http://libcom.org/library/solidarity-students-quebec
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A statement of solidarity from Iowa's Wild Rose Collective to the student
strikes in Quebec.
WRC operates in the moderately sized Iowa City, home to the state’s largest
university — the University of Iowa. Like many university towns the student
population, perhaps the most present in Iowa City, remain relatively silent
as political actors. Either unaware of or apathetic to their power to
resist the privatization of the University and the laundry list of issues
that comes along with that neoliberalization: the perpetually escalating
tuition and fees, the bankruptcy of education as a training ground for
workers in the capitalist system, and as a little salt in the wound we get
to pay for the privilege with an initiation into finance capitalism
acquiring a pile of debt to go with our shared not-so-hopeful future. Of
course with this slew of problems UI is in company with universities across
the country and world, making increasingly obvious the reality that the
‘university in ruins’ is only a symptom of a larger trend of
neoliberalization that seeps into every aspect of our contemporary social
and political realities. It is from this view that we must recognize the
University as a site of struggle. But further, as Iowa City’s largest
presence as an occupant, as well as its largest employer, we thus recognize
that the University has effects that far exceed its own walls — be it
through rent-increases, land grabs and endless construction, precarious
labor contracts, or the fostering of a racist, sexist, and homophobic bar
culture — these struggles necessarily spill into the broader communities.
It is in precisely this sense that we join so many others in voicing our
solidarity and admiration to the students, and increasingly workers, of
Montreal and Quebec who are committed and relentlessly resisting the attack
on the poor and working-class. Similar to the US Midwest, Quebec students
face the limiting of access to university in the turn toward neoliberal
education policies with continued tuition hikes. These too are the
struggles of working people around the world.
In Quebec many of the most militant involved — the explicitly
anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and feminist student coalition CLASSE —
are not only opposed to the rising cost of education, but instead recognize
this trend of austerity in the name of putting a band-aid on the global
catastrophes of finance capitalism. While the structure of student unions
is largely foreign and in many ways unimaginable to those of us in the US,
we still recognize common ground with our comrades in Quebec as they resist
the broader trends of neoliberalism. Here we share most affinity with those
in struggle and find examples of resistance to bring into our own
experiences and analyses of US struggles, especially in a town whose
largest political and financial actor is the University.
For more on struggles in Montreal see:
Stopthehike.ca <http://www.stopthehike.ca/>
For news feed you can follow “News from the 2012 Quebec Student General
Strike<http://www.facebook.com/pages/News-from-the-2012-Quebec-student-g…
on Facebook
Originally posted: June 5, 2012 at Wild Rose
Collective<http://wildrosecollective.org/2012/06/05/solidarity-to-the-st…