ONTARIO:

ANARCHIST COMMUNIST ORGANIZATION FORMED:

COMMON CAUSE:

Following their recent six-cities tour of Ontario cities anarchist communist activists in Ontario recently (September 29th) held the founding conference of their new organization, 'Common Cause'. Apparently their tour was quite successful as dozens of people are now active in developing locals across the province, including the cities of Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Windsor and Kitchener-Waterloo. The group agreed to a "basic policy document" which can be accessed at a news story on the A-Infos site HERE, a constitution, a structure for the specific problems of northern Ontario, affiliation with Anarkismo.net, and a basic publication plan including a website and a free distribution printed newspaper. The name 'Common Cause' was selected, and delegates were elected to carry out the decisions.

The statement of policy lays out some basic goals of this promising organization: concentration on class struggle in its many different aspects, from the workplace to communities, to class based ecology to "specific oppressions". They argue against "nationalist solutions" for specific oppressions and against "lifestyle changes and technological innovations" as the solution to ecological questions. They understand that anarchists must "involve ourselves with mass movements and work within these movements, in order to promote anarchist methods of organization involving direct democracy and direct action". They argue against what the late Murray Bookchin called "lifestyle anarchism" and say, "This is not a revolution that will come by summit hopping or singing and dancing in the streets. It will come by organizing every workplace and neighbourhood for change. When regular working people come together and fight for what we are due then the world will change".

This new organization is yet another proof of the growing maturity of anarchism today, a subject that Molly has often commented upon. While the promoters of primitivism, mindless violence and "anarchism as spectacle" whine and complain about some imaginary "lull" the forces of "organized anarchism" whether they call themselves "platformists" or not continue to build the sort of institutions and organizations that make anarchism something more than adolescent rebellion and pseudo-intellectual pontificating. The organizers of the Common Cause group make a genuflection towards "tactical and theoretical unity", but their statement of policy is broad enough to encompass practically everyone but the most hidebound anti-organizational fossil. Perhaps too broad. Looking over the list of their supporters given at the A-Infos article they include groups who have an opening to sections of anarchism that are not just "anti-platformist" but are in obvious gross contradiction to everything else contained in the statement of policy. Hopefully this means less "are" and more "were..in..the..past". Molly would be the last to doubt that the futility of most of fashion anarchism can dawn on intelligent younger people and that they could be drawn to an anarchism with a little more meat on its bones. This has to clarified in the future I am sure. It's very much best not swept under the carpet while one section thinks it is building some "theoretical unity" while another thinks that such unity is a part-time sort of thing that only has to be expressed at meetings and demonstrations. There's a big deep pit at the end of that path. This may seem like carping in the face of such an achievement as the Ontario comrades have done, but it's something that shouldn't be ignored.

Similarly Molly awaits some sort of clarification as to Common Cause's relation to NEFAC, as has been expressed before on this blog. The most likely thing is that there are zero, zilch, no real political differences between the new organization and NEFAC. It may be that there is some sort of sentiment that NEFAC is a Quebec/USA outfit that pays too little attention to Ontario. The success of this brief organizational effort would imply that there is just such a sentiment. Sometimes simple matters of style and personality have more of an influence than any and all matters of "theory", no matter how important neo-platformists may think that such theory is. The success of the new group certainly says something about the rather lethargic approach that NEFAC has taken to organizing outside of Quebec, and maybe this is justification in itself for being separate. Perhaps in the future the new group will affiliate with NEFAC. Perhaps they won't. Maybe they will group around other similar Canadian federations rather than try to maintain a focus on trans-border contacts. Perhaps the initial burst of enthusiasm will falter. The future will tell. But for now the new efforts in Ontario should be an inspiration to us all. Stay tuned to Molly's Blog for further updates as they come in.