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CrimethInc.: While the Iron Is Hot -- Student Strike & Social Revolt in Quebec, Spring 2012, Part 2
Share: Facebook Twitter Google Buzz LinkedIn Orkut Digg This is the second of a two-part series; for a chronological account of the events analyzed herein, read While the Iron Is Hot: Student Strike & Social Revolt in Québec, Spring 2012
To fill out our chronology of the unrest in Québec, we posed the following questions to our Montréal correspondent, who answered them with the assistance of other participants in the Printemps érable. The interview concludes with an epilogue bringing the action up to the minute, when a convergence to block the resumption of the semester is about to begin.
It’s important to acknowledge that, while the strike has had effects throughout the province of Québec, our coverage focuses almost entirely upon events in Montréal. The strike has played out differently in this city, a multilingual and sprawling metropolis with dozens of overlapping anarchist scenes and a rich history of anti-capitalist resistance, than it has in the rest of the province. A large number of anarchists and other radicals inhabit a limited number of neighborhoods in a ring around downtown Montréal, making it an important flashpoint for struggle.
How did militant street tactics develop and proliferate in the course of the strike? What can anarchists elsewhere in North America learn from this?
Discussing the tactics that militants have employed in the streets of Montréal and elsewhere in Québec, and discussing how those tactics have changed, it is often said that tactics escalated over time, and whenever things were pacified, the implication is that the tactics were de-escalated. Entire demonstrations, some of which were extremely large, are described as confrontational or non-confrontational. This kind of language is woefully imprecise. These terms can communicate nothing more than a feeling, an ambience of the moment, leaving the specific mechanics of what was going on obscure.
This is not to argue that tactics can never be ranked in some kind of loose conceptual hierarchy, from those that are less effective at inflicting damage to property or those who defend it—and thus entail less risk—to those that are more effective and riskier. For example, from lesser to greater intensity:
1) giving riot police the middle finger,
2) throwing rocks at them,
3) throwing Molotov cocktails at them.That categorization is arbitrary and its variable, intensity, isn’t rigorously defined, but it can be useful to think about tactics in this way.
Compared to most North American cities, in Montréal, the use of certain tactics by street fighters—including anarchists, Maoists, and hooligans whose politics are less precisely defined—is more normalized, and less contested. This was true long before the student strike began in February. Black bloc attire and masks, constructing barricades or simply tossing traffic cones into the street, throwing rocks and other projectiles, breaking windows and looting stores… if a Montréal local hears that a hockey riot took place, she can make an educated guess as to which of these tactics might have been used before she gets the details. The same applies to days like March 15 and May 1, to reformist demos that anarchists deem worth intervening in, and to the spontaneous demos that have occurred after the police have murdered someone.
It is accurate to say that, over the course of the strike, a significant number of participants from diverse political backgrounds have escalated their street tactics to about the same level as those employed by the aforementioned anarchists, Maoists, and hooligans. Throughout February and March, as well as earlier demonstrations like the one on November 10, 2011, anarchists employing black bloc tactics or wearing masks were often the only ones physically confronting the police and destroying the property of capitalists, putting them at odds with many of the other people in the street and leaving them isolated. Later on, though the tension between pacifists and street fighters didn’t disappear, the street fighters were a lot more numerous and some of them were running around with giant fleur-de-lysé flags—a sure sign that others besides “the usual suspects” were taking the fight to the police.
On the other hand, it would be inaccurate to say that anarchists on the whole have escalated their practice of street fighting. Since the strike began, anarchists have been doing the same thing they always do, the difference being that they are doing it more often. Every year in Montréal there are reformist demos at which anarchists challenge the organizer-imposed code of conduct, anti-capitalist demos at which the only ones trying to impose limits on the actions of anarchist street fighters are the police, and spontaneous manifestations of rage when the police do something particularly heinous. The strike has caused all three types of events to happen with a much greater frequency than would otherwise occur, but the anarchist approach to each has been essentially the same.
As to being confrontational, it’s also inaccurate to say that the movement became more confrontational over time, because whether or not they were successful, there were attempt to blockade bridges and highways even in February and early March. What happened is that, in March, the congress of CLASSE made the decision to adopt a more confrontational strategy as an organization—after some of its constituent members had already been pursuing such a strategy for weeks. But this simply meant that there were more resources for those organizing confrontational actions, which is what led to a greater frequency and diversity of targets: the port, the government-owned alcohol distribution corporation’s depot, and eventually downtown skyscrapers and events like the Salon Plan Nord. On campuses, the intention of classroom and campus blockades was, from the very beginning in many places, to let no one in for any reason whatsoever, and people used whatever tactics were necessary for that purpose.
It’s possible to argue that, gradually over the course of weeks, militants selected targets and carried out plans more intelligently. But as to whether they were trying to be more confrontational, things were simply different at different times and varied between people. The truce between the CLASSE exec and the government, the loss of Francis Grenier’s eye, the experience of seeing police run in fear… all of these, in complex ways, affected the courage and rage of different participants in the movement and, at certain times, contributed to a more confrontational attitude.
All that said, there have been some innovations on the streets. For one, rather than always seeking out rocks and other projectiles, more street fighters have started to bring tools—hammers in particular—with which to make the projectiles out of Montréal’s crumbling streets. For another, street fighters have started counting down aloud in order to coordinate their efforts, whether before attempting to break out of a kettle—as succeeded on May 20—or hailing rocks upon police.
Another innovation has been shields, which hadn’t been seen much at demonstrations for at least several years before November 10, 2011. The most conventional shield format is to drill together a combination of plexiglass sheets, foam, cardboard, and chloroplast—the stuff from which election signs are made. The idea of painting them to look like the covers of politically solid books, from L’insurrection qui vient to Nineteen Eighty-Four, came to Montréal from Rome, where student demonstrators used the tactic during the anti-austerity demonstrations in late 2010. Although shields hold promise, especially if they could be made of sturdy, light materials like the shields of the insurgent strikers in northwestern Spain, their actual use has been hit-or-miss and it’s questionable how useful they would be in fast-moving demos on the streets of Montréal. They were useful on the open fields of Victo, and would have been useful on April 20 if anyone had brought them; on both those days, both sides were holding fixe