What happened

Mobilization

The stickers and posters came out at the end of March. There was a huge amount of postering, the zines were almost all distributed, and at the end we had the luxury of circulating flyers as a reminder, especially around Cégep du Vieux-Montréal and Cégep St-Laurent. No doubt, this year’s mobilization was the most intense since at least 2011.

- À l’intention des médias-
POUR DIFFUSION IMMÉDIATE

Montréal, le 2 mai 2014 - En dépit d’un degré de répression absurdement disproportionné, la Convergence des luttes anticapitaliste (CLAC-Montréal) a réussi à prendre la rue ce 1er mai, à l’occasion de la Journée internationale des travailleurs et travailleuses. Un plan avait été conçu pour permettre qu’une manifestation ait lieu coûte que coûte.

Tel qu’anticipé, un premier contingent d’une cinquantaine de personnes a été immédiatement encerclé à proximité du point de rendez-vous officiel de la manifestation, au coin de rues Ontario et Papineau, dès 18h. Toutefois, un deuxième départ avait été prévu par la CLAC à partir du métro Papineau à 18 h 15. Ce deuxième contingent, à peu près de la même taille que le premier, a pu marcher une dizaine de minutes avant d’être intercepté à son tour au coin des rues Sainte-Catherine et Plessis.

Quand: le 27 avril, at 14:00
Où: Parc Hochelaga (coin Davidson et La Fontaine)

Le IWW Montréal et la CLAC vous invitent à un après-midi de fabrication de bannières et de pancartes pour les manifs du 1er mai.

Suivra ensuite, à 17h, un BBQ dans le parc.

The CLAC took the streets, just as planned!
In spite of police provocation, intimidation and repression, 2000 demonstrators expressed their anger in the streets of Old Montreal! TheSPVM protects the crooks!

Montréal, May 1st, 2013 – For the sixth consecutive year, Montréal’s Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC) organized an anti-capitalist demonstration to commemorate the International Workers Day on May 1st.

The demonstration left the City Hall at 6pm with the objective of making its way to the infamous private club 357C, the crooks 's club.

A politicized police force ever at the service of the corrupt political and financial elite and willing to use disproportionate force in doing so, the SPVM has once again denied the public the right to express its discontent with injustices and abuses. Once more, they decided quite arbitrarily to brutalize and criminalize more than 400 people whose only crime was to denounce the suffocating status quo. Municipal by-law P-6 is used as a pretext to shutting down dissent.

The austerity measures currently enacted by both the federal and provincial governments (such as Unemployment Insurance reforms and cuts to social security), clearly show that those in power are simply doing the footwork of capitalist interests, interests they defend tooth and nail over the social rights hard-won throughout history by
a constantly put-upon working-class.

This May 1st, the CLAC has decided to do a symbolic march to highlight the path from City Hall to the private club 357C. This den of thieves perfectly represents the “culture” of secrecy and cronyism that reigns among the ruling class, the political class, and the world of organized crime. According to Emma Smith, co-spokesperson for CLAC,
“…in order to justifty exploitation and injustice, the elite have always used secrecy, corruption, manipulation, and violence. Collusion, cronyism, and scams of all kinds are not the exception… these are the basic rules of the capitalist game.”

In this time of polarized class interests, it isn’t surprising to see governments enact laws that quash popular resistance to their abuses of power and repress anyone that tries to disturb the dominant political and economic order. The insistence of municipal officials (notably the members of the thoroughly corrupt Union Montréal Party)
on upholding the liberticidal P-6 bylaw is only the latest instance of the repressive tendencies of the political elite.

“Historically, May 1st has always been a day of international anti-capitalist resistance and struggle. CLAC firmly positions itself on the side of this proud tradition of popular and worker’s resistance,” said William Tremblay, co-spokesperson for CLAC.

WORK?!$@#
Anti-capitalist Teach-in on May Day and Labour
Sunday April 7, 2013, 10am to 6pm
Centre d’éducation populaire de la Petite-Bourgogne et de St-Henri (CEDA)
2515 Delisle (Lionel-Groulx metro)

http://www.facebook.com/events/484564931600873/

SCHEDULE IN BRIEF:

10am: Self-management in the Workplace (Guillaume! & Marie-Eve Lamy)
10am: Reproductive Work and the Construction of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation (Silvia Federici)

1pm: Immigrant Workers in Montreal: Precarity and Struggle? (Erik Argüello, Evelyn Calugay, Viviana Medina & Aadi Ndir)
1pm: Workplace Popular Assemblies: Possibilities for reclaiming grassroots power (Dave Bleakney)
1pm: Art & Politics: Creative work as a tool for political emancipation – critique of activist productivism (Marhi Aive)

3pm: The Authoritarian Division of Labour (Kevin Sutton)
3pm: Survival and Resistance: An Immigrant History of May Day (Mostafa Henaway & Jaggi Singh)
3pm: Educational Institutions: Squeezing maximum productivity from students (Jeanne Bilodeau, Amber Gross, Camille Robert & Camille Tremblay-Fournier)

5pm: Plenary

- Free entrance
- Free food, childcare, and whisper translation (EN/FR)
- Fully accessible to wheelchairs

** Full schedule of workshops and plenary listed below
** All day: Info-fair with anti-capitalist resources

A full day of anti-capitalist workshops, this teach-in is organized in the lead up to anti-capitalist May Day on May 1st and the family-friendly Status for All! march on May 18th.

It is the second teach-in in a series organized in the context of CLAC's monthly anti-capitalist assemblies in Montreal. It is open to everyone and includes both introductory and more in-depth workshops. In a spirit of self-education and aimed at collective action, the teach-in series also serves to build an online database of anti-capitalist workshops, a decentralized tool for popular education: http://ateliersanticapitalistes.wordpress.com/

If you would like to help out, submit material to the info-fair, or submit a workshop to the workshop database, get in touch with us at: educationpopulaire@clac-montreal.net

Organized by the Popular Education Committee of the CLAC (Convergences des luttes anticapitalistes), co-sponsored by QPIRG Concordia, with the support of: GRIP-UQAM & QPIRG-McGill

INFO
educationpopulaire@clac-montreal.net
www.clac-montreal.net