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ILPS Organizations in Canada Support Kitchener Tent City

image00The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) in Canada stands in militant solidarity with grassroots poor and homeless people in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, who have collectively organized to build a tent city.

Kitchener Tent City is a bold response by poor young people and their allies to a capitalist system that at turns exploits, marginalizes, criminalizes and seeks to contain them.  It is a response to gentrification in Kitchener’s downtown core – a process of displacement, social cleansing and criminalization of the poor and the homeless. At a deeper level it is a response to the neoliberal articulation of capitalism which particularly has nothing to offer to working class youth.

This neoliberal articulation of capitalism, in its quest for greater and greater profits for the few, has increased the exploitation of the working class.  It does this by, on the one hand intensifying the rate of exploitation of some workers – especially workers in the oppressed nations, a growing pool of super-exploited migrant workers, and working class women – while on the other hand systematically excluding other workers from meaningful and consistent work and stripping away the minimal social rights won through decades of class struggle.  This ‘surplus’ population, which includes young people, Indigenous and racialized workers, as well as people with addictions and mental illness who aren’t easily absorbed into the ‘regular’ capitalist economy, is targeted for criminalization and containment by the growing repressive arm of the State.

The grassroots members and organizers of Kitchener Tent City, responding to the bleak future that imperialism has to offer them, are taking a stand for basic principles of social justice.  They are organizing to meet their needs through solidarity and cooperation: food, shelter, and a sense of community and dignity.  And they have organized as a community in self-defense against police repression, right wing gangs, predators and pimps.  This struggle to meet their needs and to deal with contradictions among the people represent an important challenge to Canadian imperialism and deserves the support of all those who work and strive for a liberated and just world.

ILPS in Canada expresses our militant solidarity with the youth, the poor and the homeless in their courageous struggle for justice and dignity in Kitchener-Waterloo!

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ILPS is an international alliance of more than 340 mass organizations that promote, support and develop the anti-imperialist and democratic struggles of the people of the world on five continents.  In Canada, ILPS participating organizations are engaged with grassroots organizing among migrant workers, immigrant and refugee communities, working class women, health workers, human rights advocates and other sectors.

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