The Threat of Quebec's Good Example

Peter Hallward
The   B u l l e t	
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 647
June 6, 2012

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/647.php#continue

The extraordinary student mobilization in Quebec has
already sustained the longest and largest student strike
in the history of North America, and it has already
organized the single biggest act of civil disobedience in
Canadian history. It is now rapidly growing into one of
the most powerful and inventive anti-austerity campaigns
anywhere in the world.

Every situation is different, of course, and Quebec's
students draw on a distinctive history of social and
political struggle, one rooted in the 1960s 'Quiet
Revolution' and several subsequent and eye-opening
campaigns for free or low-cost higher education. Support
for the provincial government that opposes them, moreover,
has been undermined in recent years by allegations of
corruption and bribery. Nevertheless, those of us fighting
against cuts and fees in other parts of the world have
much to learn from the way the campaign has been organized
and sustained. It's high time that education activists in
the UK, in particular, started to pay the Quebecois the
highest compliment: when in doubt, imitate!

The first reason for the students' success lies in the
clarity of both their immediate aim and its links to a
broad range of closely associated aims. Students of all
political persuasions support the current 'minimal
programme,' to block the Liberal government's plan to
increase tuition fees by 82 per cent over several years.
Most students and their families also oppose the many
similar measures introduced by federal and provincial
governments in Canada in recent years, which collectively
represent an unprecedented neoliberal attack on social
welfare (new user fees for healthcare, elimination of
public sector services and jobs, factory closures, wanton
exploitation of natural resources, an increase in the
retirement age, restrictions on trade unions and so on).
And apart from bankers and some employers, most people
across Canada already regret the fact that the average
debt for university graduates is around $27,000.

The Growth of CLASSE

A growing number of students now also support the
fundamental principle of free universal education, long
defended by the more militant student groups (loosely
co-ordinated in the remarkable new coalition CLASSE), and
back their calls for the unconditional abolition of
tuition fees, to be phased out over several years and
compensated by a modest and perfectly feasible bank tax,
at a time of record bank profits. "This hardline stance,"
the Guardian's reporter observed, "has catapulted CLASSE
from being a relatively unknown organization with 40,000
members to a sprawling phenomenon that now numbers 100,000
and claims to represent 70 per cent of striking students."
Growing numbers, too, can see how such a demand might help
to compensate for the most obvious socioeconomic
development in Canada over the last 30 years: the dramatic
growth in income inequality, reinforced by a whole series
of measures (tax cuts, trade agreements, marketization
plans...) that have profited the rich and very rich at the
expense of everyone else.

In Quebec, student resistance to these measures hasn't
simply generated a contingent 'chain of equivalences'
across otherwise disparate demands: it has helped to
create a practical, militant community of interest in the
face of systematic neoliberal assault. "It's more than a
student strike," a CLASSE spokesman said in April, "We
want it to become a struggle of the people." At first
scornfully dismissed in the corporate media, this general
effort to make the student movement into a social movement
has borne fruit in recent weeks, and it would be hard to
describe the general tone of reports from the nightly
protest marches that are now taking over much of Montreal
in terms other than collective euphoria.

Nothing similar has yet happened in the UK, of course,
even though the British variant of the same neoliberal
assault - elimination of the EMA, immediate trebling of
fees, systematic marketization of provision - has been far
more brutal. But the main reasons for this lie less in
some uniquely francophone propensity to defend a
particular social heritage than in the three basic (and
eminently transposable) elements of any successful popular
campaign: strategy, organization and empowerment.

	
As many students knew well before they launched their
anti-fees campaign last summer, the best way to win this
kind of fight is to implement a strategy that no amount of
state coercion can overcome - a general, inclusive and
'unlimited' boycott of classes. One-day actions and
symbolic protest marches may help build momentum, but only
"an open-ended general strike gives students maximum
leverage to make their demands heard," the CLASSE's
newspaper Ultimatum explains. So far, it has been 108 days
and counting, and "on ne lache pas" (we're not backing
down) has become a familiar slogan across the province. So
long as enough students are prepared to sustain it, their
strike puts them in an almost invincible bargaining
position.

Ensuring such preparation is the key to CLASSE as an
organization. It has provided new ways for students
previously represented by more cautious and conventional
student associations to align themselves with the more
militant ASSE, with its tradition of direct action and
participatory democracy. Activists spent months preparing
the ground for the strike, talking to students one at a
time, organizing department by department and then faculty
by faculty, starting with the more receptive programmes
and radiating slowly out to the more sceptical.

At every pertinent level they have created general
assemblies, which have invested themselves with the power
to deliberate and then make, quickly and collectively,
important decisions. Actions are decided by a public show
of hands, rather than by an atomising expression of
private opinion. The more powerful and effective these
assemblies have become, the more active and enthusiastic
the level of participation. Delegates from the assemblies
then participate in wider congresses and, in the absence
of any formal leadership or bureaucracy, the "general
will" that has emerged from these congresses is so clear
that CLASSE is now the main organizing force in the
campaign and able to put firm pressure on the other more
compromise-prone student unions.

Assemblies and Collective Empowerment

Week after week, assemblies have decided to continue the
strike. In most places, this has also meant a decision to
keep taking the steps necessary to ensure its successful
continuation, by preventing the minority of dissenting
students from breaking it. Drawing on his experience at
McGill University, strike veteran Jamie Burnett has some
useful advice for the many student activists now
considering how best to extend the campaign to other parts
of Canada: don't indulge in 'soft pickets' that allow
classes to take place in spite of a strike mandate, and
that thus allow staff to isolate and fail striking
students. "Enforcing strikes is difficult to do, at least
at first," he says, "but it's a lot less difficult than
failing a semester. And people eventually come around,
building a culture of solidarity and confrontational
politics in the process."

The main result of this process so far has been one of
far-reaching collective empowerment. Resolved from the
beginning to win over rather than follow the more
sceptical sectors of the media and 'public opinion,' the
students have made themselves more powerful than their
opponents. "[We] have learned collectively," CLASSE
spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said last week, "that
if we mobilize and try to block something, it's possible
to do it." From rallies and class boycotts, in April the
strike expanded to include more confrontational
demonstrations and disruptive nightly marches through the
centre of town. Soon afterwards, solidarity protests by
groups like Meres en colere et solidaires started up in
working-class districts of Montreal.

In a desperate effort to regain the initiative by
representing the conflict as a criminal rather than
political issue, the panicked provincial government rushed
through its draconian Bill 78 to restrict the marches,
discourage strike enforcement and consolidate its
credentials (in advance of imminent elections) as a
law-and-order administration. In the resulting escalation,
however, it's the government that has been forced to
blink. On 23 May, the day after an historic 300,000 people
marched through Montreal in support of the students,
police kettled and then arrested more than 700 people - a
jaw-dropping number by historical standards. But the
mobilization has become too strong to contain, and after
near-universal condemnation of the new law it is already
unenforceable. Since 22 May, pro-student demonstrations
have multiplied in ways and numbers the police can't
control, and drawing on Latin-American (and older
charivari) traditions, pot-clanging marches have
mushroomed throughout the province of Quebec. On Thursday
night tense negotiations with the government again broke
off without resolution, and business and tourist sectors
are already alarmed by the prospect of a new wave of
street protests continuing into Montreal's popular summer
festival season.

There is now a very real chance that similar mobilizations
may spread further afield. Recent polls suggest that most
students across Canada would support a strike against
tuition increases, and momentum for more forceful action
may be building in Ottawa and across Ontario; in Quebec
itself they also show that an initially hesitant public is
beginning to swing behind the student demands and against
government repression. On 30 May, at the ritual hour of
8pm, there were scores of solidarity rallies all over
Canada and the world. In London around 150 casserolistas
clanged their way from Canada House to the Canadian
embassy at Grosvenor Square.

If enough of us are willing to learn a few things from our
friends in places like Quebec and Chile, then in the
coming years such numbers may change beyond all
recognition. After much hesitation the NUS recently
resolved that education should be "free at all and any
level," and activists are gearing up for a massive TUC
demonstration on 20 October. After a couple of memorable
springs, it's time to prepare for a momentous autumn. *

Peter Hallward teaches at the centre for research in
modern European philosophy at Kingston University London,
and is a member of the Education Activist Network. His
book on The Will of the People is forthcoming from Verso
in 2012. He is the author of the 2008 Damming the Flood:
Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment [book
launch LeftStreamed].

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