They have been in full recruitment mode lately. Posters all over Montréal and (I’m told) Toronto. I’m guessing every major city.
Has anyone here gotten involved with them or known someone who has?
They’re Trotskyists fwiw, I have no direct experience and thus no first hand positive or negative thoughts but it sounds as though they may come with some baggage in addition to cringe (from an ML perspective) views on foreign policy and some current and former socialist states that naturally comes with being a Trot organization.
I’d like to know as well, I saw one of their posters recently and was thinking of reaching out to them. Would like to know a bit more first though.
Yooooo sorry I just saw this post, should have commented sooner.
I have friends in Fightback, and was loosely involved and/or adjacent to them for about 16 years.
Check this thread for angry commentary about Fightback (so I don’t have to type it out again)
I could write a novella about all this but I’ll try to keep it brief.
There’s not a lot of options for left wing activism in Canada, honestly there are no perfect choices, maybe not even any good ones. Fightback is very alluring because they are exceedingly well organised and have a very clear vision. However, they are also:
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A glorified book club that sells a newspaper
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A cult
FightBack has excellent political analysis, easily among the best, but they tend to focus on recruiting young students and I don’t think they have much if any impact on actually improving conditions for workers (or anybody)
Hid my angry comments behind a spoiler tag:
spoiler
They don’t actually do anything; the ultimate armchair critics. Their only goal is to grow the size of their own organisation, because they view themselves to be THE revolutionary socialist party and they “can’t be effective until they are big enough”. So if you find them at an event about housing issues for example, they don’t actually care about the topic of the event or the event itself, they just show up to find people to join Fightback, that’s it.
I honestly hope that I am completely wrong about them, and maybe someday they will prove it, but from what I have observed of Fightback over quite a few years is that they. are. a. fucking. cult.
Thanks for the reply. Not really what I’m looking for then. I’ll keep an eye out for more mutual-aid focused groups
Not sure where you live but the Retail Action Network on Vancouver Island is probably what you are looking for.
Most likely you’re not on the Island, but if you reach out to them maybe they know of a similar group where you’re at that you can reach out to!
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