Visibility, though, is inherent to the spectacle of protest, and Singh didn’t want the tactics deployed on one weekend to obscure his ongoing, less publicly prominent work. “I borrowed this from [Mohawk activist] Shawn Brant: ‘The action is in the organizing.’ It’s not about the two or three days of public protests, but rather the process that gets you there, and also the vision of what you see beyond.” Before being taken into custody, Singh wrote, “We are not just protesters. We are people who are rooted in day-to-day organizing, [and] we have accountability to that day-to-day organizing.” He described his work to me not as activism, but as constantly “engaging a ‘terrain of struggle’: the process of organizing to oppose and confront oppression and exploitation in its varying forms.”
In addition to his day job at QPIRG and his work with CLAC, Singh organizes with the groups No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders, both of which advocate for migrant rights and against racism. “My broader goals are usually the same: popular education work, raising awareness about basic issues to a broader public, and challenging the comfort zones of people in power and privilege. This means workshops, presentations, and engaging media — both mainstream and independent.” Leading up to the Toronto summit, he organized a workshop with a Montreal housing rights group, in which they detailed the links between the G20, privatization, and cutbacks, and the subsequent lack of affordable housing for the poor. “In the context of the economic crisis,” he explained, “we stressed how the G20 was ‘saving capitalism,’ but undertaking a massive wealth transfer to the very people and organizations responsible for the crisis.”
ingh situates himself at one extreme of four types: opportunists, realists, idealists, and radicals. “Opportunists are ready to make any sort of compromise to increase their personal power and wealth. Realists accept the world as it is, and are willing to accept many of the compromises of opportunists. The default category is idealist — someone who, in simple terms, wants the world to be a better place. Radicals pose the deeper questions and act on making change.” With respect to the G20, he said, “In Toronto, with over 1,000 arrests, mostly arbitrary, many idealists were swept up in the police repression, or observed it close at hand. This was meant to scare those idealists into pulling away from radical politics. Some folks are definitely traumatized and scared. But many, definitely, have become radicalized, too.”I consider myself an idealist with inclinations, however ineffectual, toward radicalism. (Ideally, I’d fit into some nebulous category between the two; I look lousy in a bandana.) But in Singh’s estimation, I’m part of a majority who remain deluded “that we can use parliamentary democracy to make fundamental change.” He and fellow anarchist radicals dismiss our judicial, electoral, and governmental systems as so inherently flawed, so predicated on maintaining divisions and inequality between people, that, in his words, “the fundamental change for justice and dignity is not possible within the mainstream political apparatus. Engaging that apparatus reinforces it. That apparatus is part of the problem.”
The more non-violent, anti-authoritarian principles of anarchy have always appealed to me; Tolstoy, for one, developed a philosophy of nonresistance that was in profound harmony with the anarchist tradition. And elements of anarchism are making their way into the urban mainstream: the trends toward local, independent farming and neighbourhood gardens suggest that many people would be happy to rely less on corporate and governmental institutions, and more on their immediate communities. (Like my sanctimonious cycling, though, these movements are subject to certain ironies. As Singh points out, “The places responsible for the worst environmental abuses and injustices around the world, the metropolitan West, are also the places where we live the most ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ lifestyles.”)
I suggested to Singh that anarchism might seem, to some, to propose easy answers; taken superficially, without critical thought, it could perpetuate radicalism without idealism. And perhaps, in the case of the black bloc, radicalism might be attractive to people who, for whatever reason, including legitimate personal anger, welcome any excuse to smash stuff.
Singh responded that ideals are absolutely central to his work: “There’s a stereotype of ‘radicals’ as unnuanced, or absolutist. The kind of politics I’m asserting, individually and collectively within the groups I organize with, aren’t absolutist in that sense; they need to be grounded in principles, and it’s a problem if we don’t assert collective principles of what we’re for and against. I’m guided by the Zapatista phrase ‘Caminando, nos preguntamos ’ — ‘Walking, we ask questions.’ We’re all continually discussing and debating effective struggle, effective ways of making change, and our core principles. We don’t have fixed answers, but in struggle, in walking, we engage in a process to answer them.”
Conceptually, the idea that anarchism, or at least radicalism, requires an evolving, nuanced ideology is encouraging, especially considering the rigidity of most mainstream political parties. Still, little about what happened over the June 26 weekend suggested this to be the case for all radicals, or made radical politics appealing to me. The violence was disorienting, even alienating.
Singh, who also attended peaceful protests over the weekend, doesn’t believe the way things were reported reflects the totality of what happened. But he does believe it has created the potential for dialogue: “At the very least, you might be curious about the rage expressed by so-called angry youth. When you realize that many of those angry youth come from families and backgrounds similar to yours, you might get really, really curious as to why.”
