK’s Avandia, and heart disease. Avandia is now believed to be responsible for some 83,000 heart attacks within its first year on the American market.

(3) were accused by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of intentionally creating shortages of AIDS drug AZT, in order to reap the best possible profit from their monopoly.

(4) is a customer of Huntingdon Life Sciences - an animal testing company that became famous after a video was leaked showing their scientists beating the shit out of lab animals for kicks.

If you circled all four answers, you’re correct We're talking about a company who even lied about the goddamn vitamin C content of the fruit juice they sell (Ribena).

So, you can buy the media hype if you want (it's certainly good for paper sales), but on the Call Centre Express we'd rather put our cash aside for next month's 70-fucking-dollar bus pass than blow it on useless surgical masks.
____________
*Seriously - H1N1? What sort of PC bullshit is that? People who think it's a good idea to factory-farm pigs are fucking idiots. We might think that this crisis is exaggerated, but it's still their fault.
**As in the 5-0. Get it? Joke at the expense of Officer Friendly. Ha.
The second article, which, unfortunately, I can't find in a digital format (though a hardcopy exists at the Roberts St. Social Centre! (http://www.robertsstreet.org/zines/call-centre-express)), is a personal account of an employee who was fired for not coming to work while they had swine flu. This was, to clarify, despite the fact that the company had said specifically to stay home, and that there would be no penalty for doing so. Needless to say, once copies started to make the rounds, management at the workplace in question had several emergency meetings. While she didn't get her job back, I'm pretty sure nobody else was sacked.

The third thing taking up time in my life was an attempt to hold accountable a dudebro in the punk scene who'd recently ended an abusive relationship with a friend of mine. Complicating factors: he was also casually dating my relatively serious partner, and lived in the flat directly below mine in a duplex. Things started off promising enough: my friend who he'd been dating had some clear expectations, and he was (apparently) open to taking about it, and trying to meet those expectations. Spoiler: Shit only gets worse.

So, a couple months pass. The next round begins!

The second issue of The Call Centre Express hits the bus just in time to try and spoil everyone's patriotic Olympic spirits, on the heels of the Torch Run passing through town. The leading article this time wasn't by me, but I'm going to post it anyway:
The Olympic Torch Run
Where do the crowds come from?
They didn't come to your party, they didn't make it to your protest. No one saw when you quit your job, no one cheered when you Made It. (whatever that means to you.) The crowds didn't come out to celebrate Workers' day on May 1st. They didn't start their own street parties, or park picnics. When we had a meteor shower they weren't on citadel hill.
All busy, I guess. No rest for human capital.
But when the olympic torch (a symbol with its roots in Nazi Germany and its strings tied to some of the biggest and meanest corporations of the modern world) came through town, the people took to the streets. They cheered, they hollered, they waved their iridescent coke bottles. loving it. Loving that pure white shaft of promise. What was it offering us that was so much more worth supporting than the things that we, and our friends, and neighbours, work hard at every day? The things we're excited about, or scared of. The events we want to share. Everything we do trying to survive and support each other. Where were they then?
Halifax put $50,000 toward this event. Imagine what $50,000 worth of paint would do for a third-grade class let loose on the downtown sidewalks. Or $50,000 worth of ukeleles for a seniors' marching band.
Who decides what's important to us?
Obviously, not us.
Issue two also featured a bit of hatemail we'd received after issue one, poetry, a story about hitch-hiking home from work due to the inconvenient transit schedule, and other such odds and ends. This time, copies came partially free from Staples, partially from the "People's Photocopier" at Roberts Street.

Things were also moving along in aforementioned asshole's accountability process. As part of the process, and as a broader attempt to challenge rape culture in the punk/anarchist milieu we organized a relatively thorough consent workshop/discussion (with the lure of fancy vegan pizza!). It was remarkably well attended, and, aside from a few notable and deeply problematic derailments (including needing to explain that, "No, just because you have feelings coded feminine doesn't mean patriarchy impacts you the same way it does women."), things went relatively well.

But, ah, it's never that simple! Present at the workshop was a former partner of Mr. Asshole, who was very pissed off that the dude that had repeatedly raped her was hosting a consent workshop. Of course, in the course of his accountability process, Mr. Asshole had declined to mention his history of being a fucking piece of shit. You'd think it's the sort of thing you'd tell people who are supposedly helping you to work through things, but, alas! Turns out this guy is a total piece of shit. Of course, this only came to my attention a few months later, but since the workshop is the last meaningful community project that concerned him, I'll drop this narrative here.

In any case, Spring was a bit directionless. I hitch-hiked back to Southern Ontario to visit some friends, sat in a few circles with an undercover RCMP officer, met members of Winnipeg Cop Watch, started two-piece avant-punk band with my partner at the time, Know Hope For The Skids (https://archive.org/details/KnowHopeForTheSkids-NoHopeForThePigs), and attempted to translate The Coming Insurrection (http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/) out of bombastic insurrecto-babble into a readable popular English. I discovered that it actually fit rather easily on a single piece of 8.5"x11" paper.
STOP WAITING!

Our society is organized by work. When somebody asks "What do you do?" they're not asking about what you value in your life - they want to know where you fit in to the scheme of production.

Work sucks.
No increase in minimum wage will make flipping burgers, or answering telephones, fulfilling "investments" of time and energy. Most of my generation doesn't expect anything from work - not adequate safety equipment, let alone pensions. We fill in the gaps in the machinery, and we're treated like it (programmed, used, maintained, and, ultimately, replaced).

Economies don't suffer - people do.
Why should we give a shit about the economy? Why do we slave away to prop up the economy that builds the prisons, puts cameras on the street corners, gives us cancer, and tells us, "Work! Or else!" Or else what?
What can they take that they haven't already taken?

We have no independence.
We don't grow our own food, heal our own bodies, build our own houses, write our own stories, make our own music, or decide what time we need to get up in the morning.

We have no voice.
We don't even speak the same language as lawyers, politicians, cops, and pigs-in-general. We can't vote our way out of this shit - the option isn't on the ballot.

We have no space.
The countryside and the city have given way to a sprawling factory - canola monocultures, business parks, condos, and truckstops. We can't move around without being ID'd, signed in, recorded, and traced.

Do we have each other?
We have hundreds of friends on Facebook, but no communities. We have identities, which mean that people can identify us, but we don't have our own stories. Instead, we bond over shared experience of YouTube videos. By schools, TV, and brute force, they've ripped away our cultures and histories. We have no sense of solidarity because we live surrounded by strangers. Honestly, who would you fight the police for? We're more ready to kill and die in racist wars on the other side of the planet than we are to stand up for our neighbours.

Well, what (the fuck) can we do about it?

STOP WAITING!

We don't need an organization to do it for us - we can organize ourselves. Offices, memberships, and dues are just distractions from what needs to get done. Being recruited is just as dangerous as being arrested, and, for that matter, it's all the easier to arrest us if our names and addresses are on some party's mailing list.

We can feed ourselves!
(You can feed yourself!)
We don't need to eat their processed crap, let alone be forced to pay for it. We can shoplift and dumpsterdive to survive while we make friends with farmers and learn to grow our own food.

We can shelter ourselves!
(You can shelter yourself!)
We can share rooms and split rent so that it only takes a day of temp labour (or panhandling) to pay (the less you work, the more time you have to find ways of not working). We can squat abandoned buildings, and we can camp. We can learn to build our own houses, and dig our own wells.

We can take care of ourselves!
(You can take care of yourself!)
Do any of us expect the law to protect us from the police, racists, global warming, or intimate violence? We can learn to build barricades, to throw a punch, to set a broken arm, or to perform an herbal abortion. We can confront abusive behavior, and support each other through abuse, addiction, depression, and long winters.

STOP WAITING!

If you're sick of being governed, be ungovernable!

Don't let them evict you. Don't let them evict your friends or neighbours. Don't let them arrest you. Don't let them arrest your friends or neighbours. Refuse to co-operate with police. Refuse to be harassed. Refuse to pay. Refuse to work.

Parliament in Ottawa doesn't control us - power is local. It's the landlord, the lazy dude who expects a woman to wash his dishes, the Walmart security guard, etc. We start by taking back our own spaces - our own lives. We just need to begin.

Its first real distribution was at demonstrations against a meeting of G8 development ministers (http://rabble.ca/news/2010/04/report-g8-halifax-protest). The demo itself was relatively unremarkable - in the lead-up, I'd been attending meetings in which certain union hacks had asked me to prevent "masked anarchists" from showing up. This was particularly ridiculous, since I was mostly in the meetings on behalf of Food Not Bombs. Of course, I refused, there were heated words, and nothing was resolved. On the day of, there were of course masked anarchists, I was asked to deal with them, and I, of course, refused. Contrary to the "They'll turn the public against us!" mantra repeated by some organizers, people generally responded favourably or indifferently to masked people in the crowd. Who'd have guessed, right? Anyway, a police horse flipped out and stomped a car, a labour militant was arrested for nothing, and Food Not Bombs served food. Whatever.

The other event organized to coincide with the ministerial meeting aimed at drawing links between development "over there" and development-as-in-gentrification in Halifax's North End. The organizing was a small friends-talking-to-friends affair, with, by the looks of old email threads, 6-10 people working loosely to make everything happen. I guess we decided that I should make the poster:
http://i44.tinypic.com/xbe5nl.jpg
I don't think anybody really knew what to think or expect and the event was uneventful. About 20 people went for a walk (on the sidewalks), talked about neighbourhood history, put up some stickers, and saw an adorable folk-punk band play in front of some condos while eating vegan food. That said, I'm still partial to the premise of having "not a demo"s. It certainly caught the police off guard - there was no premise until almost the end of the event when confused police pulled up in their SUV and demanded "What's going on?!" Someone replied "Nothing!" and the police, not seeing anything illegal going on, left. The whole thing was a little surreal, given that we're talking about twenty people, mostly anarchists, walking around with a megaphone and yelling vaguely threatening things at people they perceive to be yuppies.

As a bizarre aside, I found a draft of an old email, never sent, addressed to a "political frenemy" in response to a call for anti-G8 slogans:

"Halifax G8 Welcoming Committee - We're Going To Get You, You Rich Bastards"
"Halifax G8 Welcoming Committee - I don't want your progress, it tries to kill meeeeeeeeee!"
"Halifax G8 Welcoming Committee - Develop my undouched asshole, capitalist fuckfaces!"
"Halifax G8 Welcoming Committee - We Demand Only Your Blood"

I don't know what I was thinking.

Next came Mayday, which was probably the same as many places - strange big tent politics, with the Marxist-Leninist Party, and anarchists hashing out details in a Syrian restaurant, the District Labour Council paying for a sound system. There was a punk band, lots of good food, some red flags, some black flags, the labour council's "Capitalism Isn't Working for Workers" banner. Blah, blah, blah.

Then it was summer and this:
TOTAL ANARCHIST TRIUMPH?

1

"This action will be militant and confrontational, seeking to humiliate the security apparatus..."
- Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance

"You see the humiliation on the officers faces when this stuff goes on in their city. My members are completely devastated by that."
- Mike McCormack, Toronto Police Association

To say that anarchists' declarations of intent often seem quite unlikely to bear fruit is obvious. For example, in light of our calls to shut down any gathering of ruling elites that comes to our attention, the number of big summits effectively disrupted by anarchists is small. What is significant, then, about the destruction of June 26 in Toronto is that it was an explicit victory: we did what we said we were going to do, and had that fact echoed in the words of our bitter enemies. Our promises were realized on the streets.
Perhaps more importantly, said promises - or their putting-into-practice - resonated outside of the black bloc, outside of anarchists, and outside of "political" actors. In less exclusive language: normal people started fucking shit up. The demonstration - a performance piece of the sort that characterizes North American "countersummits" - was transcended by generalized rioting. Thus, Saturday was a victory for anarchists in a deeper sense. Autonomous direct action against capital and the state ("Burning cop cars and looting stores," Blatz), the anarchist project of attack, was taken up with people outside of an explicit identification with anarchism. Toronto Chief of Police, Bill Blair, observed, "Unfortunately, [anarchists'] criminal activity was made a lot easier by the complicity of the crowd, and so we had to contain and control the crowd in an effort to control those criminals." The broadening of complicities against law and order, even in a temporary way, is a vindication of the premise that the social peace is fragile. When the state loses its capacity to directly assert its monopoly on violence, the people "stand up! fight back!" in an authentic way.

2

"...A mob is policed a little differently than a lawful, peaceful protest... We told the curious and naive to get out of the way and let us do our jobs. Thereafter, people who stood with the criminals were complicit in their activity."
- Bill Blair, high pig

The largest mass arrests in the history of Canada - as of this writing, the media is saying over nine hundred - occurred in the days following the riot. An anarchist-organized demonstration against prisons, scheduled for the Sunday of June 27, was preempted by a virtual lockdown of the neighbourhood around Bruce Mackay Park, with police stopping and searching anybody unfortunate enough to be wearing a backpack or an article of black clothing. Muzzle blasts and rubber bullets were deployed against non-violent crowds outside of the makeshift detention centre. Still others of the nine hundred were arrested during the forceful clearing of the designated protest zone.
At least seventeen people are facing conspiracy charges, the evidence in which includes a rap video, an umbrella, and an undercover's recording of a spokescouncil in which those present come to a consensus on "no plan" (1). Four of the conspiracy arrests, of the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance's "executive directors", occurred in targeted raids early Saturday morning; they weren't even on the streets when shit hit the fan. Not surprisingly, there is a publication ban on the trials.
A press conference on the 29th, attempting to justify police actions, displayed seized "street weapons" such as a copy of anarchist journal "Upping The Anti", shin pads, and golf balls. Also on show were a chainsaw, a crossbow, and other objects which police admitted were unconnected to demonstrators, anarchists, or the summit, but happen to have been seized over the weekend.
This is the reality of social war: when the police are no longer able to discern the difference between protesters and anarchists, between self-proclaimed anarchists and criminals, between civil and uncivil society, they lash out indiscriminately. No doubt, in their attack on everyone unfortunate enough to be kettled in a given intersection, or to have attended a particular meeting, they may have arrested somebody who cracked a window on Saturday. However, the proportion of arrests relative to charges speaks volumes.
Alas! Though these blatant displays of police abuse may play poorly in the media, they were successful. This represents our weakness: Without an infrastructure capable of sustaining the riots, police were able to quickly reassert control. Having retreated from the streets, we will likely go back to paying rent, buying groceries, working shit jobs, and so on, or maybe rebelling against these things individually. This normalcy is the pigs' victory. Until we can feed, house, and take care of ourselves and others without their system, their reality will continue reasserting itself with the arrival of fire departments and repair crews (2).

3

"...Trashing shops and burning cars does not help anyone. These hooligans obscure the real issues."
- Rajesh Latchman of GCAP South Africa

On June 26, anarchists demonstrated a fierce combativeness that could be controlled neither by the state nor its lackeys on the left. As part of an escalation taking place in actions across the country (countless nighttime attacks and sabotages, the Vancouver Olympics, the Ottawa firebombing), we are obscuring what are presented as the "real issues" - this or that detail of our shitty reality. A space is beginning to open in which it is possible to talk, not about the piecemeal reform of capital, but of an entirely different world. What remains, then, is how to turn a fissure into a rupture. As always, outside the realm of ideologies and big solutions, there are more questions raised than answered. How do we draw the links between our project as "THUGS!" (Toronto Sun front page headline, July 27) and building autonomous community? Now that we're front page news, how do we resonate directly and prevent ourselves from becoming a media spectacle? How do we make more moments and spaces of total freedom in the midst of massive police repression?
If some of us were unsure of ourselves before we headed East on Queen, we are not any longer. If we had not yet begun, we certainly have now. So, how do we go all the way?
____________________

(1) One editor suggested that it should be pointed out that there is other evidence, and that conspiracy charges are, legally speaking, very serious.
(2) An editor pointed out that it is not an either/or situation as regards our autonomy. Between gardening and burning cop cruisers, there is looting - a way a feeding ourselves and attacking simultaneously.
Afterword, I spent the rest of the summer traveling around, picking up odd jobs (digging a ditch, working a week at an A&W), and generally being politically irrelevant. It ended on a high note, opening for Defiance, Ohio (a popular punk band) at a show put on by the sadly defunct Toronto collective "No Apathy". "No Apathy" worked really hard to make punk shows politicized, anti-racist, feminist, etc. spaces, booking political bands, having tonnes of literature at shows, using accessible venues etc. - it really reminded me of what I love about punk.

Getting back to Halifax, I threw myself into Food Not Bombs, which started cooking twice a week at the collective house where I was living. We started to discuss changing the name, publicly repudiating veganism and non-violence, and other political questions. While none of them were answered definitively, this is the period that led to the creation of a new Halifax Food Not Bombs website (http://http://foodnotbombs.h-a-z.org/) including the wacky "About" section which I highly recommend reading a) for the lulz and b) to get a sense of where we were at, organizationally. Strangely and uselessly enough, you can still find my phone number from three/four years ago on the site.

I'd also traveled home with a member of Winnipeg Cop Watch - she graciously organized a workshop, and provided us with documents and counseling on how to start our own Cop Watch group. We began meeting almost immediately, first in the office of the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group (http://nspirg.ca/) (who provided us with start-up funds), then at a local McDonalds during Free Coffee Week. Our mission statement:
HALIFAX COP-WATCH MISSION STATEMENT
Formed in 2010, Halifax Cop-Watch is an independent collective of community residents who are actively working to end police brutality and misconduct. We patrol the streets of Halifax by foot, car, bike, etc. legally observing and videotaping police interactions with the public. Our observations take place without interfering with the police or the accused individual(s). We strongly emphasize our goal of deterring police brutality rather than documenting footage to prove a point or to sensationalize police brutality via various media sources. Through providing education to community residents regarding citizen rights we hope to enhance peoples ability and confidence to respond to police interactions and share the information with others. We hope to provide community residents with opportunities to think critically about systemic discrimination and the role of police forces in society.
We hope to organize opportunities for people to share, heal and learn from their experiences with police forces within the HRM (Halifax Regional Municipality). Halifax Cop-Watch believes crime and policing should be understood and addressed within contexts of oppression, including colonialism, the history of the reserve system, local, regional, or international displacement, and exclusion and disparity created by capitalism. We hope to work along side other community efforts and struggles to resist police brutality and work toward alternatives to the prison industrial complex. We encourage others to establish similar groups in their neighborhoods and communities.

11/10 - 11/11
The next matter of significance in which I participated was the first Solidarity Halifax conference (http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/blog/steve/5192). Though these conferences would eventually lead to the formation of a formal organization, Solidarity Halifax (http://solidarityhalifax.ca/), the first brought together a wide spectrum from social democrats to left-communists to anarchists to Trotskyists. I showed up with a stencil that said "SOLIDARITY IS OUR WEAPON :blackA:" and spraypaint, leading to a session of impromptu t-shirt making, and a bit of accidental sidewalk decoration in front of the conference venue. On the whole, the day was a lot of gabbing about a lot of things, with not many conclusions being reached - but, none the less, it was a relatively pleasant social atmosphere. I ended up on the "Ecology working group" mailing list. This group immediately split, with the weirdos/hippies/young people (myself included) starting an autonomous collective which, by spring, had evolved into "Locals Organizing Against Democrapitalist Ecological Disaster" aka "LOADED Posse".

Fall also meant the return of the now-annual German Marshal Fund sponsored "Halifax International Security Forum" - this year, we had more time to prepare, and bigger ambitions. Anarchists helped to organize the main demo (basically along the same lines as the previous year), as well as organizing our own event for the second day of the conference:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2rg2f08.jpg
The previous year, Canadian "Defense" Minister Peter MacKay had staged a successful "Look how human I am!" propaganda coup, going for an early morning jog around Halifax's iconic Point Pleasant Park. We'd been tipped off by friends in the media that he planned to do the same thing this year, and we decided we'd join him. We borrowed a van, bought a small crate's worth of energy drinks (they were only $0.30 a piece from the Food Bank-owned discount store), and plastered the city in these posters. Needless to say, response was mixed.

Anyway, the first day's demo was larger than the previous year's, and rowdier, ending with an unpermitted march down the main drag, and only forcefully being pushed onto the sidewalk after several minutes, the police having been caught entirely off guard.

The next morning's "Pig Chase" began bright and early, attracting only a small handful of people (less than ten), but was none the less a success - the threat of our presence had been sufficient to move Peter MacKay to cancel his morning jog. With the park ceded to us politically, we went for a pleasant walk, telling early morning dog-walkers and runners about why we were carrying black flags, and why we thought NATO should be dismantled. A victory statement was published in the "Letters" section of the local alt-weekly, but, unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere.

This was also about the time that Halifax Copwatch was just beginning to get organized enough to reach outside of our immediate circle. We decided, being a group of primarily young white anarchists - ie not reflecting the demographics of those most targeted for police violence in our neighbourhood - that we should organize a broader community consultation.

We produced a simple poster explaining the event, who we were (a group committed to preventing acts of police violence within a framework of prison abolition and community control), and offering the requisite lure of free coffee and snacks.
In the end, probably between fifteen to twenty people we didn't know showed up, and spoke their minds. Our primary conclusion was that white kids with cameras would be generally distrusted when filming the members of the black community's interactions with cops. Though we'd figured as much, the event shed light on a variety of more specific issues, and provided a lot of food for thought. It was somewhat successful insofar as folk seemed happy to drink coffee and talk to us, and generally shared our opinion of the police (with one or two notable adherents to the "bad apples" analysis of police violence). Back to the drawing board!

Copwatch held our second event, which was a flop - a "Know Your Rights" event at the local legal aid office. Unfortunately, only one non-Copwatch member attended. We'd hoped that posters in a similar style and a location near library where we'd held our first event would attract some of the same folk who'd come out for round one. Alas. On the brightside, we drank a lot of coffee together, and went over what were are/n't allowed to do during interactions with police in some detail - refreshers never hurt.

Anyway, Copwatch were about to have our first chance to try out actually copwatching (ie conspicuously filming police to discourage them from shitkicking people) - a CFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federation_of_students)-sponsered student rally on their "National Day of Action" to freeze tuition fees.

Of course, while it seemed like a great opportunity to practice our camera handling, it also warranted critical anarchist intervention on other levels. Consequently, running with the unintentional irony that the march was scheduled for Groundhog Day, a group of us painted a big ol' banner with Bill Murray's face on it. The accompanying text said, "Schools like factories like prisons like schools like factories like prisons like [. . .]" (plus, somewhere in the middle a "like hospitals" thrown in for good measure) and "STUDENT DAY OF WHATEVER :blackA:". We went dutifully to stand out in front of the largest university library, and distribute a pamphlet I'd written, calling for critical participation:
Student Day of Whatever

Another year, another national "Day of Action" called by the Canadian Federation Students. Another year, another repetition of demands that the government address: growing student debt, rising tuition fees, underfunding of education, etc. If previous years are any indication - and these things tend to be nothing if not predictable - most students won't give a fuck.

Does it mystify anyone (other than the CFS bureaucrats) that the promise of walking down Spring Garden Road (lead, flanked, followed by cops) chanting "1-2-3-4!", and carrying prefabricated placards fails to arouse the passions of our generation? Further, even if these means could possibly be effective, the ends strike us as equally uninspiring.

"A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the "educational system." A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking."
- On The Poverty Of Student Life

The problem is not that universities are underfunded. A look at DAL President Tom Traves's salary – in excess of $220,000 - should say enough. The problem is not that we are chained to student debt. Tuition fees are no more of an indignity than paying for food or shelter. This society makes simply being alive a matter of paying. The problem is that student life is part-and-parcel of this society more generally. Every complaint we could make as students, followed through to its obvious conclusion, is a complaint with the operation of the whole social machine. Of course the answers offered by the CFS strike us as inadequate, and if the real questions are never posed, we're doomed to make the same choice as our parents:

"Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit." - Guy Debord

It is ironic, perhaps, that where the university, and social norms generally, have been most challenged by students, tuition fees are the lowest. In 2005, Quebec students responded to cuts to bursaries with a wave of strikes and occupations that shook not just the schools, but the province. In occupied colleges students experimented in autogestion (roughly self-organization), feeding themselves, teaching themselves, and learning to relate in new ways. They also experimented in self-defense, driving off cops, building barricades, and in some cases maintaining the occupations for months. On the streets, demonstrators began to talk – not just about bursaries - but about abolishing tuition altogether. From there, it became possible to talk about abolishing capitalism without sounding like a hopeless romantic (hope ran high). Of course, under these circumstances, the government became eager to negotiate and found eager partners in the FEUQ and CFS bureaucrats who saw the situation exploding out of their control. The government offered concessions, the students were told to go back to class by "their" leaders, and the experiments ended. Not a happy ending by any means, but the lessons should be clear.

So, what about February 2nd? February 2nd might be a depressing corpse-walk, but it also might be an opportunity to find one another. In England and Italy, recent student demonstrations have exploded into confrontations; by actually fighting for themselves, students have learned lessons that can't be taught in a classroom. February 2nd might be the first day of a learning experience that could open doors not to better careers, but to better worlds. If we can meet each other in the streets, out of the student ghetto, we can initiate projects that transcend the limits of student politics. We'll be there, looking for accomplices. Will you be with us?
In the lead-up, we also bleach-printed 50 or so plain black bandanas with the words "WE ARE THE CRISIS". It was simple and fun - though there are "nicer" ways to do it, we just used a cardboard stencil, and a dollarstore spraybottle filled with storebrand liquid bleach (no dillutin' - nothin'!). Once the words became visible, we just threw the bandanas in the tub. Viola. Simple as that.

On the day of, things were not terrible, but less than inspiring. The bandanas were well received, and worn by a bunch of people, and some of our chants caught on, but the event was carefully orchestrated for the media, and the podium was dominated by "socialists" who suddenly become liberals whenever they speak to a crowd. A student journalist had this take on the matter:
Extreme Measures
What keeps a rally from spiralling into anarchy?

When protesters clad in black turned a Victoria Park bench into a podium during the Nova Scotia Day of Action for universities, third-year King’s student Phoebe Mannell decided to take matters into her own hands. Mannell said the protesters were holding homemade flags and shouting throughout a speech by Laura Penny. So Mannell went up to them and demanded they stop. They complied.
One such protester—they’re often dubbed “anarchists” —was [The Garbage Disposal Unit], 24. He was on the bench speaking with Mannell and believes that his heckling “encouraged discourse” among the students during the speeches. He was discouraged by the “unreasonable” requests of Mannell and representatives of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), who organized the rally. Penny, a university professor, had said some things with which he disagreed, and he was “pretty frustrated with a lot of it.”
In particular, he was frustrated by the idea that universities are vital to the economy, a theme of the rally. “Maybe that’s true, but is it the reason we’re promoting learning?” he asked.
[TGDU] is not a student, but says he sits in on university classes because he likes to learn. He completed one year of history at Concordia University in 2005, the year of the largest student strikes in Quebec history.
At those 2005 strikes, [TGDU] said, thousands of students walked out of school and demanded tuition fee elimination at a time when a proposed $103 million in cuts to the grants and loans program risked doubling student debt. Now Quebec has the most subsidised tuition fees in the country.
“A legal walk down the right-hand side of the street,” as [TGDU] described the march, will not cause the changes needed to make post-secondary education accessible, he said. “We can do better than that. Students don’t want to pay tuition at all.”
Gabe Hoogers, a rally organiser and Nova Scotia representative for the CFS, said [TGDU] and his friends “supported us in so far as they recognized a problem with how post-secondary education is run.”
They “wanted more extreme measures, but supported us.”
[TGDU] said that rally organisers have privately told him that they share his views about changing education and societal structure. “They express very radical politics, but out in front of a microphone, they do their job,” he said.
The rally was a first for many attendees, and the CFS planned the rally with that in mind. On each participating campus, rally organisers spoke to the crowds about route plans. On the route, designated students served as marshals and first aid responders, trained in conflict prevention by Tony Tracy of the Canadian Labour Congress.
While [TGDU] said the rally was a show of numbers to use against politicians during negotiations, Rebecca Rose, CFS Maritime organiser, said the numbers are useful in countering public opinion. Politicians believe “we’re apathetic and not interested in getting involved,” she said. This rally was the “first semi-political thing (many) did in their lives.”
[TGDU] says that he’d like to be involved with the student effort. “But I’m not going to be involved on the level of being a number in a demo,” he said. He believes students should be individuals at rallies, as his group was: protesting with unique signs, or serving as Cop Watch, a branch of a North America-wide watchdog group for police behaviour.
He also says that he has more in common with most students than they think. “I don’t think I’m more radical than most people,” he said.
Put simply, he said, “Most students wish they weren’t engaged in a hierarchical competition for a piece of paper.”
The rally also brought tensions among Copwatch organizers to the surface - discussions about how we should respond when approached by officers, whether or not we should engage with middle-class dominated social movements, and other questions were pushed to the fore. Ultimately, the couple people who thought being polite to police was strategic left: the rest of us then pulled off Halifax's first ever rally for March 15th, the International Day Against Police Brutality. Rather than offering my own account, here is Copwatch's statement:
For the first time in Halifax, on March fifteenth, as the sun set over the South Commons, people gathered to mark the International Day Against Police Brutality. The organizers, largely from Halifax Copwatch, hung banners reading "Against Police and the Prison Societies They Maintain" and "Halifax Copwatch: End Police Brutality", to a soundtrack of anti-police punk and hip-hop blasting from a shopping cart.

By the time the rally began, about 60 people had gathered, many with homemade placards, critical of police, and authority generally. A few placards warned of broader state conspiracies. Notably absent were the police themselves, the media, and official event marshals. In lieu of authorities, an air of "people power" prevailed.

After a short introduction by copwatch, poet El Jones performed two pieces, after which the megaphone was offered up for anybody speak. Individuals told of their personal experiences with police violence, talked about the police and system more generally, and about their hopes. As the sky darkened, about twenty torches were passed around and lit, while the names of people murdered by police in Canada was read through the microphone. The speaker explained that, despite having several pages of names, it was a woefully incomplete list, compiled in a couple hours of internet research, since the police do not provide this information. It was a sombre and angry vigil in the firelight.

Finally, Alana Lee spoke about systemic violence against indigenous women by police forces, and the de-funding of Sisters in Spirit, while, adding insult to injury, police budget continue to increase. Finally, she asked, "So, are we marching?"

No march had been planned, but shortly after the speeches ended the Against Police banner was hoisted and, torches in hand, about 30 people began marching toward the police station, on Gottingen St. A police van showed up and asked people to step off the street, which they refused to do; the van carried on following in silence. After chanting "Cops! Pigs! Murderers!" and "No fences! No borders! Fuck law and order!" the marchers proceeded to the Slain Peace (ha) Officers Memorial where there were some final words exchanged. The march dispersed without any arrests or serious confrontations.

This rally was in solidarity with rallies in Montreal, Toronto, Seattle, and elsewhere. In Montreal, police attacked marchers, and arrested over 100. Around the world, and everyday, we can hear the response in the streets: "No justice! No peace! Fuck the police!"
Some pics, if that piqued your interest:
http://i40.tinypic.com/2s1ak20.jpgandhttp://i44.tinypic.com/16205ts.jpg
Unfortunately, though we didn't guess it at the time, this was Copwatch's last gasp. While meetings continued for another couple months, no other events or materials materialized. Ultimately, a critical mass of people left to go traveling or over political differences. An attempt to get people together to sum up and take stock - to (self-)criticize never really took shape beyond a few "Maybe we should . . ." type email. In retrospect, I worry that I may have been a dominating figure within the group, letting my own politics shape too much of its activity and rhetoric. Ah, hindsight.

Spring also meant LOADED Posse kicking it into high gear, organizing a rally for Earth Day, putting together a 'zine, attending others' "green" events to promote an anticapitalist perspective (and heckle NDP politicians), and starting a small collective garden. Though I can't find the poster itself for the Earth Day rally, I did find an early draft of its text in an old internal collective email:

Global Warming,
Mass Extinction,
Nuclear Disaster,
Are Symptoms:
THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS IS CAPITALISM
More than ever, the planet is threatened by attempts to realize an order of never-ending production of commodities. No reform can fix this, because the whole foundation is rotten to the core.We aim to be an explicit anticapitalist, antistate, presence at the Earth Day event on [details] at [details], rallying under the [something snappy] banner.
Bring your crew. Wear comfy shoes.
The [details] appears in the original email - I guess we hadn't worked them out yet. The [something snappy] ended up being "Capitalism Fracks The Planet" - a banner that turned out quite beautifully. Our march started a fifteen/twenty minute march from the larger anti-fracking rally taking place in front of the Nova Scotia Legislature, and took the streets, picking up a few random hippies, skids, and skaters from the commons (a large park in central Halifax) along the way.

Unfortunately, around this time I started drinking heavily again, broke up with my partner of the previous going-on-three-years, and generally ended up in a pretty bad way. Luckily, some close friends in Montreal offered to help me pick up the pieces, so I left Halifax, leaving all sorts of unfinished business, and headed for Quebec.

Initially, I was pretty uninvolved - I drummed for a band (http://failbetter.bandcamp.com/), lived on some friends' couch, put my IWW membership back in good standing, helped start a new Food Not Bombs serving (it only lasted until Christmas), and applied for "activist" jobs, none of which I got. My only notable writing from this period was a pamphlet written for Montreal's "Midnight Naked Bike Ride" which was (mis-quoted) at length by a rightwing hack in an editorial for the Calgary Herald (http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/theeditorialpage/story.html?id=3476b33f-ba85-4bdc-a425-be2e51db7160&p=2). I highly recomend reading the Calgary Herald editorial, because it is hilarious.
The original pamphlet:
In business casual or a bikini, clothing covers not only our bodies, but also our selves; it imposes certain stories, cultural expectations, labels, etc. upon us. Every t-shirt has, woven into it, relationships of production and consumption, relationships of power, flows of information and materials. Every garment (and every commodity) is a thread in the most constricting of uniforms, imposed at gunpoint and at shopping centres: CIVILIZATION.
Whether we are naked or in parkas, our bodies remain trapped within the system that issues judgement according to clothing, skin colour, or desire. Whether we are on bikes or in hummers, the police will enforce the rules of the road: keep to the right, don't torch department stores. As long as the logic of the commodity rules, the power of the well-dressed man in the limousine won't be threatened by the naked queer on the tallbike.
We take off our clothing to celebrate the beauty and diversity of our bodies, but what of the bodies we can't see see, locked away in cells or consigned to stitch American Apparel under florescent lights in "not sweatshops"? When will we see the bodies that are actually forbidden? Will we even see each other outside of this carefully controlled space with its set time, its predetermined route, its police escorts?
To begin answering these questions, we have to call into question the entire existing order. We have to strip away not just the layers that hide our bodies, but the entire apparatus of domination that ensures we'll put our pants on and go back to work in the morning.

NO PANTS, NO MASTERS
means
WE MUST DESTROY CIVILIZATION

Otherwise, summer was pretty lazy, except that I started helping out friends who were doing various projects around McGill university, including the university's alternative "Radical Frosh (http://qpirgmcgill.org/)" and support for striking MUNACA (http://www.munaca.com/)workers. By early Fall, this had escalated to doing regular tabling on campus to drum up enthusiasm for the coming student strike, including this ridic insurrecto nonsense (http://mtlcounter-info.org/blocage-occupation-greve-sauvage/?lang=en) and various writings from the California students rebellion (eg After The Fall (http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/)).

Occupons Montréal was something of a non-event for the anarchists I was involved with. We made a silly banner and went down on the first day to strike up conversations, but most of us only stayed for a handful of nights, and found the GAs pretty infuriating. The presence of, on one hand, a Quebec nationalist paramilitary organization and, on the other, tonnes of useless "Zeitgeist!" hippie-types made the thing feel like a bust in some ways, though, certainly, it had its upsides. For one, it provided housing and food on the basis of mutual aid for many homeless/precarious folk, second, it did provide a space where some worthwhile conversations happened, and, third, it meant that any demo could swing by the occupation and quickly bolster its numbers. Anyway, this is the banner I was somewhat responsible for (I still have it):
http://i41.tinypic.com/i5dh7s.jpg And here's the anarchist/anti-colonial contingent's digs:
http://i41.tinypic.com/bgwok9.jpg

Anyway, by the time the eviction rolled around, I hadn't been very involved, other than dropping by to occasionally help friends with particular projects/tasks (e.g. trying to chase off the nationalists who'd appointed themselves as "security") and to eat the occasional meal. It was poorly resisted and a "non-event".

By the time November rolled around, we'd built a solid core of people on McGill and Concordia campuses - mostly members of their respective "Mob Squad" groups. Many of us attended the biggest pre-strike demo as more-or-less a block, carrying "Book Sheilds". Clashes erupted in front of Jean Charest's office, and, more importantly for me, on McGill campus in a failed attempt to storm the administration building.
gUQv9djvifU
Riot police on campus, indescriminatingly threatening students and professors led to an important change in discourse, and lay the foundation for what was to come in the winter.

11/11 - 11/12
Winter and Spring 2012 have, of course, been chronicled in some detail elsewhere. For those who are unfamiliar, Submedia's Street Politics 101 (http://www.submedia.tv/stimulator/2013/05/26/street-politics-101/) is one of the better summaries en anglais. On that basis, I'm not going to try to analyze or recount the entire movement, and I'm just going to share a few experiences to give a sense of where I was in the bigger picture.

McGill is generally a very Conservative school. Though there was a mandate for a one day strike in 2005 (the last big student upsurge in Quebec), it wasn't enforced with hard pickets, and went largely ignored. This year, before the strike-proper had even started, things kicked off with a bang, with a group of students (Mob Squad members) occupying the 6th floor of the James administration building for six days in a surprise "Resignation Party" for the Deputy Provost of Student Life. I wasn't on the inside, but I spent a night camping out in front of the building, and was involved in some of the attempts (by improvised pulley) to get food to the occupiers. The occupation fizzled on the sixth day, with students leaving the building in response to a police ultimatum, without their demands having been met. The liberal discourse at McGill around #6Party (http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2013/09/6party-and-the-morning-after/) is that it was a failure - however, it rallied radicals at McGill, providing momentum and unity that, in my opinion, was crucial.

For many of the demos and "manifactions" that followed, members of McGill Mob Squad rolled together in the streets (yes, we actually talked like that - go ahead and laugh), as well as cooperating extensively with Concordia and Dawson students by virtue of common language (English).

McGill crew blockading an entrance to the Complexe Maisonneuve / the Banque Nationale towerhttp://cloudfront.crimethinc.com/images/montreal/16b.jpg

Of course, off of the streets, there was a strike going on, with daily picketlines, and all of the attendant complications. As an incitement to scab, bourgeois media, university administrations, and right-wing student groups insisted publicly that it was not, in fact, a strike, and that it was boycott; that students had the right to go to class and there was nothing wrong with it. I produced a short pamphlet for McGill, hoping to challenge this theoretically:

[I]YES, THIS IS A STRIKE. . .
On the picket lines, I’ve heard the same numb recitation of “This isn’t even a strike, it’s a boycott!” repeated like a mantra, absolving one of responsibility for crossing a picket line. It seems as though disparagingly few students have taken the time to critically assess the assumptions underlying this discourse – speaking to a sad state of affairs in the university more generally. A boycott concerns consumption, and a strike production; consequently these readings represent opposing understandings of not only students and the university, but of knowledge itself.
To refer to a boycott, essentially, is to refer to students as consumers, and knowledge as a commodity that is passively consumed as a finished product. Within the idea of the boycott is the assumption that the student exchanges their tuition for a fixed body of knowledge, which is then their property.
Ironically, this runs counter to the idea, oft referred to by the same academic hacks, that university is an “investment” in knowledge-capital. For knowledge to produce value, as capital, it must be acted upon by labour – it must pass from its abstract existence and be transformed qualitatively. This process, for obvious reasons, is directly dependent on the concrete work of the student. In the course of their studies, students create a body of usable knowledge and social capital from which the university profits – when students stop going to class, this transformation of knowledge is interrupted. In other words, yes, it is a strike.
Disturbingly, foundational to all of this is the notion that knowledge exists, fundamentally, within the logic of the marketplace. It is implicit that knowledge serves first and foremost, a role within the reproduction of capital. While free market fundamentalists might argue that the interests of capital serve the greatest possible good, one might hope that university students are not so intellectually stunted. In any case, a little bit of thought should reveal the obvious, that knowledge is not a fixed quantity, and does not diminish when it is shared. On the contrary, knowledge tends toward the common, increasing as it is passed between us. In fact, it is only because of this that the university as a site of social production is even possible.
Tuition hikes mean a further erosion of this commons, an increasing commodification of knowledge, its increasing transformation into capital, and its increasing monopolization by the capitalist class. It is with the student strike, the disruption of this process, that we stand to reappropriate knowledge by and for the commons. What is at stake in tuition hikes is not only the exclusion of particular individuals from the university –it is a battle in the larger context of “austerity” wherein the capitalist Moloch, having inevitably run up against the limits of capital accumulation elsewhere, is now turning on us to fuel its fires. As workers rise up and strike across the world, students’ actions here are contextualized by global struggle. Boycott? No. A strike as in, “striking a blow”. In case it wasn’t obvious…
. . .YES, THIS IS CLASS WAR

By early spring things had started to escalate to riots - I took a break to attend the Edufactory (http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/) conference in Toronto. It was a fantastic forum for discussion, and an excellent push theoretically in terms of understanding the university and student struggles. It was funny to come back from academic (if urgent) discussions in Toronto to Montreal in May, which, you probably know, was an epic shitshow.

I took another break from the action to go to Halifax, where me and two other Montrealers put on a workshop about the strike, insisting on the necessity of confronting and replacing the CFS with forms of organization suited to popular participation and grassroots militancy. The CFS hacks at the workshop were unimpressed with our lack of tact.

We returned to the F1 - what turned out to be the last big hurrah of street confrontations and making chaos. With school out due to Bill 78 (the "Special Law"), the struggle lost a lot of its rooting in the schools, and the neighbourhood committees (with which I was embarrassingly unengaged), while inspiring, were unable to sustain the volume and disruption of actions. I was also arrested a second time - this time singled out, rather than swept up in a mass arrest - and so I backed off to focus on my summer job as one of QPIRG-McGill's Radical Frosh co-coordinators.
http://i41.tinypic.com/qo91yx.jpg
Whatever. I love making banners.

Other than a trip to Toronto for a "Student Strike Training Camp", my only other big political project outside of work was the Midnight Kitchen (http://themidnightkitchen.wordpress.com/)Collective - I'd been involved a bit throughout the year, but, since I was now working on campus anyway, decided to step up my involvement (plus maybe get a shot at one of the jobs come fall).

Finally, in August, came the rentrée, the Special Law-scheduled return to class in order to finish the abortive spring semester. A convergence was planned, with folk coming from outside Quebec to be present in the streets and at the schools to push for the strike to continue.

The rentrée was a coup for the government. Lured by election promises, students voted (by massive margins in some cases) to return to their classes. My roommate came home one afternoon, during the rentrée with a button made by dissenting students at one of the CEGEPs that had voted against continuing the strike. It had a picture of a red square and said, "So you voted to end the strike - that's fine, I get that, but you're wrong and I hate you." Bitter memes indeed.

On the upside, "Rad Frosh" was actually really inspiring - we had 200 froshies participate (+1 or 2 we let in, even though 200 was supposedly our limit), and had some great workshops on everything from Indigenous Feminisms to street tactics. What blew my mind was the politics of the "kids" participating - at 18 they had the type of analysis I didn't develop until I was 24 or 25. It was really inspiring, in that it made me feel like the left, broadly speaking, was on a good trajectory in terms of our baseline theoretical level. The days of muddled antiglobalization anticonsumer politics are behind us! Maybe.

Fall, on the whole, was quiet. I wasn't working, and took some time to just enjoy the collective space I was living in, play music. For kicks, I scammed my way into Powershift (http://www.wearepowershift.ca/) in Ottawa because I'd heard Vandana Shiva was speaking (it wasn't true), and because I have a masochistic love of talking to liberal hippies about anti-capitalist struggle. It was actually a really nice weekend (not nice enough that I would have paid for it, mind you). As it turns out, some of the organizers were moving away from the liberal politics they'd entered the CYCC with, and, as a consequence, there were some pretty interesting speakers - I saw a workshop by Harsha Walia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oesjegD1-Vg), and another by Dru Oja Jay, a co-author of Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism (http://fernwoodpublishing.ca/paved-with-good-intentions/).

Coming back, I attended the refounding meeting of Climate Justice Montreal (http://climatejusticemontreal.ca/), and finally gave up on paying my overdue IWW dues.

11/12-11/13
Over the Winter, some friends and I started a feminist hardcore band (http://secondwavemom.bandcamp.com/) - otherwise, my time got taken over by a job testing video games, for which I wrote this (Which Pelarys (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=67466) was kind enough to translate into French):
Why Build a Secret Organization of Communists in Our Workplace?

1. Why communist?
2. Why a secret organization?
3. So what?

1. Why Communist?

To answer that question, we have to answer "What is capitalism?" first. In other words, to know which way to go, we need to know where we are in the first place. The easiest way is to retrace how we got here; easy in theory, but harder when our maps are all wrong. High school history class taught us, "We came on some boats, signed some treaties, and beat the Nazis. Peace, Order, and Good Government." We're going to need some better landmarks.
A condensed version of the story of capitalism could go something like this: About 600 years ago, or so (and over the span of a couple hundred years), rich people started buying up and/or stealing all of the common land in Europe. This "commons" had traditionally been the land that the peasants had used for food, firewood, and other necessities. The result was a tonne of newly dispossessed people who, for the first time, had to work for wages in order to buy all the basics of life.
Now, this should have been a pretty short-lived state of affairs because, after all, how do you suddenly find the money to create new jobs for most of the population of Europe? However, about 500 years ago, the Americas were "discovered"(1). Rich Europeans decided that, to pay all of the dispossessed peasants, they would enslave the native peoples of the Americas, and/or murder them, and steal everything on the continent.
Of course, back in Europe, convincing people to work for wages wasn't as easy as we might now assume. Why would anyone want to work for someone else to pay for the things they used to take/make themselves? People resisted - rebel armies, religious heresies, and food riots swept Europe . . . so the rich and their governments burned the women as witches, executed rebels en masse, and started locking up those who refused to work in what evolved into the prison system.
All of this, plus, not too much later, the enslavement of huge numbers of Africans, was how the rich got the wages, and the people to work for the wages, together to kick-start capitalism.
About 200 years ago capitalism started to go down the road of industrialization - replacing people with machines (powered by coal, oil, etc.). This "revolution" opened up huge potential in terms of what society could produce, but, because wage workers don't decide what or how they produce, it produced the greatest disparities of wealth in world history.
Capitalism has continued to grow and change since then, but this is where we can get back to the matter at hand. While many societies and communities practiced something like communism before this point, it's here - at industrial capitalism - that we can start talking about communism in a contemporary sense.
Karl(2), communism's most celebrated poet, described communism as "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things". This "real movement" has to be a movement of workers, since "the present state of things" is created by workers moving (sewing the shoes, picking the apples, writing the code). It's only a change in these motions which can abolish that "present state".
Some people associate communism with the Soviet Union or China (or Obama - ha!), but that's silly. The workers in those countries worked the same as workers do here. Just looking at Russia now is instructive. The same type of work - wage labour - produced the same outcome, capitalism. This just goes to show that communism isn't something which can be accomplished by politicians, even "communist" ones. On the contrary, communism begins at "the abolition of the wage system" (3). The people who work for wages have to organize themselves to stop taking orders, and start reconstituting "the commons". Instead of working to produce wealth for the wealthy, communism means working to produce the shared means of making our own lives.
Anyway, enough talking history and quoting dead white men with beards. Right now, why would anyone want to have the life of a peasant, when, after all, even a minimum wage job can buy a higher standard of living? For everything that's awful about call centres or pushing a mop, wasn't dying of the plague a lot worse? Let's break that down.
First, where do we buy our high standard of living from? Well, look at the tag inside of your shirt collar. Just as native Americans and Africans were enslaved to pay for Europe's capitalist beginnings, it now works brown women to death in sweatshops to buy first world loyalty. Like it pillaged the plains buffalo to virtual extinction, capital is now making a toxic cesspool out of Northern Alberta.
Secondly, who's building a time machine? The modern working class are not the 6th century's peasants. To imagine the 21st century's commons as "Medieval Europe: Round 2" is absurd. Just as now, under capitalist rule, we produce wonders like cluster bombs, video games, and modern medicine, we will still be able to produce miraculous things when we are free to produce what we see fit. Hopefully, they will be different things.
Finally, do we really have it that great? Are you really happy?(4) If so, how long will it last? It's a cliche now to talk about catastrophic climate change. The return of the bread riot is visible on the horizon. We can't buy our way out of crisis, especially when the money is in the form of oil under the receding permafrost. On the other hand, maybe by holding the Earth in common, as the basis for all life, we can craft solutions for common problems.
In short, "Why Communist?" The answer can be summed up in a single sentence: Communism offers a vision for us, as wage workers, to stop the enslavement of the majority world(5), the destruction of the planet, and the waste of our own talents on burger flipping and filling out Excel spreadsheets.
________________________________

(1) How a place that is already inhabited can be discovered says something about the people who made the discovery, and their respect for unfamiliar cultures.
(2) As in Karl Marx, radical political economist with an epic beard.
(3) Karl again, in "Price, Value, and Profit".
(4) To borrow from Reagan Youth, a satirical 80s hardcore band once covered by the Beastie Boys.
(5) Popularly called the "third world", "majority world" is a useful term insofar as it drives home that reality for most people is not a suburban consumerist paradise.

Why a secret organization?

At this point - let's face it - the old strategy of syndicalism(1) has made its way to a dead end. When the big unions in Canada threaten the smooth operation of the Colonial Death Machine(2), they get legislated back to work; the union's own leaders say, to paraphrase, "Them's the breaks. Strike's over." Meanwhile, most workers remain un-unionized, and, realistically, un-unionizable.
Still, workers' self-organization is as pressing as, if not more than, ever. This doesn't mean that all workers need to form (or join) one organization, or even one type of organization. However, some forms are well suited to particular circumstances.
In the age of the internet, and CCTV, keeping secrets is no easy task. All of us, as individuals, exist in government databases, surveillance footage, and corporate records - even if we've kept our noses clean. "Knowledge is power"(3), and a lot is known about each of us. At the same time, what is known about us - the statistics, the time stamps, the Facebook "like"s - all adds up to something less than what gets us out of bed in the morning. It is our secrets, our conspiracies, and our relationships that shape us. It's what we share, and not what makes us individual numbers.
In the carefully managed and minutely supervised contemporary workplace it is this individualization we must combat. To communicate honestly, and without fear of getting fired, we have to escape being singled out. The syndicalist strategy was all about representing ourselves to our employers; letting ourselves be known. At this juncture, we must remain impossible to represent so that we can speak directly with one another, invisible to management.
___________________________

(1) The strategy of organizing workers in to unions to fight for immediate gains, and thereby slowly undermine the power of the rich.
(2) The movement of money and goods that keeps the rich rich, and the poor in line.
(3) “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” - Michel Foucault

So what?

This pamphlet is just the beginning of a discussion. By responding to it, critiquing it, and spreading it we can begin to shape an organization to our particular needs. By establishing means of covert communication (pick-up/drop-off locations, symbols, etc.) we can develop infrastructure and strategy. Just as every journey begins with a single step, every revolution begins with a few conspirators. A secret organization of communist workers won't end capitalism, but it's a point to set out from.

To conspire, please contact: [email address]

Unfortunately, while there were a few conversations about the pamphlet, it failed to materialize into any sort of organizing directly. That said, I did meet a coworker who was part of a collective of radical Spanish self-described "exiles", who organized anti-capitalist events and participated in some immigrant/refugee solidarity work.

Work, and "little things" continued to take up most of my time until Spring/Summer, at which point I took the opportunity to travel to New England and Southern Ontario (where I had the opportunity to meet and drink soda with Blake 3:17 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=12361), as well as home to Halifax.

While in Halifax, my partner and I produced a poster to raise awareness about the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike, and wheatpasted it around the city:
http://i44.tinypic.com/wj98pv.jpg
Otherwise, our involvement in Hunger Strike solidarity was very limited: we hung a banner at one point, but that was it until after the strike had already ended.

Before the Summer was over, my partner had been hired for an "Activist Job" in Halifax, which accelerated my plans for moving home, consequently discouraging me from taking on any "big" projects.

I volunteered again with McGill's "Rad Frosh", helping with some logistical/practical tasks, and signing up as a facilitator ("Frosh Leader"), and having an absolute ball. Again, I was impressed by the quality of analysis among a group of eighteen year olds. I was also very interested to see that Rad Frosh was disproportionately women, and people of colour. It raised questions for me about the disproportionate whiteness of some left/anarchist spaces that socially overlap with the McGill left, and my own relationship to struggles as a white leftist/anarchist.

Otherwise? Fall was relaxed. I organized a benefit show (https://www.facebook.com/events/167430530117661/) (I don't have Facebook, so a friend made the event) for California Prisoners, started to work on a new recording with Fail Better, attended some solidarity demos, and events against the racist Quebec "Charter of Values".

Mostly I've been making plans for Halifax. This has included getting in contact with and meeting with a member of STAND (http://stand.h-a-z.org/), a small libertarian communist organization, as well as talking to friends involved with Solidarity Halifax (http://solidarityhalifax.ca) (about whom I have mixed feelings, to say the least) and unaffiliated anarchist/hippie-types. Montreal has been great, but the types of organizing I've been capable of have been limited by my poor French, and my poor sense of local organizing. I've been convinced that my efforts would be best invested in a place where I have some history, grasp of the dynamics of struggle, a sense of local political culture, etc.

Thus, I'm about to go back to the point I left from five years ago. All suggestions about what I should have learned from the interim experience are very welcome.