Come together, right now, over me

Last weekend I went to my first political event in quite some time. I've been feeling quite guilty (and uneducated) in the past while about not going to events to learn, however he more I go he more I feel like I already know what's going on and that nothing new is being learned. The past few years have been intensive learning experiences for me but I have to say that most of my learning has been isolated to personal experience and very little has been done through any sort of group atmosphere. This includes most of the education I received in Norway, my experiences in working at the shelter and my immersion in newsprint for the last 3 years.

Saturday I went to see Angela Davies talk. Davies is an ex-black-panther and member of the communist party in the US. She gave a talk that I would characterize as pretty weak, but I personally got a lot out of it. All of my friends really liked what she had to say and the crowd gave the impression that she could have read pages from the telephone book and they would have loved it.

Essentially she got up and sort of rambled about a variety of subjects from the US elections and Afghanistan to black politics and her take on the glory days of the civil rights movement. There was no main theme to what she was saying, but a lot of the things I heard were good and she had a very casual and "straight up" way of talking.

A couple days later I saw a couple of speakers focusing on Israeli apartheid. It was really good because all of the speakers focused on different aspects of apartheid: South African, Canadian and Israeli.

I got to and it to Ryerson events. I've been to 2 in the last week and both were well organized, quick, insightful and to the point. They didn't go on for hours upon end so you got out of there with enough brain power to digest what you heard.

One of the common themes they talked about was something I've been focusing on for quite awhile in my politics. The theme of collective responsibility over individualism. Collective responsibility is hard to pin down as a concept because it's vague, but it's essentially an ideology of working together vs. that of every one for themselves. Beyond a simple ideology, I think most of the non-profit and activist groups in Canada have been operating like this for the past 10 years. They have occasionnally joined up for one-shot issues now and then (the Quebec student strikes come to mind) but no political force has been whipped up in the same manner as, say Quebec Solidaire.

Solidaire is a 'party' example, but you could argue there are others. The People's commission was another quebec example: immigration and internationally focused groups linking up to become a unified lobbying/social movement group.

I think socialist/pro-state/pro-collective action groups will stay on the fringe, and broken like so much hope we've had until someone unites them. A group or person, criss crossing a country and then the world.