The politics of fear

I22

When people are insecure, when people think there is instability, and they feel atomized like we feel in this society, then anybody who can guarantee security and stability will receive their support, including the far right. Even intelligent people who you would think would have left wing positions would adopt that because when it comes to insecurity and stability...people want to opt for security and stability.

No going back

I27

I always think it's really exciting when people...move...and I think that the key thing…[is] not necessarily to take them and show them exactly what to do, but [to show them] there's no going back. They're either going to win or they're going to fucking lose and I think that's an important position. To push people out to taking those risks that they wouldn't normally want to take and getting them to feel like that's their decision, feeling empowered, and then creating that contrast, and then there's no going back, you're pretty much taking a leap.

Radical sympathies

I27

My perspective has been coming from a radical, egalitarian position. I know that there are many different points one can attack something [from], but the point is to draw the links between those things….So yeah, I have an anarchist-communist outlook, that doesn't mean I'm not sympathetic to other things and other perspectives.

Putting people and revolution in front

I22

I don't believe in models...but there are examples and when one stands up and fights for principle, when one puts a revolutionary interest, when one puts the interests of the people in the forefront you can accomplish...tremendous...things. What Cuba is about is not a question of whether Cuba is better or worse than any other country, the question is that Cubans are asserting their right of self-determination and sovereignty to solve their own problems themselves. The same thing with the Venezuelans, the Bolivians, what's going in Ecuador, what's going on in a number of other countries. So they are an example that when you struggle, you can achieve certain things - that it's not futile to struggle, and that one can put the interests, revolutionary interests and the interests of the people in the forefront.

Organizing alternatives

I9

I've [retreated] from being so action focused because I didn't see the sum of all the actions I was doing actually building anything that was creating any fighting potential to actually challenge the social conditions around me. I just felt like it was going nowhere. The cafe was different. With the cafe we were putting together a project [which] we hoped would be an example of something that was organized differently on different principles. So we were organizing on this principle called participatory economics and we were organizing as a workers’ cooperative so, as we saw it, this cafe bookstore venue was...how we were organizing a very political space that was living by example and the hope was we could encourage other people to organize like that.

Indigenous struggles and deep democracy

I6

Working on [building settler solidarity with] Six Nations…[it] was very interesting...and inspiring to see Six Nations, which is this Indigenous group that has the oldest surviving democratic constitution in the world, who have been actively fighting colonialism for five hundred years, who have retained a great deal of their culture in the face of genocide, and still works by those sorts of principles that we were trying to discover in 2001. Things like consensus, broad deep forms of respect, broad forms of solidarity and affinity. They have methods for cultivating those that have lasted for literally thousands of years. So seeing that in action and also seeing what the state does in the face of that and how they try and divide and conquer was very inspirational and changed my thinking a great deal.

Popular education and action

I10

Before getting people to act you need to educate them and then you need to incite some sort of emotion in them. Those are vague but that happens just with grunt work like posters, discussion nights, talk nights, showing movies, making it on people's radar...people need to be reminded of issues of social and environmental justice as much as we're being reminded that we need to buy Blackberry.

Organizing and alternatives

I24

If the goal is equality, for example, then you have to organize society in such a way that you're going to get that equality and you have to organize the economy in such a way that gives you that equality. That means that the very ethos of this economy has to be overcome, has to be destroyed because as long as the economy is running on the basis of profit, and accumulation of wealth, and growth we can never achieve equality because it's the antithesis of the system. On a political level we have to have a decentralization of power. I don't agree that we can achieve it through...spontaneous uprisings all over the place, I don't think that's going to get us anywhere. We need to see centralized organizations as facilitating the grassroots movements rather than dominating the grassroots movements.

Climate crisis and fascism

I3

From what I can tell the environmental changes that we're going through at a global scale are really concretely affecting a lot of people and the way that they can survive. Especially people who live or are more directly dependent [on] direct production [on] the land,….people who live in areas where climate already generates conditions of precarity, and that's exacerbated and we can see shifts [in] accessibility [of] resources, [of] food, already happening. I fear that those who have access right now will increasingly follow a trend...towards fascism in terms of claiming and enclosing access, in very rigid and violent ways, excluding [others from being able to] access...resources and food.

The state and class rule

I22

The Canadian state itself is an instrument of class rule, and the Canadian state itself...has been deployed...against workers, against progressive peopl[e], against the First Nations, against minorities….The Canadian state[‘s]...foundations are colonial, we only have to talk about what happened to the First Nations, we only have to talk about what happened to Louis Riel.