On June 26 and 27, the political representatives of the world’s greatest thieves and murderers gathered in Toronto. They held their ‘G2o Summit’ in a billion dollar armed camp financed with public money stolen from vital social programs. They threw out some meaningless platitudes and drew up a plan around their real agenda – solving the crisis of their bankrupt system by imposing austerity and poverty on people throughout the world. With the Harper Government hosting the event and standing on the right wing edge of the discussions, plans were drawn up to halve public deficits by 2013. They will not, however, take the money back from the banks and corporations they bailed out. Instead they will gut public services, destroy social infrastructure and launch a war on poor and working people.

Across the world, people under attack and in struggle saw that the Toronto Summit was challenged and that the massive array of police security protecting it failed to silence that challenge. On the 24th, Indigenous people and their allies took to the streets. On the 25th, OCAP along with many community organizations and joined by thousands, came out to fight for justice for communities. We faced police intimidation and attack without backing down and, after marching through the streets, put up a tent city in Allan Gardens that was held throughout the night in solidarity with the homeless and all those being displaced and forced from their homelands here and abroad.

On the 26th, tens of thousands took to the streets and thousands of them would not accept a route well away from the security fence that the trade union/NGO leaders had negotiated with the cops ahead of time. At Queen and Spadina, a confrontation began that continued all through that and the next day. It was marked by firmness and courage on the part of those taking to the streets and by brutal police attack. The largest mass arrest in the history of Canada unfolded. Basic civil liberties were effectively eliminated. The over one thousand who were arrested faced inhuman conditions and despicable treatment in the now-infamous Eastern Ave Detention Centre. People were taken by the cops without the slightest legal justification. But still people filled the streets and defied the G20 enforcers.

By Monday, the sheer scale of the abuses was beginning to cause disquiet in high places. More seriously, it was clear that the violent intimidation was failing miserably. Thousands came to police headquarters that evening to challenge the police state conditions being created in Toronto. They faced a subdued array of cops. Harper’s plan for an austerity meeting complemented by a show of force that would deter opposition had utterly failed.

The cops did not even wait for the events of the 26th to begin their crackdown. A series of raids on homes and buildings offering accommodation to protesters began the night before. People’s doors were broken down, some were carried away in the middle of the night or early morning in unmarked vans, some even at gun-point, with little knowledge of what was happening to them. Our comrades from Quebec were particularly targeted with extreme anti-Quebecois violence. Many vocal and respected community organizers, our friends and allies, were targeted and are still detained.

We are now building legal support and political solidarity with those facing serious charges and attempts to detain them for trial. Antiquated and reactionary ‘conspiracy’ charges are being used by the Crown. It should go without saying that our movement will spare no effort to ensure those facing legal persecution are given all possible support, that they are set free and the politically motivated charges laid against them are dropped. OCAP wishes to show our solidarity with all G20 defendants and we demand their immediate release. This is an attempt to criminalize, silence and intimidate our movements, and we will fight against it.

At the same time as we fight and win this legal battle, we must set our sites for the resistance that emerged around the G20 to grow. We can and must build strong social movements in the fight against the austerity agenda that the G20 devised. This agenda is the real conspiracy that must to be defeated.

As they work to cut vital social programs, attack public sector workers, expand the security apparatus at home and abroad, attempt to criminalize and brutalize poor communities, migrants, people of colour and First Nations communities, we will mobilize to fight back. The International Monetary Fund has called for twenty years of austerity. The elements of that agenda will be decreed by governments and backed up by lines of cops. We have shown in Toronto, as people around the world have already demonstrated, that our resistance can be stronger than their austerity. We will defeat their agenda and create a society where the exploiters and their thugs go on trial while we build a world based on solidarity and equality.

[Statement from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)]

Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20 London Chapter *Part 1*
Part taken from: The Great Dictator 1934 Charlie Chaplin
Content owner: DashGo/Audiobee
By Mike Roy
WeAreChange London
CAPP London
CEP Union Local London

There is evidence the police infiltrated “Black Bloc” and should have known their plans. Howard Morton is a criminal lawyer and a member of the Law Union of Ontario

Many in Canada are furious with the world leaders gathered there. Thousands marched through Toronto to protest over the G8 and G20 summits.

Click on image to view online PDF.

For printer-friendly PDF, please click here. Feel free to print and distribute to your heart’s content.

Brand new video from radical hip hop mc’s Test Their Logik, just in time for the G8/G20 in Huntsville and Toronto.

On May 20, 2010, at the Steelworker’s Hall in Toronto, Canada, and in advance of the G8 (June 25, Huntsville, Ontario) and G20 (June 26-27, Toronto) summits, the Toronto Community Mobilization Network (TCMN) http://g20.torontomobilize.org/ held a press conference: Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the G8/G20.

“The mobilizations in June are concerned with our ongoing struggle for social justice,” says Sharmeen Khan of TCMN. “The attendees of the G8 and G20 summits represent the interests of a wealthy few and are responsible for creating policies and institutions that destroy communities and the environment.”

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network consists of grassroots organizations, people of colour, indigenous people, poor and working class people, women, queer, and disabled people.

TORONTO COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION NETWORK (TCMN)
Themed Days of Resistance, June 21-24
Days of Action, June 25-27
http://g20.torontomobilize.org/

2010 PEOPLE’S SUMMIT
Building a Movement for a Just World, June 18-20, Toronto
http://peoplessummit2010.ca/section/2

Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair, June 5, 2010 — Join us for the Third Annual Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair, presented by Common Cause. Special guests include Peter Gelderloos, author of How Nonviolence Protects The State, and Gord Hill, author of 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance.

Admission is free. Child care available. Runs from 10am to 4pm at Westdale High School, 700 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario.

Social revolution may have different connotations depending on the speaker. In social libertarian and anarchist parlance, a “social revolution” is a bottom-up (as opposed to a vanguard party-led or purely political) revolution aiming to reorganize all of society. More generally, the term “social revolution” may be used to refer to a massive change in society, for instance the French Revolution, the American Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture reformations of religious belief, personal identity, freedom of speech, music and decentralized media.

“Social revolution means the reorganization of the industrial, economic life of the country and consequently also of the entire structure of society.”
- Alexander Berkman

A revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, a revolutionary is someone who supports abrupt, rapid, and drastic change, while a reformist is someone who supports more gradual and incremental change. A conservative is someone who opposes all such changes. A reactionary is someone who wants things to go back to the way they were.

Expropriation is politically motivated and forceful confiscation and redistribution of private property generally aimed at furthering the cause of social justice.  Expropriation takes place outside the law and can refer to the socially-motivated confiscations of any property.

“You say you want a revolution, Well, you know
We all want to change the world.” - the Beatles

Anarchist communism is a political theory that advocates the abolition of the state, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers’ councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle:“from each according to ability, to each according to need”.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

- Preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Constitution (1908)

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We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For, you must not forget, we also know how to build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.

- Buenaventura Durruti (1936)

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We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through”, beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.

Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old slogans; Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision.

All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique — the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, that hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image — but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining “how we would vote” on various issues.

Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old — and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, people have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and people act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be “toughminded”.

In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories — but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convenience people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum — research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.

As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus and community across the country.
If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

From: The Port Huron Statement (1962) - By Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)