For International Workers’ Day, a labor organization called Alliance Ouvrière (AO; “Workers’ Alliance” in English) brought a mock guillotine to the big union demonstration in Montreal. Rank-and-file workers bussed in by the major unions laughed and cheered as the guillotine passed by on its rolling platform. It was a funny prop, an over-the-top nod at the popular rage simmering in Quebec after years of rule by the province’s nationalist, austerity-minded Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) party.

At the end of the demonstration, AO members carried out a mock decapitation of a papier-mâché dummy, representing Quebec’s business elites, in front of a laughing crowd. Good family fun for all.

The next day, a reporter from the right-wing outrage outlet Rebel News broke the “story”: union thugs threaten Bolshevik terror at Montreal murder-rally, etc. Within hours, the heads of every political party in the province, plus every major union central, had denounced AO and distanced themselves from the Incident. The leader of the Parti Québécois said that he was shocked and sickened. The leader of Québec Solidaire demanded that AO apologize. Jean Boulet, Quebec’s minister of labor, wiggled and wept as though he had narrowly escaped the Terror.

What followed was a full-fledged meltdown. The political elites in the province, together with their media lackeys, descended into a frenzy of pearl-clutching snowflakery. The right-wing podcast circuit started pumping out content about the specter of communist terrorism.

The mainstream liberal media came out with piece after piece quoting members of the governing-class about how sad they were and asking sour-faced lawyers if the scary union rabble could be made to answer for their crimes in a court of law.

Opinion writers moaned and lamented about how our noble democracy is now in danger from political extremism. TVA called it “une violence inouïe” (an act of unprecedented violence). The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said that it was “orchestrated by a radical fringe known for also displaying the symbols of the pro-Hamas movement.”

Politicians started accusing one another of not taking the guillotine seriously enough. The police said they were opening an “investigation.” The minister of labor, whom the dummy resembled, said he would be personally filing charges. The National Assembly in Quebec City voted unanimously to condemn the Incident.

All in all, it has been a nauseating experience watching these people fall over themselves to pretend that this innocuous act of street theater qualifies as an unacceptable act of violence to be censored and condemned. It has demonstrated that the rentier class who rule us are entirely too comfortable — an entitled and out-of-touch stratum of hysterical aristocrats who believe that they deserve special police protection from feeling offended by demonstrations.

Hilariously, everyone who isn’t six years old understands that demonstrations are more or less useless other than as a means of letting off steam and showing the flag. Demonstrations have increasingly been absorbed into the framework of liberal capitalism and have essentially no impact on policy.

A mock guillotine, therefore, doesn’t represent some sort of violent threat, as these hysterics pretend. What it actually represents is the crossing of a line — lèse-majesté, a transgression against a code of politeness already totally tipped in the favor of the enemy class. Sending the cops to investigate AO is the equivalent of the Victorians sending somebody to Australia for insulting the Queen. “You can have your completely toothless little demonstration which we will totally ignore, but if you dare to even gesture at the possibility of something a bit scarier, you’ll be hearing from the cops.”

Ironically, as the whining minions of capital in Quebec City will find out, AO is actually not an “activist” organization, doesn’t really care about street theater, and is engaged in something much, much scarier than fake guillotines: organizing the working class into fighting unions, radicalizing the existing unions, and rehabilitating the political strike as a weapon against the ruling class. Its members have been active in the militant labor networks surrounding the first successful unionization of an Amazon site in Canada at a distribution center outside Montreal — an effort that was so disruptive that the company pulled out of the entire province of Quebec.

The group is a major emerging threat to capital because its base is not in student politics, identity politics, or some boutique Trotskyist microsect; it is in organized labor, notably in the public and construction sectors. Its members are organized into industrial sections and are actively engaged in building power for the working class inside and outside of the major unions.

AO is not lobbying or begging for concessions; it is not a woke infographic-generating machine; and it is not the one true Leninist vanguard party issuing lengthy denunciations of the twelve other one true Leninist vanguard parties. It is something far more dangerous: a socialist organization run by and for normal people with a clear vision for social transformation through working-class politics, and the ambition and energy to make it happen.