Though the basic course of events in Quebec over the past several months has been widely reported, I want to address two questions that might be of greater interest to those struggling in and around universities elsewhere.
First, I want to look at how the Quebec student strike articulates, on the one hand, the conflict and interplay between the socialist aspirations and corporatist realities of a public university system, and on the other, the pressures put on that system by the dreams of dollar bills floating through the heads of administrators and the “austerian” belt-tightening of governments. These are not simple realities; university administrators hoping to open the floodgates of tuition and donor dollars are contingently allied with government ministers convinced by fear that fiscal austerity is the only way forward. I believe that a Marxist analysis of the university’s place in the capitalist economy will clarify the stakes of the students’ struggle against this contingent alliance of hope and fear within the administrative apparatus.
Second, I want to ask, very briefly, whether this analysis has any traction outside of Quebec. What conditions have produced these 100 days of increasingly widespread and increasingly ambitious clamor? Can these conditions be replicated by others elsewhere?