Since we started organizing with a militant tent city movement in 2014, AAD has supported the self-organization of low-income and unhoused communities. We have coordinated assemblies and elections and the operation of leadership groups, helped people learn how to make agendas and chair and speak in meetings, make decisions, and carry them out. But these organizations have been local-only, and limited to immediate survival spaces like tent cities. The infrastructure to coordinate between different locations has been held by AAD, not these communities. 

In 2019, at the June 8th gathering of 60 delegates from 8 different tent cities, we started to develop a movement infrastructure that involved unhoused community leaders in the political and organizational apparatus between communities. The June 8th Poor People’s Network came to life a few months later in November, with a 2-week long tour of the Okanagan and Kootenays. Leaders from tent city struggles in Metro Vancouver made contact and started organizing with hundreds of other low income, unhoused people from 16 other communities. The June 8th Network will continue to grow and lead fight backs in and across communities throughout western Canada in 2020. 

The more active braiding of AAD activists with subaltern community survival struggles has also influenced and transformed Alliance Against Displacement internally. At our bi-annual visioning meeting near held near the end of 2018, AAD decided that in the 2019 we wanted to leap from being a “political organization,” which had been our previous goal after feeling frustrated by the limitations of single-issue community organizing, to a “revolutionary organization.” At the time, we were not sure what that meant exactly, but knew the answer was somewhere down the line of the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics that we had been developing. 

In 2019, along with and through our many community campaign struggles, we learned that, for us, being a revolutionary anti-colonial and anti-capitalist organization is not about perfecting our declarations, it means making revolutionary politics relevant to communities involved in struggles for survival. 

In the past, the reforms offered by social democracy have been a barrier to developing relations between revolutionary groups and the working class. During World War 2 and the postwar, many workers received a portion of the land stolen from Indigenous nations, and of the superprofits won through the position of global power that Canada and the USA secured through the war. Even many of those who did not get a share of the victors’ spoils doled out through redistributive tax programs believed that they could, through organizing for integration, get included in the future, making  “socialism” a hard sell.

While 2019 has brought social democracy (or “democratic socialism”) back as a social movement current, the hard losses suffered by Jagmeet Singh’s NDP in Canada, which adopted a bare bones, right social democratic program, and Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain, show that its reform offerings are not finding the ear of working and poor people. 

When the NDP says “affordable housing,” they mean giving tax subsidies to private apartment developers and landlords. When the NDP says “supportive housing,” they mean institutions contained in old mining camp trailers. When the NDP says “reconciliation,” they mean they’ll provide police to push pipelines through Unist’ot’en territories, in violation of Wet’suwet’en law. 

2019 showed us that social democracy is not a “pragmatic” response to capitalist crisis today. Revolutionary responses however, though the autonomous self-activity of Indigenous peoples blocking pipelines, and of working class and urban Indigenous people taking over and using empty properties and buildings as sanctuary and shelter, are both pragmatic and radically transformative. 

For AAD to make revolutionary politics relevant to poor peoples’ survival struggles means providing politics and resources to fight back when a fight back is needed, and it means building infrastructure where movement leaders can develop their own vision and connections in order to extend that fightback beyond any single location. 

In 2019, Alliance Against Displacement developed a new basis of unity, adopted an organizational strategy, began building relations with groups and organizers in other cities, and chose a new group name, all that better suit these revolutionary political perspectives. In early 2020 we will relaunch our organizing project on these foundations, and we invite you to join us.