Comrades to Comrades: We Will Oppose the Evictions of Our Peoples:
The intention behind the Protégé Panther Project for Self-Defense as an idea, an action, an initiative, an intervention, is and has always been about nurturing, developing and building an intercommunal, intergenerational collective revolutionary anticolonial consciousness in us and for us as oppressed peoples in whatever ways we can, and in whatever spaces we find ourselves in, or in whatever spaces we’re invited to or claim for ourselves, and whether we’re talking about us being 2 comrades, 10 comrades, or 40 or 200 or more it don’t matter. This video recorded political education session demonstrates this. ‘We Will Oppose the Evictions of our Peoples’ is a collaborative cross-class, cross-community, intergenerational teach-in session facilitated and organized by the Protégé Panther Project for Self-Defense (PPPSD) and Peoples Defense. Its focus is on the mass evictions of poor and working class peoples especially peoples of colour taking place then under Covid 19 conditions in the city of Toronto and beyond in real time by the power structure itself, and the strategies and tactics carried out by revolutionary minded groups such as the Peoples Defense and the PPPSD to organize a holistic people’s self-defense against that power structure and its use of this kind of violence to keep people down. Our grade 5 and 6 comrades are in-person in their public school classroom with undergraduate students from the University of Toronto and community members in the city joining live via Zoom along with our Peoples Defense comrades. The violence of colonial oppression in the form of evictions and displacement and the threat of both is everywhere in our comrade’s lives and in the lives of all of us and our families and it brings real fear and real despair. This then is not an academic exercise or some unit in the school curriculum to be graded and ticked off before you move onto something else. Its real for us. It’s real for our comrades.
We begin then as we always do with anti-colonial language, thought and action. We root ourselves in this. This is highlighted in our reminder to our grade 5 and 6 comrades and everyone present of the concepts of ‘comrades’, ‘self-defense’, collective struggle, collective identity and therefore collective power and collective self-defense against colonial thought and colonial action that would like to have us the oppressed fighting amongst each other, hurting each other and putting each other down as individuals competing and scrambling over each other for the few crumbs that colonialism throws down for us. Of importance here is the starting point being made in the development of a collective revolutionary consciousness. The emphasis, as always with our collective teach-ins where we are all comrades and all a part of the journey and process of anticolonial liberation as something that’s lived and living, is to organize in ourselves as a collective the fierce fire-rage revolutionary belief and conviction that WE have POWER, that we have the power to resist and oppose oppression and to become and be new revolutionary Peoples for a new revolutionary future and to live that now. We believe there is collective life affirming joy in that and we believe that is something that we can all connect with and feel and understand. Power to the People.
The K-OS
The Protege Panther Project for Self-Defense 