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Campus Fightbacks in the Age of Austerity: Learning from Quebec Students

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By Xavier Lafrance and Alan Sears

The 2012 Quebec student strikes delivered one of the few victories we have seen in anti-austerity struggles in the Canadian state. The mobilization, which at its high point saw over 300 000 students on limited or unlimited strike, and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, was a crucial highpoint that has a great deal to teach radicals. The attempted clampdown by the Charest government through Bill 78 that attempted to outlaw the movement, unleashed a new and innovative round of resistance including the casseroles night marches.

Mobilizing Against Tar Sands Pipelines in Ontario: An Interview with John Riddell

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Can you explain what’s happening in Canada with the tar sands pipelines, what they are, and what they’re going to do?

It really starts with Canada’s rulers. They have a dream that Canada is going to become the new world oil superpower. The oil that is locked up in Canada’s tar sands is greater in quantity than all the conventional oil reserves in the world put together. The tar sands could make Canada a rival to Saudi Arabia on the world oil market.

Montreal-Nord Republik and its Fight for Justice

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By Alejandra Zaga

The inspiring student movement is not the only organizing in Quebec that people outside Quebec need to know about, so we are publishing a number of articles about movement organizing in Quebec today. Following on our article on Profs Against the Fee Hike, we’re glad to publish this look at Montreal-Nord Republik — NSW.

Quebec’s “Red Square” Movement: The Story So Far

Quebec’s “Red Square” Movement: The Story So Far

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By David Camfield 

This is a slightly revised and expanded version of an article written for the magazine of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France. Although it’s mainly intended to give readers outside Canada an account of the movement, readers in Canada may find it a useful overview.

Share Our Future: The CLASSE Manifesto

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By Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale (CLASSE)

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.

Race, Racism and the Quebec Student Movement

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By rosalind hampton

Action guided by anti-racist and anti-colonial analysis is essential to imagining and building liberating alternatives to our current social order. The experience of the inspiring movement ignited by Quebec students this year confirms this belief, as questions about its diversity and about incidents of racism have increasingly emerged.

Overhauled website

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We’ve updated our website and look forward to being able

Syria: Understanding the regime and the revolutionary process

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By Khalil Habash

The Syrian revolutionary process has since the beginning been met by circumspection by some on the left and even led some to separate it from the other uprising in the region, accusing it of being a conspiracy of Western imperialist and reactionary regional countries such as Saudi Arabia. This trend has unfortunately continued, despite the criminal actions of the regime. Others have limited their position to the refusal of any foreign military intervention, on which we agree, but refused to bring full support to the revolution, on which we disagree. Opposition to foreign military intervention in Syria is not enough. Such a position is meaningless if not accompanied by clear and strong support for the Syrian people’s movement.

Red Square, Everywhere: With Quebec Student Strikers, Against Repression

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By Xavier Lafrance and Alan Sears

The Charest government has turned to repression to try to break the largest and longest student strike in Quebec history. Students had already endured heavy-handed policing, including hundreds of arrests and brutal attacks by riot cops on campuses and in the streets. The new strikebreaking legislation, Bill 78, is a brutal clampdown on the right to organize collectively and on freedom of expression. The protest plans for any demonstrations of more than 50 people must be cleared with the police in advance of any gathering, or the action will be considered illegal.  Individual students, staff or faculty members who advocate the ongoing strike action risk harsh penalties, and student unions or university employees unions who organize or support ongoing strike activity will face heavy fines.

The International Indigenous Movement for Self-Determination (Part II)

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This article is Part 2 of a 2-part series, and is the basis of a presentation at the Historical Materialism 2012 conference in Toronto [http://www.yorku.ca/hmyork/]. Part 1 can be found here. The authors are both based in the United States, and thus use the term “tribal nations” and American Indians (Indigenous peoples in Canada refer to themselves as “First Nations”). – NSW

Massive Student Upsurge Fuels Major Debates in Quebec Society

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By Richard Fidler

A crowd estimated at 250,000 people or more wound its way through Montréal April 22 in Quebec’s largest ever Earth Day march. They raised many demands: an end to tar sands and shale gas development, opposition to the Quebec government’s Plan Nord mining expansion, support for radical measures to protect ecosystems, and other causes. And many wore the red felt square symbolizing support to the province’s students fighting the Liberal government’s 75 per cent increase in post-secondary education fees over the next five years. The Earth Day march was the largest mobilization to date in a mounting wave of citizen protest throughout the province.

Understanding and Learning from Occupy Toronto

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From mid-October 2011 until its eviction in late November, Occupy Toronto attracted a lot of attention. Earlier this year, Adrie Naylor, Dave Vasey and Donya Ziaee, who were all active in Occupy Toronto, talked with New Socialist Webzine co-editor David Camfield about what happened, its significance and its lessons for people who want to build a new Left.

Car Culture: A Dead-End Road

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Review of Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler, Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay (Fernwood/RED, 2011).

By Harold Lavender

The Real Ron Paul

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Ron Paul is a Texas member of Congress currently running in the Republican presidential primaries.
Paul certainly won’t win the Republican nomination, but he has the potential to galvanize a movement around his agenda. Why does this matter to people in Canada who support radical social change?

The NDP Leadership Race: Sleepwalking toward the Centre?

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By Murray Cooke

For the first time, the NDP is holding a leadership race that involves picking the leader of the Official Opposition and someone that can, with some credibility, claim a decent shot at becoming the next Prime Minister of Canada.

Revolutions Are Not Over: Adam Hanieh

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By Farooq Sulehria

Saudi Arabia, along with other Gulf states, have been key protagonists in the counter-revolutionary wave unleashed against the uprisings. Indeed, 2011 has clearly demonstrated that imperialism in the region is articulated with – and largely works through – the Gulf Arab states.

‘Overall, it is important for the Left to support the ongoing struggles in the revolutions as the contradictions of the new regimes continue to sharpen,’ says Adam Hanieh.

Adam Hanieh is a Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is author of Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (Palgrave-Macmillan 2011) and a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Historical Materialism.

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