Fehr Marouf

It took repression, riot police, hundreds of arrests, the threat of expulsions for students, and threats of firings for teachers who supported the strike; but the student movement in Québec has been defeated in the short term. Anglophone students are passing a quieter semester this year, without much knowledge of the evolution of the student movement in the province. Many Francophone students have also seen the frantic pace of mobilizations and strike votes subside, as l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ) has officially ended its campaign for an unlimited general strike for free, quality, accessible post-secondary education.

The Québec student strike of 2007/2008 is dead at birth. The final strikes at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and other universities were focused on the specific demand of reinvestment in the indebted post-secondary institutions. The energetic efforts of student union leaders from campuses all across Québec, all the way up to ASSÉ executives, failed to produce a strong movement capable of challenging the government’s attacks and defending the unions facing crackdowns.

Most important of all is the failure to generalize the struggle at UQÀM, l’Université de Montréal (UdeM) and and l’Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) into a mass movement. After all, we were told by dozens of congress resolutions and general assembly mandates that an unlimited general strike for free, quality, accessible education was on its way, before the struggles at UQÀM had commenced. That side of the movement seems to have been limited to paper. It leaves students asking: What happened to free education?

As Marxists, it is our duty to look back at the balance sheet of the strike movement in order to learn from the experiences and to draw conclusions for the future.

UQÁM

Jean Charest’s provincial government has so far gotten away with raising university tuitions, without triggering a successful generalized student strike movement. Some of the factors which allowed this include objective divisions in the student movement between radical and opportunist wings, as well as the isolation of the student movement from the labour movement. There were also missteps on the part of organizers in the push toward a general student strike in Québec.

In spite of all this, the heroic student strike at UQÀM inspired similar strikes at UdeM, and UQO. This forced administrators and the state to bring the hammer down on student militancy. The response of the government and administration means that all students on strike at UQÀM faced failure of their courses, a fine of $50,000 and up to one year in prison if they continued their protests. The same government that made it a crime for 500,000 public sector workers to strike, now wishes to make it a crime for students to walk out of classes in protest.

UQÀM is a part of a province-wide Université du Québec network of 9 fully public universities. The Université du Québec network was established in the heyday of the student movement in 1968, at the tail end of the golden age of capitalism. The post-war boom, a period of capitalist expansion, allowed for progressive reforms - crumbs thrown down from the capitalists’ table - to pacify the working classes of the western world. These concessions were given only after mass movements threatened a much more menacing possibility than accessible education, free healthcare and social services: their trajectory was toward a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. In 1968, that danger was strikingly proven by France’s heroic working-class revolutionary movement and the student revolt which announced it. The 1972 Common Front general strike in Québec was a burning example closer to home, with workers occupying their factories across the province and even taking over radio stations. But in the 70’s, capitalism’s era of continuous expansion came to a close. Since then, the golden age of reforms has given way to naked profiteering. The bourgeoisie is waging war on all fronts to reclaim the profits conceded to the working class through the welfare state.

Enter UQÀM. The state-led attacks on this holdover from Québec’s “golden age” are symbolic of the period Québec is now passing through. Over the past decades, one bourgeois government after another has slashed the education budget, both at the federal and provincial levels. The preferred solution of administrations across Québec, passing the bill on to students, is tricky. The student unions have consistently fought – and won – against rising tuitions over the past 15 years.

Tuitions have been officially frozen until recently, though by ministerial order and not by law. This has forced administrators into imposing extra fees, with the conspiratorial silence of the government. Such invented fees as “file opening fees” and “administrative fees” have led to a gradual erosion of accessible education in the province.

Officially, tuitions were frozen at $1,600 a semester since a successful student strike a decade ago. With the addition of these “ancillary fees”, the cost rises to $2,500 a semester. Though administrators prefer not to consider these fees as a part of tuitions, working students can see costs have skyrocketed.

The other method of raising money that most administrations have turned to is corporate sponsorship. Nothing says “we’re desperate” more than Concordia University’s prestigious “John Molson School of Business”, a shiny new business faculty building named after the mediocre Molson brand of beer. As for the UQÀM administration, it gambled students’ money on property development schemes.

Needless to say, that hasn’t worked out too well.

Now, the government has announced an increase in tuitions across the province of $50 every semester for the next five years, for a total increase of $500. Since the freeze itself was never a law, this is merely a signal that administrations can now increase fees as they see fit, with some universities already instituting immediate increases of hundreds of dollars. The government, kindhearted as it is to the plight of working students, declares its determination to put an end to the increases in ancillary fees, now that universities don’t need a loophole.

All of this does not even begin to address the debts of the universities here. As a result of the adventures of UQÀM’s former chair, it has $565 million worth of debt and a yearly deficit of $43 million. UQÀM has a new chair, Claude Corbo, and a “seven-year plan” to save itself.

The new rector called in the university-building experts at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a Wall Street investment firm, to draw up the plan. What advice did he buy? As usual, they screw up, and we pay: 77 professors are to lose their jobs, salaries and wages are to be frozen, and tuitions are to be hiked above and beyond the $50-a-semester increases the other universities are already implementing. Last semester, tuitions at UQÀM were hiked by $200.

As a result, things were heating up. Four of the university’s seven student unions were on strike, some since the beginning of the semester. Several student union leaders have been suspended for admitting their role in organizing the strike. With only 5 weeks left to the semester, the university attempted to pass a resolution through the board calling for repressive measures against students and teachers who participate in the strike by missing classes or refusing to cross picket lines. The students disrupted the meeting, and this ended in an emergency court ruling that bans students from demonstrating or generally disturbing the university, within 100 meters of the property.

The administration, on the orders of the government, was determined to break the student unions.

Support for the striking students poured in from workers’ unions and students’ unions from across the province. Unfortunately, this support was limited to press releases, as the student movement outside of the universities involved had actually mostly subsided.

Red Unions

ASSÉ, as we have pointed out in previous articles, is the left-wing provincial student union in Québec. It represents more than 40,000 students in colleges and universities across the province. The larger student unions, Fédération Étudiante Collégiale du Québec (FÉCQ) and Fédération Étudiante Universitaire du Québec (FÉUQ) (from here on in referred to collectively as FÉCQ/FÉUQ), have 40,000 and 145,000 members respectively. There is a bureaucratic inertia about them that leads the ultra-lefts to the conclusion that “red unions” (or more appropriately in Québec, “red and black unions”) can be an alternative for a combative student movement.

This is patently false.

ASSÉ played a leading role in the strike in 2005, but by separating itself from the FÉCQ/FÉUQ rank and file, ASSÉ has alienated itself from the majority of students in Québec. Worse still, it has endangered the future of the Québec student movement, which is now far more divided and paralyzed than it was in 2005.

At that time, ASSÉ was willing to form a coalition with FÉCQ/FÉUQ in the interests of building a large-scale movement. Since FÉCQ/FÉUQ agreed to negotiate with the government without ASSÉ, many involved in ASSÉ have held a bitter grudge. Though understandable – and not unjustifiable considering the shameful tactics of the reformist federations – this attitude is corroding the power of the student movement. Today, ASSÉ is officially banned from negotiating common protests with FÉCQ/FÉUQ by a resolution passed haphazardly at an ASSÉ congress several months ago. This resolution quickly gained the excited support of the majority of the delegates, though many broke ASSÉ rules by casting their vote without a mandate from a general assembly of the students they represent.

ASSÉ Congresses, talking shops not fit for a strike

Throughout the strike campaign, the attitude that reigned was negotiating the language of every resolution, splitting congresses into gender caucuses to complain about local personality problems, and similarly meaningless diversions.

Most important of all was the determination to “destroy the federations,” the opposing provincial-level unions of FÉCQ and FÉUQ. So long as everyone agreed on that, all differences during the congresses became secondary, and the actual work of leading a struggle faded into the background. The congresses sometimes felt like they were talking-shops, with resolutions being passed that very rarely were carried out. The union itself, in retrospect, seemed less of a union and more of a gathering of union executives - out of touch with each other and their students.

As time passed, it became more and more clear that there was no unified campaign, but dozens of different campaigns by disjointed unions on different campuses, with some campuses splintered into 5 or 7 different faculty unions all with their own campaign. The fear of a centralized structure was taken to its ultimate conclusion, the dictatorship of completely irrelevant individuals. Any attempt to organize the work was shattered on the worship of spontaneity that dominated the structures, the meetings, and the leaderships. In their fear of empowering a provincial bureaucracy that would sell out the movement as the FÉCQ/FÉUQ bureaucrats are notoriously known for, ASSÉ activists instead empowered local bureaucrats to destroy the strike by stamping their own particular shortcomings and misgivings on the work. There was even a new set of executives at the provincial level every semester, as though continuity was anathema.

Even the demands were not sacrosanct. ASSÉ’s strike for free, quality accessible education first became a strike for a freeze of tuitions at current levels in the perspective of free education, and then a strike simply for reinvestment in the university system, all by “fait accompli” at the local level. Different student unions printed their own mobilization materials, with their own particular demands in mind, in the hope that “reasonable” demands would find more of an echo. By the time this was reflected by any decision at congress, the strike was already dead.

The local leaders tended to be anarchist, and concerned with the moral arguments for free education. Education is a right, and so it should be free, this was the logic displayed in the pamphlets. Where working students were mentioned, it was in passing statistics. Often, it was the working students who were most hostile to the strike, with slogans against “hippies in the student union”. The leaders failed to win their students over, with an ultraleft attitude and disorganized mobilizations alienating important layers. Instead of questioning their orientation, revising their tactics and redoubling their efforts, leaders watered the demands down, which further alienated students.

Most student workers work in un-unionized jobs for minimum wage, which buys less than it did 30 years ago when we account for inflation. The cost of living is rising, working students are expected to commit ungodly hours, and now their tuitions are going up. In such a period, many students are receptive to a message about free, quality, and accessible education through a massive government reinvestment. The failure of student leaderships to connect with this mood is a tragedy that many paid for at their general assemblies on the strike. For many, it was not a strike to defend working students and their standards of living.

The whole time, the main slogan remained the confused one of an “unlimited general strike.” The cart was put before the horse and the work proceeded in a backward manner. The demand seemed to be to strike at all costs, for as long as possible, and never give in until we win. The actual gains of the strike, the reasons to strike, the realistic appraisal of how to win, all seemed secondary.

Unlimited general strike, limited foresight

As heroic as the sentiment was, it was a copycat strike movement. The militants at ASSÉ were so enthralled with the successes that the left had achieved by leading the strike movement in 2005, they forgot a whole set of less “heroic” circumstances and believed they could lead it better. Ignoring that the role of ASSÉ in 2005 was to embarrass FÉCQ and FÉUQ into joining the strike, guaranteeing its general character, they decided to have nothing to do with them. Ignoring the minor battles that are needed to lead up to an unlimited strike, they organized one strike day and a few minor protests throughout the 2007 campaign before realizing they had no momentum for the planned “launch-date” of the unlimited strike. Then they decided to have three strike days, which were relatively successful as we reported.

At Dawson College, Common Front, named after the 1972 general strike, called on students to flood their student union’s general assembly and pass a motion supporting the student movement for free education. General assemblies at Dawson are usually poorly attended, rarely surpassing the 150 students needed. Students at Dawson College shocked the union bureaucrats, with 100 students present an hour before the doors opened, and 700 by the time the strike vote was taken. They loudly and almost unanimously took a mandate to strike for the full three days, the only Anglophone institution to join. Similar attempts were made at Concordia University and McGill University, where Common Front was not much of a force yet. Unfortunately, the minimum attendance needed for the general assemblies at these schools was not reached.

At its height, the 3-day strike claimed the participation of 65,000 students, and a huge potential existed for breaking the isolation of activists at Anglophone colleges and universities. Sadly, no ASSÉ protest march ever came to the doors of Dawson College, despite repressive measures and police action which broke the picket lines. As a result of intimidation of teachers and students by the administration, half the classes continued at Dawson throughout the strike. Many Dawson students still identify the strike with Common Front, and ask whether the government has responded to their demands. The failure to show striking Anglophone students the energy of Québec’s student movement is another missed opportunity for ASSÉ.

This was symptomatic of the kind of costly organizational paralysis ASSÉ experienced. While twice the number of delegates were present at congresses as in 2005, many were fresh, without any of the experience that leaders in 2005 had.

Rather than building their mandates for an unlimited general strike as a consequence of the movement, they spent the entire time debating how many unions with mandates ASSÉ would require to declare an unlimited general strike movement. So instead of striking, unions which had the mandate awaited the magic number of unions prepared to join them. That never happened, of course, as the movement lost steam waiting for the mandate to appear.

Movements are not built by mandates, even if they come from the radical union democracy of a general assembly. Democratic forms are a framework through which a movement can sometimes express itself. Without a movement, constitutional cretinism destroyed the general strike. Instead of playing for mandates, the leaders should have worked hard to convince students and organized protests to build the movement.

The unlimited general strike is one tactic, not an end in itself. It is the culmination of smaller struggles. It will need to be built by a unified student movement, focused and organized, which stands by its principles. Most of all, it will have to be a movement which has outgrown the current worship of form over content.

By comparison, UQÀM was ablaze with struggle, but it was the result of a colossal effort, and the enormous threat the students and teachers face. It was this threat that was forgotten in ASSÉ’s congresses it seems, as thumbs were twiddled in waiting while the mandates never came.

Save UQÀM!

Today, the movement at UQÀM has shown how to build an unlimited strike through partial strikes and a build-up of pressure tactics. The militants there showed a better sense of how to win their students over, but were faced with the ultimate test. Alone, they were going to be defeated, even if they had been on unlimited strike for an extended period.

The government and the administration gambled that the strike movement elsewhere was out of steam and incapable of coming to the aid of their fellow students. The student unions at UQÀM desperately needed to prove them wrong. The activists at ASSÉ had to put aside the grudge, and organize solidarity protests with FÉCQ and FÉUQ, if they wanted to win this battle. This didn’t happen.

More importantly, by threatening teachers who refused to cross picket lines, the administrators and the government were gambling that the student unions had alienated full-time and part-time teachers - much as local leaders at other schools alienated many working students. The solidarity of the teachers’ and support staff unions at UQÀM will be essential in the ongoing struggles. If striking students at UQÀM build links with their teachers and support staff to save the university, they could lay roots that will help overcome the divisions of the student movement, and the isolation from labour that cripples it.

Even if the government has forced a temporary end to the strike, the movement will rise again, and the links built and the conclusions drawn will make it that much stronger. During the strike, support came from the major workers’ federations: Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN), Fédération des Travailleurs du Québec (FTQ) and the Centrale des Syndicats du Québec (CSQ). Even FÉCQ and FÉUQ signed on with their support. This will be a historic battle, which can be won, even if students have been pushed back to classes this semester. The government and UQÀM’s administration are on the offensive in the hopes of wiping away the last traces of the massive movements of the 60’s and 70’s. But by attacking both students and workers at UQÀM, they may end up resurrecting those movements instead.

Concordia University, sleeping giant

On the other side of Montréal is an element of the movement that is only just beginning to develop: the Anglophone student movement. It has been years since Anglophone students were last considered to be “part of the movement”, not since the Concordia Student Union (CSU) elections in 2003 propelled right-wing leaders – supported by the university administration – to power. Dawson students have shown that things can and will change at these schools.

What is forgotten now is that Concordia University, which is home to 30,000 students, was once the nest of constant and energetic activity. The student union, with its $1.5 million budget, was in the hands of anarchists and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) activists. It was in the national spotlight on a monthly basis, and during the final weeks of the radical left there, a daily basis. It was often the hub for protests of tens of thousands, called by organizations on campus. During the FTAA protests in Québec City – historic events – the CSU actually spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and rented hundreds of buses for activists across the city to travel to Québec for free.

Concordia was very important in building much of the “anti-globalization” movement in Montréal, with organizations such as the Anti-Capitalist Contingent (CLAC) being heavily active on campus.

Their role in ASSÉ was no less central. They joined shortly after its founding, and, being the largest member union, accounted for half of its budget. To this day, no larger union has ever joined ASSÉ. Historically, Francophone unions have been shattered into faculty unions, sometimes as a result of anarchist tactics, sometimes as a result of collusion between administrators and right-wing union bureaucrats. This is not the case with the CSU, or any other Anglophone student union for that matter.

Such a large movement by nature is vibrant, and filled with lessons for today’s student movement. There was much in the attitude of the anarchists which can explain the lack of a base amongst working students, and the same kinds of moralistic campaigns that they conducted can be found in the attitude of some of today’s leaders towards the strike movement. The SPHR activists, however, were very well organized, with a determined core that were not to be trifled with. They built larger and larger protests and gained a national media presence with branches on campuses across North America, within 3 years. Their successes guaranteed their failure. As their media presence grew, they began to receive death threats and visits from security agents.

More dangerous than the security agencies for them, however, was the media frenzy that began around them, which fed and was amplified by the increasingly vicious race-baiting on campus. While they survived this toxic brew for years, the fragile combination of moralistic anarchists and Palestinian solidarity activists was not a lasting leadership for the 30,000 students at Concordia. The work of SPHR was an intensely divisive force, and not along class lines. For many readers, it would be difficult to imagine an atmosphere of almost daily incidents with racial slurs and racially motivated fights in a Canadian university. Worse were the vulgar, fringe campus papers and the racism of administrators.

While many SPHR activists were honest and well-meaning, and the organization rejected the PLO as well as terrorism, their focus on informing people in the west as the only solution meant a vision of divided peoples that needed outside intervention. All that was left was to decide who was more legitimate: Israel, or Palestine. With no role for solidarity with the Israeli working class in this formula, a competition built up on campus between them and the Jewish students’ association, Hillel, to establish whose people deserved the territory more, who was more hurt by bombings, who was there first. In short, hatred built for years. Solutions took second place.

September, 2001 changed everything for many people. Now the hatred reached a fever pitch and the CSU and the SPHR tried desperately not to be swallowed up by statements in the mainstream media that Concordia was a training ground for Bin Laden.

The boiling tensions engulfed all finally when former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to speak on campus in 2003, and thousands of students came to stop him. Riot police attacked and provoked the crowd, then fired tear gas inside the university when windows were smashed by the crowd outside. Needless to say the Prime Minister never appeared. Doctored security tapes were presented to the courts by the administration to ensure a speedy conviction of a union executive and some activists. Some full tapes, showing the unprovoked attacks of the police, and the defence of the crowd, inconveniently made their way to the judge. He threw the case out.

The damage was done however, students wanted a return to order on their campus, and the CSU’s half-hearted public defence of SPHR sealed their fate.

The right wing’s slate name when they won? “Evolution, Not Revolution”.

Once the right wing took control, they wasted no time in clearing out obstacles to entrenching themselves. They looked the other way as the administration raised tuitions for international students by thousands of dollars, something which would have never passed without protests and mass mobilizations in previous years. They even voted for tuition increases on occasion. Some of this was a reflection of their “free market” ideological stripes, some of it was a shade more sinister - a tinge of social engineering to “clear the rabble out.” Foreign rabble that had caused so much trouble for years.

Now it’s been 5 years, and the CSU’s budget has been increased to 1.8 million dollars. Scandals abound, and opposition election posters that state “make your representatives work for their pay” are deemed “libel” and torn down as they “could be interpreted to mean the current representatives aren’t working for their pay”!

For a united student movement
For unity with labour unions

A school as large as Concordia University, in its history and its political development, can echo many of the lessons that must be drawn for the wider student movement.

One tendency of the “left” in recent years at Concordia has been to run to the middle, to show students how similar they truly are to the right. No one should be surprised that students have consistently told them they are not interested. This is the opportunism that must be swept aside for the sake of building a movement that can win. We must not be afraid of an uphill battle to convince the mass of the student population of our ideas.

Another tendency is a carbon copy of the mistakes and shortcomings of ASSÉ leadership, with all its “autonomist” faults. It is a tendency that opposes the vision of a unified movement organized as one, across campuses and languages. It divides along campuses for “special circumstances and different conditions” and then further divides campuses along faculties because “Art students would never work with other students,” It calls for the creation of faculty unions as an alternative to the “monolithic” campus unions, in an emulation of the weaker features of the francophone movement. It works for disaffiliation from FÉCQ/FÉCQ and from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) as “right wing” federations. Even more damaging are their arguments that education is a provincial issue and the student movement in Québec is unique: therefore, there is no need for the CFS.

Honest activists in this way end up advocating the destruction of any fighting power students can gather up in their organizations, their unions and their federations. Precisely because of their seemingly monolithic nature, these organizations, when they do undergo change, will not do so in half-measures. They will be turned completely on their heads, shaken of all the careerists, and taken in a firm direction leftwards. They will enter onto the road of student strikes and general strikes, linking up with student unions across Québec, as well as teachers’ unions and workers’ unions.

When Concordia students move, this university can play the role of a bridge between Francophones and Anglophones, FÉCQ/FÉCQ, CFS and ASSÉ, and a gateway for the movement to the rest of Canada. In the future, Concordia could be as central to this movement as it was to the FTAA protests of 2001. It could reunite the disparate student unions in Québec into one democratic, fighting Québec Student Union. A unified movement would be a force to be reckoned with, and the students reawakened by the struggle would ensure it remains a democratic instrument of the students, and not a rats’ nest of careerists. This is the only guarantee against bureaucracy, not the weakening of our movement by splintering and shattering our student unions. We need as large and organized a student union as possible, but only by awakening students to revolutionary ideas can we sharpen this weapon of the movement.

This is the long term goal Common Front will need to set for itself if it is to build on the previous successes at Dawson, and the IMT in Montréal will help to build this.

Ultimately, this is a student movement that cannot simply remain at the provincial level; free education is a movement that must extend across the country. The federal government has the resources to establish free education in every province and territory.

At the University of Toronto (UofT), there has been a serious movement against tuition increases for the past few months. A peaceful sit-in organized by the students was violently attacked by campus security, with several activists injured. In response, students organized a protest of about 100 against the fee increases as well as the repression of activists on campus. Several students have been threatened with expulsions and a few of the victims of security violence are being threatened with criminal charges. This shows that the attitude that this movement is “unique” to Québec is absolutely incorrect. This movement must unite students across Canada if it is to win. The students at the UofT have links with students at Concordia, through the CFS. By gathering around Common Front, students in both provinces can build a left-wing within this federation.

The CFS represents over 500,000 students across Canada, representing about 50,000 in Québec, but has done nothing to support striking students at UQÀM, across Québec, or at the UofT. Left-wing students, in Québec and across Canada must hold their leaders in CFS to account, and demand that they show solidarity with students under attack. This union is our union, and we must take it back to win.

Finally, the major workers’ unions have neglected working students, and it is our student unions first and foremost that should fill this void. This is something that even “red and black” unions such as ASSÉ have failed to address. They have the resources to become unions for students on campus and on the job, and no one else will defend us. So long as our representatives are rich, Blackberry-toting, future businessmen, this is out of the question.

The bosses are making enormous profits off our work, on minimum wage and precarious conditions. They’ve tended to increase the amount of work they expect of us, and any increases we’ve seen in our pay have been swallowed up by rising prices. Now, their own greed has led to a situation were no one can afford to spend as much as they used to, credit card bills are bloated. Guess who’s going to pay for this mess? Hint: it’s not the bosses who got us into it.

Now more than ever, we need representatives who will fight for us.

Revolutionary students across Canada will need to unite, winning working students over to their ideas, flooding the rats out of our unions and taking them to the battle against unchecked bosses and rising tuitions. For free, quality, accessible education, for a $10/h minimum wage, for quality daycares for student parents, for the right to strike: one student movement, coast to coast, democratic and united in struggle!

Together, we will win.