Sunday, August 25, 2013

Letter to the Autonomous People's Assembly of Montreal (APAM)


We have serious questions about APAM’s very existence, on its activism and its strong leftist composition. APAM arose amidst the stagnation, if not the very retreat of a mass movement. It was formed by a tiny minority without support from the majority of the Popular Assemblies Autonomous District (APAQ). Here, we’re talking about a ‘city-wide’ organization, not a neighbourhood assembly.

In the text The organization of the proletariat outside periods of open struggle which is attached to our brochure, The Student Struggle and the Neighbourhood Assemblies, we call into question this type of committee in a period of decline or absence of real mass struggles. These committees tend to descend into activism as shown by the participation of APAM in the May 1 demonstration or that of May 22, with predictable results. This is why they, the committees, circles, and proletarian groups must be careful to avoid them.
They also tend to fall into the following traps :
  * imagining that they constitute a structure which can prepare the way for the appearance of strike committees or councils ;
    * imagining themselves to be invested with a sort of ‘potentiality’ which can develop future struggles. (It isn’t the minorities who artificially create a strike or cause a General Assembly or a committee to appear, even though they do have an active intervention to make in this process) ;
  * giving themselves a platform or statutes or anything else that risks freezing their evolution and thus condemning them to political confusion ;
    * presenting themselves as intermediate organs, half-way between the class and a political organisation, as if they were an organisation that is at one and the same time unitary and political ;
            - Extract from the organization of the proletariat outside periods of open struggles

The APAM could have been very useful in spring /summer of 2012, while there was still a mass movement. In spring 2012, members of Klasbatalo (CIK) and APA-RPP (a Montreal neighbourhood Assembly) proposed the creation of APAM but the majority of the assembly, influenced by anarchist political positions, refused. As individuals, and with scepticism, we still participated in APAM in December, as it came at the end of the period of open struggle .

In short, for the moment, it is more important to our members and our group to focus our energies towards the consolidation of internationalist communist forces worldwide. We won’t be participating in APAM.

Two militants (ICK) and members of APAM

klasbatalo1917@gmail.com

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