FACTORY OCCUPATIONS IN ONTARIO, CANADA: REBUILDING INFRASTRUCTURES OF RESISTANCE

Abstract

This article discusses recent developments, including occupations and radical workers centers in the context of rank‐and‐file resistance and alternative organizing, and emerging challenges to union bureaucracies, in the current period in Canada's industrial heartland. Occupations provide a possibly crucial turning point in the working‐class response to capitalist economic crisis and in the formation and structure of working‐class organizing and struggle. In order to properly understand the development of occupations it is important to look at the present context of their emergence. This means situating occupations within the limiting practices of legal union structures. It also means, crucially, looking at the erosion of working‐class infrastructures of resistance, those institutions and spaces that have sustained struggles of the working classes and the oppressed, and situating occupations as part of broader attempts to renew those infrastructures. Infrastructures of resistance help people and communities to develop the capacities to sustain human struggles over time and place. They provide a basis for self‐directing these struggles strategically. They also allow for the crucial connection between local and immediate struggles and campaigns and broader and more thoroughgoing projects of contesting existing social structures. The article includes a discussion of attempts to (re)build infrastructures of resistance in Windsor, Ontario.