A discussion document on strategy for advancing the organization of people’s struggles in Toronto

By BASICS Community News Service

We in BASICS Community News Service advance this discussion document in this same spirit of unity and struggle that has built a movement to reclaim May Day since 2009 with our allies both within the May 1st Movement (M1M) and outside of it.   We wish to advance what we see as key questions facing the struggles of oppressed and exploited peoples in this city.

These questions pertain to the forms of organizing that will make us stronger and better prepared for the fights ahead.  We welcome feedback and commentary.

2006-2014: Our experiences in building a people’s media apparatus

BASICS was launched in 2006 to serve the immediate purpose of building a fight against gentrification in Lawrence Heights .  As our paper’s readership grew in this and other communities, our membership did as well, ultimately extending our organization’s coverage and connection to many more issues facing the most exploited, precarious, and brutalized sections of the working class in Toronto.

To the extent that we have developed as a people’s media apparatus is the extent to which we’ve reported on the day-to-day horrors of capitalism, from the daily physical and mental strain of surviving under capitalism, living under slumlord landlords, living with precarious status, or facing cops serving out orders to mine our communities for more racialized working-class folks and all too ready to shoot our people down.

Yet, we also recognize that we have much to improve as a people’s media organization. We need to: produce more regularly; extend our distribution; be more consistent in developing sharp, appealing and accessible formats; and most importantly, produce content that, in the example of the best stories we’ve covered, lights some fires and appeals to all the just concerns of the people.

But we are also not paid. There are little to no career opportunities in our work.  We have been and remain an organization of people with stakes in nothing less than the realization of a movement that can confront our class oppressors and exploiters, dispossess them of their power and wealth, and avert the global ecological disaster unfolding in real time.

We see our role as a people’s media organization not to “speak truth to power,” but to collect and reflect back to the people the most revolutionary ideas and advanced struggles amongst us, from around the world, throughout history, and right down to the struggles on our blocks and in our buildings.

But, as observers and participants in people’s struggles, we have to do more than just hold up a mirror to the unfolding disasters around us.

This is why we consciously reject the liberal sham of a notion of “objectivity” in our reportage. The capitalist media, in all its entities, are united in the perpetuation of our exploitation and the plunder of the earth to keep their system profitable. Even when the ruling class appears divided over how to continue governing in their parasitic system — with a smile or a sneer, with sugar-coated bullets or tear gas and tasers – they are united in keeping us under their guns, scattered, and disorganized.

Therefore, an active discussion and debate on the methods by which to end exploitation and oppression by capitalist imperialism must all be part of the unfolding discussion and debate in our media work.

We need to build people’s power for the fights ahead

The simplest way of expressing our conception of progressive political change is as follows: the conscious political activity of the masses of people is the only means to liberation. The expanding participation, control, and conscious direction of the people in the struggle against their class enemies is what keeps that struggle on a path that leads towards universalizing social emancipation, and not towards new forms of exploitation and oppression. This is what democracy looks like. It’s not a formal or procedural thing. It’s a substantive thing, and it has a class content. Democracy for our class enemies is their dictatorship over us.

So we are faced with the question of how to build democratic mass organization that expands and deepens amongst the people. Not a coalition for the next election. Not a process that launches political careers for a select few among us. Not a build up for one day of action that can pressure our enemies.  Rather, combative, class-struggle mass organizations where democracy is about how we define the growing power within our movement, not how we are going to relate to social classes that are parasites upon our bodies.

Are we building organizational forms that can actually capture the imagination of people who share common oppressors and exploiters?  Do we have the capacity to stimulate struggles that can build an expanding struggle against common enemies, rather than simply reacting in this or that defensive way against a new round of ruling class attacks? Do we even have the basis of defining common enemies at this point? We want to be able to answer all these questions in the affirmative, but we don’t think any organization in Toronto can at this point.

For those of us who are seriously committed to the organization and mobilization of the masses in our communities for struggle, for a conscious fight back, for an offensive that we need a long-term buildup of forces for, what organizational and political formations do we require to advance people’s struggles in our city? We don’t have definite answers, but we hope we can raise some important questions and we believe that we have a correct orientation towards their resolution.

First steps: Towards a combative working-class mass organization

Over the summer of 2014, BASICS will be launching an intensive wave of social investigation in a series of neighbourhoods, reporting on these investigations along the way in our media, and exploring where there may be the most important sites of intervention for the construction of new organizing initiatives.

We would like to see the outcome of our 2014 initiative to be to develop a strong, strategically united, pan-Toronto mass organization of peoples oppressed and exploited by Canadian imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism who live in this city. Such an organization can’t be afraid of talking to people who may like Rob Ford.  And this organization has to be willing and able to sink deep roots amongst the most oppressed and exploited.

Since class struggle advances only in proportion to the degree of people consciously taking initiative within clearly formulated and tactically-flexible strategic plans, we want to open up this debate far beyond the confines of our own organizations.  We wish to work with any and all organizers who can roll with us in a practice that builds the capacity of the people for combative struggles and a concerted fight back beyond May Day.

Let’s also be clear about our own sympathies in BASICS is with with general socialist orientation. But for the record, our practice contrasts sharply with those who see the path to “socialism” as a struggle within the NDP, as primarily a struggle within unions, as an electoral or parliamentary process, or those who define socialism as a project that can be advanced independently of the struggles of people against imperialism across the world.  We may not be guided by a clear socialist program, but that doesn’t stop us from taking stock of the positive lessons of the most revolutionary, powerful and mass-based movements in the world fighting against imperialism and for socialism and a complete elimination of class division and national oppression.

But let’s not be divided by vocabularies that we may not (yet) have in common. We stand for a mass-based, grassroots, people-power organizing that puts a widening section of the oppressed and exploited people in the driver’s seat of revolutionary social change.  If we do anything contrary to spirit of these principles, we demand to be held to account, and we want to be criticized.  If you’re down with this orientation, get at us. Comment on this article on our website — or on Facebook if that’s where to find it. Email us at [email protected] .

Serve the People! Fight the Power!

BASICS Community News Service

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