About

who we are

The word “Tkaronto” is a Mohawk word that means “where there are trees standing in the water.” This word refers to the ancient practice of placing fishing weirs in the water to catch fish. We use this word as a reminder that we are on Indigenous land that was stolen and destroyed by us, settler colonizers. We are not an indigenous group but we seek to follow the ideological and practical leadership of Indigenous groups from this land. To us “decolonization is not a metaphor“. We seek to abolish property ownership and return sovereignty of the land to the Indigenous peoples. We are a group of mostly students who have had enough of the system and have decided to work towards something new. We are not a vanguard trying to liberate the people, but a movement that seeks to inspire the people to liberate themselves. We do not claim to represent anybody but ourselves.

The following ideas are taken from varying different sources, and the views of the organization are subject to change by the members. We are a very small group right now looking to grow.

what we believe

To us, anarchy stands as not just ends, but as the means to achieve those ends. This unity of ends and means is central to our ideas. we see means as inherently linked with ends, we must use means inline with our stated ends. If we change the means the ends will necessarily change. Through this we aspire to two things, social revolution and libertarian socialism. Anarchy, being the negation of hierarchy and promotion of horizontalism, gives us means to achieve these ends. They are available to us as direct action, prefiguration, and mutual aid. In order to enact these means we must be organised, for this we choose especifismo. We see ourselves as interconnected with nature, so we will use social ecology to understand the world. I will explain all the emphasized terms on this page.

Social revolution is the process by which a society changes drastically in a short amount of time. These changes usually affect more than just political systems, but society as a whole. We seek to overthrow the powers of hierarchy and establish a horizontal system based on freedom, equality, and solidarity. This system we call libertarian socialism. Libertarian means having an equal distribution of power, it is structural equality. We define socialism as direct social control of the means of production and distribution. This new structure usually comes into reality as a federation of directly democratic council structures.

Hierarchical social structures like the state, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy give one individual power over another. They generate their power through domination, violence, and coercion. Horizontal power structures on the other hand, derive their power from co-operation, where no person has power over another.

Our weapons in this fight are direct action, prefiguration, and mutual aid. Direct action means using our collective social force to achieve our aims. It means not using representatives or the systems internal routes. It means acting autonomously, materially working towards our goals. Prefiguration represents the consequences of the unity of means and ends. Power structures reproduce themselves, so to have a society in the future built on horizontal power structures, we must built those very structures today. Mutual aid is the sharing of resources for collective benefit. This is unconditional and based on a collective will to see everyone achieve their potential. These are the driving forces in our group, working in tandem with our organizational principle, especifismo.

Especifismo was developed by the FAU in Uruguay and combined the idea of a specifically anarchist organization or SAO, with the idea of social insertion. The SAO is a group of anarchist militants who have agreed collectively on a political line. Members are able to carry out this line effectively and spread anarchist ideas in their work, social insertion. Social insertion is the practice of anarchists from the SAO participating in and helping social movements. Social movements are non-anarchist anti-hierarchical groups that exist on the social level. They should engage in direct action and mutual aid, and have a directly democratic structure. These are the kinds of organizations we want to be inserting ourselves in. The militants of the SAO help these organizations to spread anarchist ideas. Another Especifist idea is the concentric circles, where the organization is formed from concentric circles where the innermost circle is the most dedicated militants who can carry out the political line of the group. The second circle is usually supporters or partial members, next one out is the social movements that the group is involved with. These concentric circles can be different for different organizations. Someone’s place in the concentric circles defines someone’s say in the political doctrine of the organization and their responsibilities.

The last idea we need is social ecology, which is the natural extension of ecological principles to social analysis. We are inseparable from nature and we must examine history from this perspective. The emergence of hierarchy came from more deeply engrained hierarchies in human society. We must learn from this to prevent the reemergence of hierarchy in the future. We must understand how leaders justify their rule and what foundation it is actually built on. In order to overcome this old system we have to understand it, and in order to build a new system we must have a vision of what human society can be, an ecological society. This ecological society should reintroduce usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum. We should not abandon technology, but reimagine it holistically as emergent behaviour.

All of these ideas come together to form the foundation for our organization and strategy. These theories and ideas illuminate the future of our organization and they inform our direct action, prefiguration, and mutual aid.