Mass Arrests in Montreal

Defend Quebec Student Protesters!

(Young Spartacus pages)

In the early hours of November 14, riot police brutally assaulted and arrested more than 100 students at Cégep du Vieux-Montréal for staging a peaceful bed-in against the Quebec government’s plans to raise tuition fees. This followed police attacks and arrests of students at nearby Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) two days before. The cops used batons and pepper spray, injuring at least 20 students. While the protesters were released, many face serious charges including assault and battery and armed assault on police. Drop all charges now!

The sit-ins and protests were part of a three-day student strike at campuses around the province. In the midst of last spring’s elections, marked by the racist anti-immigrant backlash over “reasonable accommodation,” Liberal premier Jean Charest also announced an end to Quebec’s fourteen-year freeze on tuition, which is by far the lowest in Canada. Student unions, centrally the more militant Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), have been organizing protests and strikes against this, possibly leading to an all-out strike in 2008. In 2005, a month-long student strike forced the Liberal regime to drop an attempt to severely cut student grants. This time, Charest & Co. unleashed state repression early on in an attempt to beat protesters into line. These attacks illustrate once more that the cops are the armed fist of the bourgeois state, arrayed against the working class and all those who would challenge the capitalist status quo.

While student protests have won support from college teachers and other union members, the Quebec capitalist media has run a frenzied campaign against “privileged” student “casseurs” (hooligans). The two opposition parties in the National Assembly, the right-wing Action Démocratique du Québec and the supposedly “friend of labour” Parti Québécois, have backed the government’s stance, just as they have fanned the flames of the current hysteria against Muslim immigrants and minorities.

In a context where the bosses and politicos are beating the drums for “reengineering” Quebec society—i.e., smashing the unions and gutting social services—racist “divide-and-rule” schemes and attacks on social programs go hand-in-hand. Students could provide a spark for the broader social struggle necessary to beat back these attacks. What’s needed is to ally with the organized working class, which must be mobilized independently of the PQ and all other capitalist parties. Due to its central position in social production—in the factories, transport and service industries—the working class uniquely has the power to strike real blows against the bourgeoisie’s profit system, and to give a lead to all the many victims of the racist capitalist system.

Typically, the English Canadian bourgeois media has been almost totally silent on the repression of students in Quebec. While hypocritically tut-tutting the Québécois over the outpouring of racist scapegoating coming out of the current Bouchard-Taylor commission hearings on “reasonable accommodation,” they are fully behind Charest’s move to “clean up” Quebec’s public finances through attacks on the unions and on social programs like accessible postsecondary education.

The Quebec Cégep system (short for Colleges of General and Vocational Education) arose out of the modernizing reforms of the 1960s known as the “Quiet Revolution.” This was fueled in large part by militant labour class battles against national oppression, the stifling hold of the Catholic church—not least on the education system—and the grinding exploitation of Québécois workers at the hands of what was then an overwhelmingly anglophone ruling class.

The expansion and secularization of education was part of a drive by a modernizing francophone elite to cohere a distinct Québécois bourgeoisie and professional/technocratic stratum. At the same time, the creation of the Cégeps served to somewhat undercut the division between mental and manual labour, one of the bedrocks of class-divided capitalist society, where manual labour is degraded as cheap and unworthy. While this division cannot be fundamentally overcome short of socialist revolution, the Cégeps—which nominally have no tuition fees—have nonetheless enabled working-class youth in technical programs to rub shoulders, including in struggle, with university-bound petty-bourgeois students, often to the benefit of both. Cégep du Vieux-Montréal, for example, is known both for its humanities programs and for the teaching of trades such as mechanics. Tellingly, the current capitalist onslaught to roll back many gains from the Quiet Revolution has included schemes to disband the Cégep system.

Quebec’s tuition fees have remained unchanged since 1994. In 1996, Lucien Bouchard’s PQ regime made moves to raise them, but backed off in the face of a widely-supported student strike, leading to the still-current tuition freeze. After the defeat of the 1995 referendum on sovereignty, Bouchard & Co. had no stomach for a major confrontation with student protesters. But the same PQ government—with current PQ leader Pauline Marois as a central figure—soon began its assault on social programs and public-sector workers under a “zero deficit” program of sweeping budget cuts. The PQ government’s defeat of a widely popular strike by the nurses union in defense of the health-care system in 1999 helped to pave the way for the even more savage attacks of the Charest Liberals.

The capitalists everywhere are on the rampage against the rights and gains of workers and the oppressed. Defeating these attacks requires united class struggle. But the workers of English Canada and Quebec are deeply divided on national lines. In English Canada, the trade-union bureaucracy and NDP push the lie that the workers have a common interest with the Canadian capitalists. This includes flagrant chauvinism against Quebec, shown for example in the NDP’s support to the Clarity Act, anti-democratic legislation that denies Quebec’s right to national self-determination. For their part, the pro-capitalist Québécois union tops push support to their own bourgeois nationalists, represented by the PQ and Bloc Québécois. We Marxists advocate independence for Quebec, seeking to get the national question “off the agenda” and thereby make clear to the workers in both English Canada and Quebec that their “own” capitalists are the enemy, not each other. This is the road to forging fighting anti-capitalist unity among Québécois and English Canadian workers, including their key immigrant/minority components.

Dissatisfaction with the PQ has led in recent years to the formation of a putatively more “left-wing” nationalist-populist party, Québec Solidaire. But while QS occasionally poses as a defender of labour and the oppressed, it is unambiguously wedded to the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. While calling to “progressively” reduce tuition fees and expressing “concern” over police repression, a recent QS communiqué solidarizes with the campus administrations by noting, “These institutions are of course protecting the security of their personnel and property” (quebecsolidaire.net, 16 November)!

Unlike QS, ASSÉ correctly calls for the immediate abolition of tuition fees and generally speaks in favour of full accessibility to higher education. But the anarchist-influenced ASSÉ simultaneously promotes utopian hopes for a “just” education system under “democratic” capitalism. For instance, in a 14 November statement responding to the recent police repression, ASSÉ quotes one of its spokesmen: “This disproportional repression is unworthy of a democratic society: police brutality has no place in silencing those who dare to call for social change.” In fact, repressing social protest is exactly the job of police under capitalism!

To fully open universities to workers and the oppressed, and to give a modicum of independence to youth, the Spartacus Youth Clubs call for free tuition, open admissions and a living stipend for all students. Only the overthrow of the capitalist state, in this country and internationally, and the establishment of a global planned economy, can lay the basis for an end to class elitism, enforced ignorance and oppression everywhere. Achieving this requires forging a revolutionary workers party that can win workers and the oppressed to an understanding of the need to sweep away the entire oppressive capitalist system through socialist revolution.