Montreal

Protest Anti-Communist Censorship at University!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below a translation published in Spartacist Canada No. 188 (Spring 2016) of a leaflet issued by our comrades in Montreal on March 4.

On February 17, the UQAM [Université du Québec à Montréal] administration notified our comrades of the Groupe d’Étudiants Trotskystes [Trotskyist Student Group], which has organized political events at UQAM in partnership with the Ligue Trotskyste, that their status as a candidate campus group had been terminated. The reason: an absurd claim that our comrades failed to “maintain good relations with the university community.” Scandalously, this attack was driven by a “complaint” to the UQAM administration filed by the Étudiant-es Socialistes [Socialist Students] group, which is affiliated with the fake-Marxist Alternative Socialiste (Quebec section of the Committee for a Workers’ International). This banning order follows a failed attempt by a cabal of student association bureaucrats to stop us from holding a public meeting in September 2014 titled “Marxism or Feminism: For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!” The UQAM administration and their left bootlickers are hell-bent on censoring the revolutionary Marxists.

The role of the rightly much-despised UQAM administration is to run the university in the interests of society’s capitalist rulers. Last spring, the administration brought the cops onto campus to quell a student strike against austerity. During one notoriously brutal intervention, they arrested 22 people and used tear gas to break up the occupation of a campus building. In addition, several student militants were threatened with expulsion for their political activities. More recently, the administration has refused to meet the modest demands of its student workers. SÉTUE, a union that includes teaching and research assistants, has been on strike since the beginning of December. The university has maintained a hard line against the union. Indeed, UQAM rapidly obtained an injunction from the bosses’ courts to prevent strikers from blocking the campus. So much for “good relations with the university community.”

Our comrades in the Groupe d’Étudiants Trotskystes have joined and defended the SÉTUE picket lines, which represent the class line between the capitalists and the workers, two classes with irreconcilable interests. On the lines, at union meetings and elsewhere, our comrades have argued for a class-struggle perspective to win the strike. The road forward for a small, isolated union like SÉTUE is to struggle to shut down the campus, mobilizing other campus workers, students and professors. Picket lines mean don’t cross! One out, all out!

As for Étudiant-es Socialistes, instead of honouring the strikers’ pickets and boycotting any activities on campus as an expression of class solidarity—actions that should be elementary for socialists—they have undermined the strike. Not content with crossing picket lines, they have invited others to do the same. For example, a January 9 post on their Facebook page invited students to attend the “Rendez-vous de la vie étudiante” [student clubs event] organized by the administration and held inside UQAM on January 25-26.

Collaborating with the class enemy is nothing new for Alternative Socialiste. They uphold the scandalous position that cops are “workers in uniform.” They support the petty-bourgeois populist Québec Solidaire, which stands for leaving the capitalist system in place while offering to apply a few palliatives to its brutal workings. In the United States, their co-thinkers are cheerleaders for would-be Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders, the imperialist running dog who supports the U.S. bombing campaign in Syria. Internationally, their forebears took the side of the imperialists and did their small part to bring about capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, a world-historic defeat for the international working class. (For more on their long history of betrayals, see our Spartacist pamphlet, Militant Labour’s Touching Faith in the Capitalist State [1994].)

Against the university administration and its lackeys, we stand for full democratic rights for all student groups, including those who uphold this capitalist system which we seek to do away with through socialist revolution. The capitalist rulers want to keep students from exposure to communist politics as part of their efforts to regiment youth to be ignorant and compliant servants of their system. Our comrades will go forward, striving to win over a new generation of radical youth to revolutionary Marxism at UQAM and elsewhere, notwithstanding the despicable machinations of reformists like Étudiant-es Socialistes. We will not be silenced!