Quebec is in an uproar and the university students are refusing to go to class. They even had to end the semester early. Why? They're fed up with their current economic crisis(raising tuition AGAIN!) and the career choices they have to look forward to(bleaker than hell). That sounds awfully familiar. So what are they doing that we're not?
Alternet posted an article two days ago about the student strike and so far it is amazing! We need to support our neighbors to the north and do the same here; we could certainly do more than what Occupy has done. We need to get loud and colorful and definitely more organized. If something like Law 78 was to be passed here in the US you can bet your sweet cheeks we'd be out in force. This really was the tipping point for the Canadians. Get the word out. Mirror this article, tweet it, RE it to your friends, and any other imaginative thing you can think of.
The core issues at stake here are the same ones that
students and workers around the world are facing right now: austerity
and the increasing privatization of education.
On Wednesday night in Montreal, we shared a long dinner with
student organizers, discussing everything from police tactics in
Montreal and New York to the necessity of an anti-racist and
anti-colonial framework for our movements. Our hosts noticed that,
around the time that the nightly 8:30 p.m. march was supposed to begin,
we were getting nervous about missing it. They laughed and said,
“Don’t worry, it will go on until 2 a.m.” Or at least they normally do.
By
midnight, after peacefully and joyfully marching through the city for
hours, the police charged our march of about 4,000 people with batons
and pepper spray. In a moment the scene became one of chaos and
confusion. Many in the crowd turned around and ran, but there were
police behind us, too, coming straight at us with their batons out as
people were pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground. Eventually, we
found our way out of the melée and asked our Canadian comrade what had
happened to provoke the police. “Nothing,” she answered. “They just got
tired of us.”
We had been lucky. Moments after the police charged us, they surrounded
a group of 506 protesters and arrested everyone in what became the
largest single mass arrest since the indefinite student strike began
here in Quebec 103 days ago.
The student movement in Quebec is growing. On Tuesday, an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 students, workers and supporters took to the streets to
protest tuition hikes and the passing of the new, draconian
anti-protest law — Law 78 — as well as to celebrate the 100th day of
the student strike. But state repression is also growing. Last night’s
mass arrest and other forms of police violence bear witness to the new
climate of fear and repression that the Charest government is trying to
create in order to break the student movement.
The passing of
Law 78 is a direct attack on the freedom of assembly and the right to
protest. It not only bans unpermitted marches or any unpermitted
gathering of more than 50 people, but the vaguely worded “special law”
also
threatens
to levy enormous fines against organizers, unions and potentially
anyone who participates in an unpermitted assembly. The law comes in
response to the growing popularity of the student movement and can be
read as as symptom of the government’s inability to control the
movement; it is a sign that in some ways
the students are winning.
In fact, since its passage last Friday, the nightly marches have only
gotten larger as more people see the struggle expanding from the single
issue of university tuition to a broader one that includes the right
to protest and the suppression of dissent.
The media in the United States have hardly noticed the Quebec student
strike, despite it being the longest and largest in the history of
North America. Those of us who have been following the movement have
been amazed by the sheer numbers that these mass demonstrations have
mobilized, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets on major
days of action. What is less known, but equally important, is that every
single night for the past month there have been marches of several
thousand protesters. These high-energy marches snake their way across
the eastern side of the island for hours, through residential and
commercial neighborhoods. People in bars, restaurants and apartment
windows shout back, wave flags, chant with the protesters and cheer them
on, even banging their pots and pans, in reference to the Latin
American tradition of cacerolazo protests. The breadth of politicization and the everyday forms of solidarity in Montreal is formidable to witness.
“This didn’t happen overnight”
The prevalence of
the red squares that symbolize the student strike is stunning: pinned
in the hair of a girl on the metro, worn as earrings by another,
attached to a baby carriage, or duct-taped on backpacks, shoes, bike
helmets and cell phones. But most of all the small, red felt squares
are safety-pinned to people’s jackets or shirts, a visible expression
of the crushing student-loan debt that Canadian students face — on
average, $27,000, according to the Canadian Federation of Students.
They’re derived from to the expression “carrément dans la rouge,”
literally translated as “squarely in the red.” They are everyday
reminders of the increased burden of debt that will come with increased
tuition. So many people are wearing the red squares, some claim that
the dollar stores where the red felt is bought are running out of it.
When
we express disbelief that one of the biggest universities in Canada,
the Universitité du Montréal, has been forced to cancel classes and end
its semester early because of the strike, and when we are amazed at
the prevalence of red squares, people simply say, “Yes, but we have
been working for two years to get here.” And it is true. The tuition
hikes have been on the table since 2010, when the tuition freeze ended.
In March 2011, Quebec announced its plan to raise tuition by $325 a
year over 5 years. In response to this, protesters occupied the finance
minister’s office.
When we ask how, over that time, so many
students have been mobilized and politicized, the answer is both simple
and complex. As student organizer Myriam Zaidi said, “We’ve been
standing on corners handing out leaflets and having conversations with
people about this for years. Just opening up that space of conversation
has been hugely important. This didn’t happen overnight.” These basic
forms of disseminating information about the tuition hikes and
fostering debate about these issues have been pivotal in mobilizing
massive on-the-ground support behind their call for a strike.
But
the more complicated answer to our question lies in the organizing
structure and history of student unions at universities in Quebec.
Organized at a variety of levels — from that of the whole Quebec
Province all the way down to individual departments — these unions
provide a way for students to organize politically, granting them both
legitimacy and power. Longer-term mobilizing strategies include
campaigns to build strike votes at general membership meetings,
carefully navigated negotiations with governments and university
administrations, and coalition-building between the various unions.
These have been pivotal in securing a unified front during the current
strike. This current round of protests are also only the most recent
expressions of
a much longer history of radical student unionism in Quebec, which dates back to the 1960s.
Solidarité
All
in all this has meant that when, on February 14, the student unions at
the Universitié du Montréal called for a strike, they already had a
very strong base level of support. From there, picket-lines were
organized in front of classrooms, and efforts to shut down the
university required constant organizing and action. As one student
organizer told us, “In those first few weeks, it was very tedious. We
knew the class schedule, and we would stand outside the classrooms with
signs … Many students would know this was going on and just stay home …
One conservative history professor charged the picket line once.”
The
university didn’t take these actions lightly. Our friend went on to
describe how, in March, fed up with the picket lines and the strike,
the university hired a notorious strike-breaking security firm. Armed
guards patrolled its hallways, interrogating people about why they
weren’t in class, stopping professors and students alike to bully and
harass them. This, however, only lasted a few days until widespread
outrage from faculty of all political leanings forced the administration
to withdraw the guards. Unbroken, the strike continued to the present,
and now the provincial government has called for an early end to the
semester in yet another attempt to break it.
There are varying
levels of support at different universities and in different parts of
Quebec. At the English-speaking, elite McGill University, support has
not been as widespread, and an attempted student strike there has not
been successful (despite having had an occupation of the administrative
offices there in the winter). In some ways, this is emblematic of
historic divisions between the French-speaking and English-speaking
communities in Montreal and Quebec, and of the way that these divisions
also fray along class lines. Occasionally this has meant that the
protests have a nationalistic flavor to them, with people carrying the
Quebec flag and chanting things like: “A qui le Québec? A nous le Québec!” (Whose Quebec? Our Quebec!)
These
nationalist undertones have been increasingly contested by student
organizers of color who have been actively working to articulate an
anti-racist and anti-colonial analysis within the movement, while also
combating the false view that the movement is dominated by white
students. These efforts are increasingly successful, as shown by the
creation of the students-of-color and anti-racist coalitions that had a
presence at Tuesday’s march. (Listen to an interview with one of the
organizers
here, starting at 23:00.)
During
these marches, or while banging pots on street corners with our
Montreal comrades, the question often on our minds is how we as
students in New York City can stand in solidarity with them. The first
answer, of course, is to build our own movement and to build it
in explicit connection
with the one happening here in Montreal. We too are facing tuition
hikes at public schools, from New York to California. We too are met
with repression and violence when we express dissent. And,
fundamentally, the core issues at stake here are the same ones that
students and workers around the world are facing right now: the
implementation of austerity measures, the increasing privatization of
education and (to use Prime Minister Charest’s unapologetically
Thatcherist language) a “cultural revolution” in the way we think of
education. What was once a common good is being purposefully transformed
into an elite commodity available to only those who can afford it.
Last
night, as we marched in Montreal, it was with the knowledge that
hundreds of our Occupy Wall Street comrades in New York were marching
in solidarity for the third time. (
Here
is video of the first.) Occupy Wall Street itself grew out of
solidarity with the Tunisian and Egyptian and Spanish and Greek
uprisings, after people began asking themselves, “How do
we do
that here?”
Our generation of students in the United States has yet to mobilize on
a mass scale, but after watching what’s happening up here in Quebec,
perhaps that will change.
Manissa McCleave
Maharawal is a doctoral student in the Anthropology department at the
CUNY Graduate Center and a New York City based activist.
Zoltán
Glück is PhD student in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is
also a full-time student organizer and activist based in New York City.
