What is the Barricade?
The Barricade is a project based in Canada aiming to provide political commentary, analysis, and education. Each of us has come out of grassroots organizing, from tenant unions, labour unions, women's liberation, and anti-militarization movements, and more. We aim to create a rallying point for those fighting similar struggles, and to create the analysis and resources that we need to win victories and build working class power.
Our perspective is simple: We believe that working-class people can fundamentally change our society, and that in order to do this, we need to build our collective power. By getting organized, fighting back against the ruling class, and taking democratic control over the systems that govern our lives — we can build something better.
What's more, we don't have a choice. Things can't go on like this. Countries like Canada are facing a long, drawn-out crisis. Our political and economic systems are stagnating. Elections offer no real opportunity for ordinary people to engage in politics, and we have become desensitized to broken promises, corruption, and the constant betrayal of our interests by politicians who side with the rich. We have watched factories close, seen our economy hollowed out and taken over by parasitic financiers, landlords, and tech billionaires. Good union jobs have been replaced by unstable contract labour, precarious service work, and monotonous office jobs. And while work gets more precarious, working people are charged more for basic necessities. All the while, the ruling class takes in record profits.
The fact is: this system is reaching its limits. It has to change. The main questions now are: Who will change it? And how? Rich capitalists and their friends in politics are circling. They want to see a system which is more exploitative, where working people are squeezed even harder, and where they can scrap even the pretenses of democracy and the rule of law. If we fail to get organized, these rich and powerful owners of our society will have a free hand to create an even worse system out of the shell of the old one. It is their interests that lie behind the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes across the world.
We at the Barricade believe in taking a different course. We believe in building a fighting movement, in regular working people getting organized in our workplaces and our neighbourhoods, and in putting forward a program for a new system — one based on the people's democratic control of economic resources and political power.
Working people are already fighting back by organizing workplaces, forming tenant unions, and striking. We want to see this rising tide of resistance turn into an effective fighting movement. In other words, into a force able to challenge the ruling class. In our view, this movement must go beyond spontaneous demonstrations and decentralized actions. We need to go beyond small-scale reforms to the capitalist system. It is time to put socialism back on the table — not as a utopian dream, but as the concrete demand of a vibrant working class movement. Not as another empty "ism" but as a continuation of people's own experience of taking democratic control over the systems that govern our lives.
We need a political program, a plan of action, and to build organizations capable of uniting people together in a common struggle and elevating isolated fights into powerful co-ordinated campaigns. This is what we aim to work towards.
The Barricade aims to be a voice of working-class struggle and to contribute to building the movement by highlighting the stories of those fighting back, putting forward political analysis to develop our understanding of the issues we face, and creating educational resources that others can draw on.
