02) "REACH OUT AND BUILD THE MOVEMENT"

During July, three Quebec student activists toured southern Ontario, speaking at public forums about the historic student mobilizations in Quebec. We reprint here excerpts of the comments at these forums by one of the speakers, Marianne Breton Fontaine.

     We cannot see the Quebec student strike in a glass jar or, as we say in French dans une boulle de verre.

     But if you just look at the corporate media, you could think that we are a bunch of spoiled students who do not want to pay even $1600 for our education ‑ despite the fact that Quebec students pay less than in the rest of the country.

     The front‑page headline from McLeans magazine on June 4th presents that wrong understanding of the student strike very well: "How a group of entitled students went to war and shut down a province, over $325."

     The truth is that the student strike has arisen in a very inflamed social and political moment. We are at the crossroads of many struggles right now across Canada. Consider the Harper Conservative Budget, the Omnibus Bill C‑38. All these attacks together are what is being called austerity.

     We are told there is an economic crisis and we cannot afford social programmes that the people won, after struggle, in the past. We are told the state does not have any more money.

     This is exactly the message of the Quebec Bachand Budget, named after the finance minister who himself called it a radical change. And it is also what people are hearing in Greece, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere.

     But the economic crisis was not created by social programmes, or by the people.

     To note one statistic, from the Montreal‑based IRIS research group, in the last 40 years, Quebec corporations doubled their profits but paid four times less taxes.

     Deeper than that there is a systemic problem. We need to openly state that this is an economic crisis of the capitalist system. We need to find an alternative!

     The struggle of students is not just a question of having accessible education. 

     A few months ago, I interviewed Camilo Balesteros from the CONFECH, the Students Federation of Chile, where 300,000 gathered in the streets of Santiago, fighting directly for free education, and against one of the worst funded education systems in the world ‑ even high school is not free.

     Camilo explained that their struggle could not be reduced to the demand of free education. It could not finish there, and just let the government determine how to make free education happen.

     So they struggled to change the Constitution to put the right of education into that document. They also called for nationalization of natural resources, to have the wealth to pay for free education.

     The Chilean students said the means that are needed to achieve accessible education are also the means to achieve the demands of other popular struggles.

     Consequently, the student struggle is directly confronting the austerity measures and the social vision that austerity represents!

     Internationally, young people have shown great courage and risen up, redoubling efforts to set aside their differences and fight together for a better world, often in more difficult situations than ours.

     The rapid increase in involvement by the people en masse in politics ‑ beyond elections every few years ‑ has scared the ruling class.

     Take this statement from the president of the Employers Association in Quebec: "Eventual elections will provide citizens with the opportunity to have their say in regard to the current debate and to decide the responsibilities of everyone involved. That is how democratic societies solve their conflicts and make their decisions ‑ at the polls instead of in the streets."

     Stop mobilizing and just wait for the next election. This statement is completely anti‑democratic!

     In fact, in order to make gains, including at the polls, we have to go to the streets.

     The anti‑democratic Bill 78 was put together to discourage any kind of mobilisation, whatever it is the students, or other organised groups like labour that would like to protest in solidarity.

     Bill 78 shows the fear of big business and the reactionary political parties, faced with a population defending its own social interests, because our struggle has opened the question of social transformation. So the student strike is also a fight for democracy.

     To stop this amazing mobilisation, the Charest Liberals have tried to ignore the situation, hoping the movement will fall apart; to intimidate, through legal injunctions, police violence and repression, and now Bill 78; and to divide the student movement.

     To their credit, the two other student Federations have refused to negotiate without the CLASSE.

     The Charest Liberal government, and its allies, have also tried to win the battle of ideas and convince the students and the rest of the population, by saying that a diploma is a personal investment. According to this neo‑liberal logic, by paying more, the students simply invest in themselves. In other words, a student becomes a product, and education becomes a commodity, a privilege.

     Instead of social solidarity, we have the atomisation of society.

     Can knowledge be a commodity? Knowledge is perhaps the only thing ‑ together with love ‑ that grows when it is shared. The social tool for transmission of knowledge cannot be reduced to an individual investment.

     In fact, there are two ways of viewing education. The corporations need a functional worker with a certain amount of training. The people want education as a right.

     Our public education system has developed out of this contradiction. Some people say education is good for the economy. I would ask: whose economy?

     Let me illustrate this point with some examples.

     In 1966 the Parent Report fundamentally changed education in Quebec. For over a century the Québéquoise people had been second-class citizens in their own land. We had higher unemployment, we lived in poorer conditions, we had poorer quality health care and higher rates of disease than the rest of Canada.

     The majority of Quebecers did not know how to read or write. Except for some programmes in law and theology, we could not learn in French. Education was dominated by the Church, women were not allowed in the vast majority of colleges, and there were few science and technical programmes.

     But as the economy developed, people began to demand a better life. The Quiet Revolution exploded in Quebec society. At the core was the question of being "masters of our own house" and French-language education.

     An official commission was established and the resulting "Parent Report" secularized education and created the CEGEP system, which is distinct from the rest of Canada, merging college with the last years of high school.

     The Parent Report expressed diverging class interests at the same time. Business needed a more highly trained workforce. The people needed to get out of the Dark Ages maintained by the ultra‑right Duplessis government of the 1930s and 40s.

     The Parent report proposed free education as an ultimate goal, to be achieved by freezing tuition fees and reducing them when possible. The idea was to have the most accessible education system.

     Quebec is today totally different. And our education system played a big role in our emancipation.

     Free education would require less than 1% of Quebec's budget and could be obtained by restoring the capital gains tax. But the corporations do not want to pay the bill for education.

     You can see this also with the report that just came out from the McGuinty Liberal government, proposing three‑year degrees.

     Are students over‑educated? Maybe even with "unnecessary" degrees like philosophy or women`s studies? Or do they have sufficient training to be employees ‑ and the employers, through taxes, will not pay for more?

     I am reminded of another extreme example.

     About a year and a half ago, I attended a conference in South Africa and met with leaders of the National Union of South African Students, which was an illegal organization under the apartheid system.

     They told us that quality education was forbidden to the majority black population, and particularly for women. For them, access to education could not be separated from their struggle for emancipation. Education is freedom.

     I personally think we have a lot to learn from the students of Cuba, who have won free education. There is an alternative direction, even for poor countries.

     Millions of people in Canada share our sentiment that education is a social good, it should be accessible, and it should be a right. A survey by the Canadian Federation of Students showed that 83% of Canadians are for a freeze, and 37% for a reduction of fees.

     Your support and your red squares are very important for us. We will continue to need your support ‑ and your fightback.

     Two lessons from the Quebec struggle might be important for you.

     In Quebec the students have learnt a hard lesson in the power of unity. Over the past forty years, students have collectively marched out classes eight times in a general strike. While not all students hit the streets, so many acted together that, despite fear mongering by university administrations, they were not academically penalized. All but one mobilization forced the government to back down.

     But the one mobilization that did fail, in 1988, fractured the movement, killing the l'Association nationale des Etudiantes et des Etudiants du Québec (ANEEQ).

     The lines of communication between the Quebec student movement and the Canadian student movement were also broken, a unity based on equality and the recognition that the Quebec people were a nation, not just residents of another province, but that we had a common struggle.

     We are rebuilding that solidarity now, twenty years later, and this tour is one step.

     Unity does not mean to adopt the lowest position to reach consensus, but to recognize our real opponents, to politically convince our potential allies, going beyond the campus. It means getting out of an economic discourse with demands that only speak to individual students.

     By addressing the question of how to achieve free education, or even the freeze, we can reach out to other people's demands and struggles, and grow the movement.

     Even where the student leadership is reactionary, like the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, students on campuses can move into action if they can connect with the mobilization.

     Perhaps the biggest lesson of Quebec is to have a plan of escalating action. The strike is the most powerful moral weapon the students have. But to get there, one day of action should be followed by another, then by an occupation, and a week of local action, a one day strike, etc.

     It is militancy that won our current level of accessibility, not charity from the government. Victory through struggle is possible.

     The Quebec Student Strike is not over $325, or $1600. It is not about numbers.

     It is about what kind of future we have. Ignorance, debt and more poverty? Or a bold, different direction that says education is a social right?

(The above article is from the August 1-31, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)