Anarchism in Canada
Encyclopedia
Anarchism in Canada spans a range of anarchist philosophy
including anarchist communism
, green anarchy
, anarcho-syndicalism
, individualist anarchism
, Libertarian Communism
as well as other lesser known forms. Canadian anarchism has been affected by thought from the United States
, Great Britain
, and continental Europe
, although recent influences include a look at North American indigenism
, especially on the West Coast. Anarchists remain a focal point in media coverage of globalization protests in Canada, mainly due to their confrontations with police and destruction of property.
, Halifax, Fredericton, Guelph
, Kingston
, Saguenay
, Quebec City
, Montreal
, Saint-Jérôme
, Ottawa
, Toronto
, Sudbury, Windsor
, Hamilton
, London
, Kitchener
, Waterloo
, Winnipeg
, Saskatoon
, Calgary
, Edmonton
, Vancouver
and Victoria
all have active anarchists and or anarchist projects.(2)
and Emma Goldman
spent some time in Canada; Goldman died in Toronto in 1940. Rudolf Rocker
visited Winnipeg three times, meeting Honoré Jaxon during his first visit in 1913. The Rudolf Rocker Cultural Centre and Emma Goldman Grassroots Centre are part of Winnipeg's main anarchist institution, the Old Market Autonomous Zone.
Canadian anarchist figures include Honoré Jaxon, George Woodcock
, L. Susan Brown
, Wendy McElroy
, Norman Nawrocki
, Larry Gambone, Dimitrios Roussopoulos
, Dick Martin,
Eugene Plawiuk, Ann Hansen
, Mark Leier
, Jeff Shantz
and Jaggi Singh
. There are many other individuals who have made long term contributions to Canadian anarchism, among them, Harold Barclay
,
Alexandre Popovic, Michael William, Zig Zag, Sea Weed, Bob Melcombe, Jim Campbell, Bruno Massé, Radical Rodent and Gary Moffatt. Recently, Taiaiake Alfred
has developed
Anarcha-Indigenism through his book Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Two Quebec-based anarchist academics, Normand Baillargeon and Francis Dupuis-Déry,
have also published several books.
As well it is a long-standing tradition among anarchists to use pen name
s or to sign their work anonymously, so many authors and activists remain unknown.
, which in 2004 supplanted the Alternative bookshop an anarchist bookshop founded in the early 1970s. Ottawa's Exile Infoshop founded early 2007, as well as numerous other bookstores, prisoner solidarity groups, study groups, publishing houses, record labels, cafes and squats. There are environmental and anti-poverty direct action
ists in many regions and cities.
There are also groups, like the Quebec group La Sociale / Centre de Diffusion Libertaire, who have published several pamphlets and distribute for radical French publishers.. The Montreal-based Mauvaise Herbe green-anarchist group publishes a zine of the same name and distributes a variety of pamphlets and new books. The Toronto-based collective Punching Out (Jeff Shantz, pj lilley, Mick Black) made important contributions to the theoretical development of NEFAC
including preparing the accepted draft of that federation's workplace position paper. In 2008, members of Workers Solidarity Movement
(WSM) and NEFAC
initiated the founding of Common Cause http://www.linchpin.ca along with anarchist activists in Ottawa
, Hamilton
and Toronto
. Common Cause like NEFAC and the WSM is a project of platformism
. Other anarchist projects include a number of publications, radio shows and micro radio stations.There are also many under the radar activities like squatting
.
Anarchist schools of thought
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
including anarchist communism
Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
, green anarchy
Green anarchism
Green anarchism, or ecoanarchism, is a school of thought within anarchism which puts a particular emphasis on environmental issues. An important early influence was the thought of the American anarchist Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden...
, anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. The word syndicalism comes from the French word syndicat which means trade union , from the Latin word syndicus which in turn comes from the Greek word σύνδικος which means caretaker of an issue...
, individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy but refers to a...
, Libertarian Communism
Libertarian communism
Libertarian communism is a theory of libertarianism which advocates the abolition of the state and private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, a direct democracy and self-governance....
as well as other lesser known forms. Canadian anarchism has been affected by thought from the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
, and continental Europe
Continental Europe
Continental Europe, also referred to as mainland Europe or simply the Continent, is the continent of Europe, explicitly excluding European islands....
, although recent influences include a look at North American indigenism
Indigenism
Indigenism, Native nationalism, or Indigenous nationalism is a kind of ethnic nationalism emphasizing the group's indigeneity to their homeland...
, especially on the West Coast. Anarchists remain a focal point in media coverage of globalization protests in Canada, mainly due to their confrontations with police and destruction of property.
Locations
Historically, anarchism has never attracted large support in Canada, although small groups of activists and writers have often existed in many areas, especially in the larger cities. Today there are anarchists and anarchist projects in most regions, including small towns and mid sized cities. St. John'sSt. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador
St. John's is the capital and largest city in Newfoundland and Labrador, and is the oldest English-founded city in North America. It is located on the eastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. With a population of 192,326 as of July 1, 2010, the St...
, Halifax, Fredericton, Guelph
Guelph, Ontario
Guelph is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", Guelph is roughly east of Waterloo and west of downtown Toronto at the intersection of Highway 6 and Highway 7. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it...
, Kingston
Kingston, Ontario
Kingston, Ontario is a Canadian city located in Eastern Ontario where the St. Lawrence River flows out of Lake Ontario. Originally a First Nations settlement called "Katarowki," , growing European exploration in the 17th Century made it an important trading post...
, Saguenay
Saguenay, Quebec
Saguenay is a city in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, Canada, on the Saguenay River, about north of Quebec City....
, Quebec City
Quebec City
Quebec , also Québec, Quebec City or Québec City is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec and is located within the Capitale-Nationale region. It is the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about to the southwest...
, Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, Saint-Jérôme
Saint-Jérôme, Quebec
Saint-Jérôme is a town in Quebec, Canada, near Mirabel, about northwest of Montreal along Autoroute des Laurentides. The town is a gateway to the Laurentian Mountains and its resorts....
, Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
, Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, Sudbury, Windsor
Windsor, Ontario
Windsor is the southernmost city in Canada and is located in Southwestern Ontario at the western end of the heavily populated Quebec City – Windsor Corridor. It is within Essex County, Ontario, although administratively separated from the county government. Separated by the Detroit River, Windsor...
, Hamilton
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
, London
London, Ontario
London is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, situated along the Quebec City – Windsor Corridor. The city has a population of 352,395, and the metropolitan area has a population of 457,720, according to the 2006 Canadian census; the metro population in 2009 was estimated at 489,274. The city...
, Kitchener
Kitchener, Ontario
The City of Kitchener is a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. It was the Town of Berlin from 1854 until 1912 and the City of Berlin from 1912 until 1916. The city had a population of 204,668 in the Canada 2006 Census...
, Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Waterloo is a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. It is the smallest of the three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, and is adjacent to the city of Kitchener....
, Winnipeg
Winnipeg
Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada, and is the primary municipality of the Winnipeg Capital Region, with more than half of Manitoba's population. It is located near the longitudinal centre of North America, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers .The name...
, Saskatoon
Saskatoon
Saskatoon is a city in central Saskatchewan, Canada, on the South Saskatchewan River. Residents of the city of Saskatoon are called Saskatonians. The city is surrounded by the Rural Municipality of Corman Park No. 344....
, Calgary
Calgary
Calgary is a city in the Province of Alberta, Canada. It is located in the south of the province, in an area of foothills and prairie, approximately east of the front ranges of the Canadian Rockies...
, Edmonton
Edmonton
Edmonton is the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta and is the province's second-largest city. Edmonton is located on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Capital Region, which is surrounded by the central region of the province.The city and its census...
, Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
and Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of British Columbia, Canada and is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of about 78,000 within the metropolitan area of Greater Victoria, which has a population of 360,063, the 15th most populous Canadian...
all have active anarchists and or anarchist projects.(2)
Notable individuals
Noted anarchist philosophers Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...
and Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....
spent some time in Canada; Goldman died in Toronto in 1940. Rudolf Rocker
Rudolf Rocker
Johann Rudolf Rocker was an anarcho-syndicalist writer and activist. A self-professed anarchist without adjectives, Rocker believed that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social...
visited Winnipeg three times, meeting Honoré Jaxon during his first visit in 1913. The Rudolf Rocker Cultural Centre and Emma Goldman Grassroots Centre are part of Winnipeg's main anarchist institution, the Old Market Autonomous Zone.
Canadian anarchist figures include Honoré Jaxon, George Woodcock
George Woodcock
George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet, and published several volumes of travel writing. He founded in 1959 the journal Canadian Literature, the first academic journal specifically...
, L. Susan Brown
L. Susan Brown
L. Susan Brown is a Canadian anarcho-communist writer and theoretician.Brown is best-known for her germinal text The Politics of Individualism , in which she makes a distinction between "existential individualism" and "instrumental individualism" and examines how these forms are utilized in...
, Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy is a Canadian individualist anarchist and individualist feminist. She was a co-founder along with Carl Watner and George H. Smith of The Voluntaryist in 1982.-Sex-positive:...
, Norman Nawrocki
Norman Nawrocki
Norman Nawrocki , is a Montreal-based comedian, sex educator, cabaret artist, musician, author, actor, producer and composer. Nawrocki together with Sylvain Côté were the founding members of "rock 'n roll cabaret" band Rhythm Activism...
, Larry Gambone, Dimitrios Roussopoulos
Dimitrios Roussopoulos
Dimitrios Roussopoulos is a Montreal based political and environmental activist, prolific author and editor,and founder of the left-wing publishing house Black Rose Books....
, Dick Martin,
Eugene Plawiuk, Ann Hansen
Ann Hansen
Ann Hansen is a Canadian anarchist and former member of Direct Action, a guerrilla organization famous for the 1982 bombing of a Litton Industries plant, which made components for American cruise missiles. She was sentenced to life in prison, but was released after eight years. Hansen wrote of her...
, Mark Leier
Mark Leier
Mark Leier is a Canadian historian of working class and left-wing history. He is the director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University, where he is also a Professor of Canadian History and the history of Marxism....
, Jeff Shantz
Jeff Shantz (author)
Jeff Shantz is an anarchist activist, poet, and sociologist, currently teaching critical criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC....
and Jaggi Singh
Jaggi Singh
Jaggi Singh is one of Canada's most high-profile anti-globalization and social justice activists. He is an anarchist. Singh lives in Montreal where he works with groups such as Solidarity Across Borders and the No One Is Illegal collective, among others. Singh graduated from St...
. There are many other individuals who have made long term contributions to Canadian anarchism, among them, Harold Barclay
Harold Barclay
Harold B. Barclay is professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. His research has focussed on rural society in modern Egypt and the northern Arab Sudan as well as political anthropology and anthropology of religion.He is also commonly acknowledged as a...
,
Alexandre Popovic, Michael William, Zig Zag, Sea Weed, Bob Melcombe, Jim Campbell, Bruno Massé, Radical Rodent and Gary Moffatt. Recently, Taiaiake Alfred
Taiaiake Alfred
Gerald Taiaiake Alfred is an author, educator and activist, born in Tiohtiá:ke in 1964. Alfred is an internationally recognized Kanien’kehaka intellectual, political advisor and he is currently a professor at the University of Victoria ....
has developed
Anarcha-Indigenism through his book Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Two Quebec-based anarchist academics, Normand Baillargeon and Francis Dupuis-Déry,
have also published several books.
As well it is a long-standing tradition among anarchists to use pen name
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
s or to sign their work anonymously, so many authors and activists remain unknown.
Projects
There are a variety of long-standing anarchist projects, including Montreal's Insoumise bookstoreInsoumise bookstore
Montreal's anarchist bookstore, Librairie l'Insoumise, is located downtown on Saint Laurent Boulevard. It opened in November 2004, several months after the closing of the Alternative bookshop...
, which in 2004 supplanted the Alternative bookshop an anarchist bookshop founded in the early 1970s. Ottawa's Exile Infoshop founded early 2007, as well as numerous other bookstores, prisoner solidarity groups, study groups, publishing houses, record labels, cafes and squats. There are environmental and anti-poverty direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...
ists in many regions and cities.
There are also groups, like the Quebec group La Sociale / Centre de Diffusion Libertaire, who have published several pamphlets and distribute for radical French publishers.. The Montreal-based Mauvaise Herbe green-anarchist group publishes a zine of the same name and distributes a variety of pamphlets and new books. The Toronto-based collective Punching Out (Jeff Shantz, pj lilley, Mick Black) made important contributions to the theoretical development of NEFAC
NEFAC
NEFAC is a platformist anarchist communist organization based in the northeast region of the United States...
including preparing the accepted draft of that federation's workplace position paper. In 2008, members of Workers Solidarity Movement
Workers Solidarity Movement
The Workers Solidarity Movement is an anarchist organisation in Ireland broadly in the platformist tradition of Nestor Makhno. It was set up in 1984 and publishes the paper Workers Solidarity and the magazine Red and Black Revolution....
(WSM) and NEFAC
NEFAC
NEFAC is a platformist anarchist communist organization based in the northeast region of the United States...
initiated the founding of Common Cause http://www.linchpin.ca along with anarchist activists in Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
, Hamilton
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
and Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
. Common Cause like NEFAC and the WSM is a project of platformism
Platformism
Platformism is a tendency within the wider anarchist movement originally theorised by Nestor Makhno and is mainly based on his concept of anarchism and the organisational theories in the tradition of Dielo Truda's Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists ...
. Other anarchist projects include a number of publications, radio shows and micro radio stations.There are also many under the radar activities like squatting
Squatting
Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use....
.
See also
- Squamish FiveSquamish FiveThe Squamish Five were a group of self-styled "urban guerrillas" active in Canada during the early 1980s. Their chosen name was Direct Action....
- G7 Welcoming Committee
- Political culture of CanadaPolitical culture of CanadaCanadian political culture is in some ways part of a greater North American and European political culture, which emphasizes constitutional law, freedom of religion, personal liberty, and regional autonomy; these ideas stemming in various degrees from the British common law and French civil law...
- Ontario Coalition Against PovertyOntario Coalition Against PovertyThe Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is an anti-poverty group in Ontario, Canada, who promote the interests of the poor and homeless...
- Union Communiste Libertaire (Quebec anarcho-communist federation) with collectives in:
- Montréal
- Québec
- Saguenay