For months now, all over Quebec, the streets have vibrated to the rhythm of hundreds of thousands of marching feet. What started out as a movement underground, still stiff with the winter consensus, gathered new strength in the spring and flowed freely, energizing students, parents, grandparents, children, and people with and without jobs. The initial student strike grew into a people’s struggle, while the problem of tuition fees opened the door to a much deeper malaise – we now face a political problem that truly affects us all. To find its remedy and give substance to our vision, let us cast our minds back to the root of the problem.

By the Wild Rose Collective

Originally published by Voir.ca here on March 29, 2012.

Interview by Marie-Pier Béland

Translation for Linchpin.ca by Maxime Gagnon

Tuition fee increases: the struggle continues!

While the fight against the tuition fee hike has now lasted six weeks and the government still refuses to talk with students, we asked Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois to, on behalf of the CLASSE, do a review of the unlimited general strike which currently has about 200 000 students participating in Quebec.

Quebec student movement on the warpath!

A set of translated summaries of key articles on the student strike appearing in Cause Commune, the newspaper of Quebec-based anarchist organization, the Union Communiste Libertaire just before the strike. We hope the analysis presented here is helpful in understanding the dynamics of the student movement in Quebec and the current general strike.

Translation by Maxime Gagnon-Gauthier and Gabriela Alfaro

Listening to the TV or radio might makes us doubt it, but the student movement is getting ready to strike back against the tuition fees increase announced by the Liberal government. Responding to the call of the Association for Student Union Solidarity(ASSE), a lot of student associations in colleges and universities are organizing a strike that could culminate in the coming weeks.

As appeared in the anarchist journal Cause Commune, produced by the Quebec-based, Union Communiste Libertaire.

Translation by Maxime Gagnon-Gauthier

Original article can be read here in French

Since the advent of the nation-state, the ruling class has taken control of education to promote patriotism and national pride first, and second to train workers to gain skills enabling them to adjust to precarious living conditions and to workplaces gnawed by uncertainty.

This is the text of a talk given by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of the book Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), at the DIRA bookstore in Montréal, Canada, on 18 March 2010, as part of his Black Flame tour of Canada. Thanks to Marie-Eve Lamy of Lux Éditeur, Montréal, for the transcription.

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