How Organizers Are Using Fighting Arts to Teach Working Class Youth Their Power
Written with Sisters Committee: an organization composed of members of Proletarian Fighting Arts Collective (@pfacollective), Scarborough Fighters (@scarborough_fighters) and East Scarborough Tenants Union (@estu.tu).
Illustrated by @zsociety.co
Scarborough has a long but little known history of working-class organizing. Toronto’s Easternmost suburb is home to 600,000 residents - making up the largest population of first and second generation immigrants in the city. Scarborough and its people have made major contributions to the fabric of Toronto (labour, cultural, and otherwise) and yet, poor city planning and decades of government neglect continue to keep Scarborough on the margins. Contributing to an ecosystem of organizers on the ground are the Sisters Committee: an organizing group teaching radical power amongst Scarborough residents through fighting arts.
What is the purpose behind the Sisters Committee?
We organize to bring to light the power that working class people have when we are united. We put in a collective effort to fight and defend ourselves against issues that affect youth and tenants in Scarborough. Whether they are water shut offs, evictions, pests, bullying, or racist teachers and CAS workers, we know what we deserve and want better for ourselves and our communities. We recognize that we have common problems that require collective solutions. Organizing ourselves helps us make connections between our problems and better understand others in our community.
The Sisters Committee uses fighting arts as a method of building collective power. How can fighting arts be an important tool of resistance for working class youth?
We aim to connect strategies for self-defense and personal power to strategies for community defense and collective power. Within fighting arts, you are focused on adapting to and defending/striking your opponent within a constantly changing situation. This practice of attending to and changing strategy/tactics within a high-pressure context where your opponent is always working against you, can train us to think about strategizing within an ongoing class struggle. Fighting arts also builds self-knowledge (e.g., understanding your own weak points/disadvantages and strategizing around them) and confidence in self-defense, which can impact how youth understand and experience their power within their broader communities and consider their abilities and opportunities for direct action.
What specific issues are working class residents facing in Scarborough and what makes it a fertile ground for political organizing?
Residents in Scarborough face a number of issues, the most common are generally related to living conditions. Unaffordable rent for poor living conditions (like pests, mold, issues with water, extreme temperatures, exposure to toxins, overcrowding, lack of privacy, poor air quality, poor sanitation, etc), unlawful landlords (discrimination, tenants being targeted, taking advantage of tenants, etc) and not being able to find suitable housing. These issues are not new and after years of being left on the margins by city officials - people are passionate about them. This is what makes Scarborough a fertile ground for political organizing.
People have been facing these issues for years and they are only getting worse for many., Tthe frustration and anger is palpable and many are ready to do something about it, they just don’t know what to do or how to go about it - or how many people around them are facing similar issues. This sentiment is an advantage to political organizing as it helps bring people together over a common cause.
How was it determined that martial arts could be a tool of resistance?
Being able to fight well means being able to execute power with intention and confidence. Capitalism steals confidence from the gender oppressed, and training and fighting together builds our confidence back up. Many of the skills we build in fighting are applicable to organizing. In a physical fight, we need to be flexible and adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and we need to know how to set things up. In a fight, this means setting up our physical combinations and strikes and targetingand, targeting an opponent’s weak points through technique and practice. Similarly, in our organizing conversations and class fights, we need to know how to set things up with skill. Martial arts / fighting arts are full of useful skills and techniques for the working class (self-defense, community defense). We are aware that engaging in class/political fights can put us in physical danger. We train with the intention that if we can calmly navigate and counter a high pressure scenario where strikes are being thrown at us with the intention to destabilize us, we can apply that training to bigger fights outside of the ring.
Why was it important for you guys to come together and organize around gender?
Martial arts spaces are often hostile to women and reflect many of the ways that other environments steal confidence from women under capitalism. Not all of us are martial artists, but, martial arts classes and recreational programming in our neighbourhood have been a way for the youth and their families to get to know us. This is how we build connections that outlast any singular issue that we are organizing working class people around.
In 2018, a few organizers in our community got together to do collective physical activity. As organizers, we often found that we would meet each other when there was an active campaign or issue to rally around. A venue where we meet as proletarians for healthy recreation allowed us a space to have political conversations and build relationships with other organizations in our city. In working together, we took note that the systemic gender struggles that exist in bourgeois institutions permeated our training spaces - emphasizing the need for a sister's only training space. We made the sisters committee out of members of PFAC, Scarborough Fighters and Estu, recognizing that proletarian women are integral to organizing because of the leadership role they play in families and communities. Organized women and girls see their strengths and social roles as the building blocks of class struggle, and we wanted to popularize that.
How are youth and residents able to use fighting arts tools to combat systemic issues in their communities?
The fighting arts include various systems of combat aimed at effective self-defense and preservation. By training in these systems of defense, youth can begin to think systemically, including understanding one’s own system of defense, and their opponents’. This can translate into understanding the capitalist systems’ strategies/tactics for attacking and keeping our communities powerless, and identifying opportunities to strike back and weaken it. Thinking about systemic self-defense requires thinking about building and organizing effective community systems to leverage collective power against the capitalist forces and figures impacting our communities.
Why is it important for the Sisters Committee to support and nurture a culture of youth organizing?
We can build and sustain power in numbers so we can solve the problems in our lives as a community. Organizing ourselves helps us to challenge the fear of addressing problems that feel overwhelming and impossible to solve alone. Organizing helps us build the power, collective trust, and agency to feel capable of taking control over the decisions that impact us. What differentiates our organization in particular, is that whether or not we achieve our demands in a campaign, what we aim to build is an organization of people that back each other up when any of us face issues. When we come together to fight against our smaller oppressions, we build collective unity, agency, and strategy to imagine what is possible for us and then fight towards collective liberation.
How can Scarborough residents and other working-class organizers engage with the Sisters Committee and the other organizations?
They can get in touch with us via our instagram (@pfacollective or @estu.to) or email (prolefightingarts@gmail.com)
