The key to finding the proper organizational structure is to avoid “organization for the sake of organization.” Specific anarchist organizations must always be linked to the concrete struggles and needs of our class, and should never outlive their usefulness. They must be flexible, and adaptive to the ebbs and flows of material conditions.
[…]
Organization is simply a vehicle, or structure for sharpening our praxis collectively. As the Batko Group succinctly put it […] “form is always dependent on the capacity of initiative.”

Charted and Uncharted Territories: Common Cause and the Role of the Anarchist Organization - Mortar Volume 2.

On Sunday March 6th 2016, members of Common Cause Ontario unanimously voted to dissolve as an organization. As revolutionaries and anarchist communists, we remain united in our belief that political organizations are necessary vehicles for collectively sharpening political analysis and practice. Common Cause has been invaluable to our membership in this regard. We are proud of the work we have accomplished in the past nine years, but this time has not been without challenges. Both the accomplishments and hardships that emerged from our organization have shone light on what it is that our members wish to pursue, as well as leave behind, in future political organizations dedicated to the self-emancipation of the working class. It is because of the invaluable lessons that we have learned through Common Cause that we know that it is time to move on, and we all have a better idea of in what direction that should be.

We sincerely thank our comrades and wish each other all the best.

Written by every member of every branch of Common Cause Ontario

Two Toronto Members, One Hamilton Member, One Kitchener-Waterloo Member

In recent decades we, the Left, have had shockingly little to show for ourselves. Our various tendencies each have their own take on why this is, and the explanations are all familiar to us. Material conditions are not yet ripe. The Left is fragmented and sectarian. There is a crisis of leadership in the unions. Our activists lack the requisite commitment and discipline. The movement lacks militancy. Those of us with privilege have not yet become good enough allies. And from our class struggle anarchist scene, too often: the Left just needs to refocus on “class.” While there are no doubt kernels of insight to be found in some of these worn out tropes, let’s be honest. There are material conditions, and then there is the North American Left of 2015.

In Canada, neoliberal restructuring continues to erode the living standards of large sections of the working class. Urbanization, capital flight, and reaccumulation-by-gentrification have reorganized our cities. In Toronto, this reorganization pushes the growing lower strata of the class into the new inner-suburban proletarian districts. State immigration policies swell the ranks of a migrant worker underclass labouring under worsening conditions in the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors. All these pressures combine to fragment and re-fragment our class. We cannot overstate the Left’s failure to contend with this onslaught. Countless hours of internal debate have not produced a productive reorientation to these conditions. Our public forums, publications, and Internet presence are an echo chamber that deafens us to the very voices that should inform our politics: those of our neighbours and co-workers. Marginal, isolated and inward-looking, no matter our particular tendency we share a common affliction: our politics are ridden with populism.

One Hamilton Member, Two Toronto Members, Two Former Members

To be honest, this is not the article that we set out to write months ago. Our original intention was to take the three most potent reactionary tendencies that we see percolating under the surface of Canadian working-class culture: an emboldened, backward-looking misogyny, a domestically jingoistic nationalism intransigently opposed to anti-colonial struggle, and a supposedly enlightened secularism that only thinly conceals a deep seated racism – dissect them, and prescribe treatment. Relying on recent and more historical struggles against reaction and backwardness within our class, we intended to help light the way forward by contributing to a deeper understanding of what it is that we are up against, and how it is that we will defeat it. This did not come to pass.

Instead, what we have for you is less a treatment regimen for what ails the working class (and, by extension, the Left), and more of a diagnostic report of three salient examples of reactionary tendencies attacking its composition and consciousness: Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), anti-Native sentiment, and Islamophobia. We intend to take up how to mount a counter-offensive in a later article. It is imperative that multiple counter-offensives target these three reactionary tendencies and “movements” and defeat them.

For twenty years, Parkdale has been a “destination” neighbourhood for thousands of Tibetan refugees. They've made their homes in the mid and highrise apartment buildings up and down Jameson, Tyndall, Dunn, and the other streets and avenues of this neighbourhood. Their kids go to the schools, play in the parks, and chill on the corners and planter boxes of their neighbourhood. They organize their rallies outside the Chinese Consulate from the local shops and they march from Cowan Ave. They access public services from Parkdale Community Legal Services, Masaryk Cowan Community Centre, Parkdale Project Read Program, and multiple other settlement and language service centres. Programs of mutual aid and support spring independently from the library, shops, and apartment units here.

If the property owners and landlords in Parkdale have their way, this will all be a thing of the past. The “sense of community” and “diversity” that Tibetan working-class families have helped build in this neighbourhood has now made it a “destination” neighbourhood for others. And landlords are looking to cash in by pricing all of us out.

While what's going on today is different than the Canadian government's recent attempts to ethnically cleanse Parkdale of our Roma neighbours, it will carve a similar hole from the heart of this neighbourhood. Whereas craven racist politicians and their CBSA systematically deported hundreds of our Roma neighbours - they would hardly bat an eye at celebrating the “diversity” of “Little Tibet”. Nonetheless the cold economic logic of the politicians' best friends – developers and landlords – demands the displacement of all those that can't foot the bill for a $1,100 bachelor or $1,400 one bedroom apartment.

In 2013 Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) announced that the province’s community legal clinics needed to “provide more clinic law services in a more efficient and effective manner.”[1] Fearing funding cuts, several Toronto legal clinic executive directors made a deal with LAO; they would develop a plan to make the legal clinic system more “efficient” and in the meantime, LAO would agree not to cut their funding. The Directors call their plan the GTA Legal Clinic Transformation Project. Its aim is to close the existing legal clinics and to replace them with three mega-clinics for the entire GTA (Greater Toronto Area). [2]

The seventeen legal clinics currently operating in the GTA provide legal defense to low-income people facing eviction, wage theft, deportation, and being cut off social assistance. A few of these legal clinics have a history of supporting community organizing and advocacy work such as tenant associations and campaigns for access to services for non-status immigrants and refugees. Legal clinics also offer a small number of fast-disappearing decent, public sector jobs.

Closing neighbourhood legal clinics will mean reduced access to legal services. People in need of legal assistance will have to travel greater distances to get it, and will be screened before ever receiving service. Legal clinic workers will lose their jobs and be forced to compete for employment in the new mega-clinics. Workers in the mega-clinics will be burdened with even heavier caseloads and will have a new layer of middle management to deal with.[3] Both the staff of legal clinics and the people they serve will be hurt by their closures.

Defending Legal Clinics