Jeff Shantz

For anarchists, marriage is defined not by the sexuality or gender of spouses, but by the presence of the Church and State. However, marriage, the legal and religious sanctioning of interpersonal relationships, rarely receives much attention in anarchist feminist circles. Major collections of anarchist writings cover many areas of social life but usually have no essays dealing with marriage. Those chapters in which important institutions and social relations are dealt with do not even include marriage as part of the discussion.

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2023 has officially been designated as the worst fire season on record in so-called Canada, with almost 20 million acres burned by summer’s end. While these wildfires deeply ravaged many communities, they have most severely impacted Indigenous communities, many of whose territories are northern, rural, or wilderness.

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The rising tide of fascism and organized political violence of the Right, particularly the mobilization of street-level right-wing forces, such as the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, have returned the question of self-defense to the center of anarchist and antifascist concerns. This has become more burning following the brutal fascist mobilization and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. The murder there of Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi gives the issue of self-defense life or death importance.

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Social resistance has reached a certain impasse, a conundrum as nation states impose austerity as an extended regime of governance throughout social life.

In North America, movements still race from crisis (response) to crisis (response), while organizing often occurs around rather narrow issues.

The alternative globalization politics of the last two decades, Occupy and the street protests against the IMF, World Bank, and G20, are posed as having emerged spontaneously as resistance to the state and capital.

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Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal ruled in August against the government, effectively suspending the TransMountain expansion (TMEX) project, a proposed twining of a bitumen pipeline, parallel to the first, from the Alberta tar sands to an oil refinery in Burnaby, Metro Vancouver.

The TMEX has long been opposed by a diversity of Indigenous communities, environmentalists, and anarchist activists. Recently, the Canadian government nationalized the Trans Mountain pipeline to assure the expansion would be built, putting up 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.5 billion) to purchase the project from Texas oil giant, Kinder Morgan.

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According to all reputable climatologists, an immediate ninety percent reduction in material and energy production is required to meet the goal of limiting the average worldwide temperature increase by a disastrous two degrees Fahrenheit. At the current rate of fossil fuel extraction and use, the earth will experience a catastrophic increase of four to nine degrees by the end of this century.

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The Occupy mobilizations of the last year have offered to many some hope for a renewal of popular movements and alternatives to state capitalist arrangements Yet, perhaps few recurring events show the great disparity that exists between activist subcultures and broader working class and poor communities in North America than the privileging of street protests and demonstrations within activist practices.

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As has been the case throughout colonial conquest, the military police force of the Canadian state, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have facilitated the occupation of Indigenous lands by resource capital. Most recently, the state forced its way onto Wet’suwet’en territories in northern so-called British Columbia to secure access for a Coastal GasLink liquified natural gas pipeline (LNG).

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