Campus Fightbacks in the Age of Austerity: Learning from Quebec Students

2013-02-16 · first published in marxsite · 200 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

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By Xavier Lafrance and Alan Sears ( New Socialist webzine ) The 2012 Quebec student strikes delivered one of the few victories we have seen in anti-austerity struggles in the Canadian state. The mobilization, which at its high point saw over 300 000 students on limited or unlimited strike, and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, was a crucial highpoint that has a great deal to teach radicals. The attempted clampdown by the Charest government through Bill 78 that attempted to outlaw the movement, unleashed a new and innovative round of resistance including the casseroles night marches. The newly elected Parti Quebecois (PQ) government of Premier Pauline Marois immediately cancelled the 75% tuition hike implemented by the previous Charest government and rescinded the oppressive "back to work" legislation in Bill 78. This is a real victory, though the struggle in Quebec must continue. The PQ government has already made cuts to university budgets and is committed to smaller incremental tuition increases, indexing tuition to cost of living increases. Further, the PQ is organizing a series of roundtable discussions on the future of post-secondary education with a very clear agenda for technocratic restructuring that impedes rather than increases democracy, access and quality.