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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, The CFS October Week of Action  - Article﻿</title>﻿
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﻿<b﻿>﻿The CFS October Week of Action 
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by Tom Keefer﻿<br﻿>﻿
﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, August - September 1998﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿
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With the decline of resistance, best represented by the cancellation of the Ontario Federation of Labour's (OFL) one-day province-wide strike proposed for this fall, the October pan-Canadian week of action called by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) stands out as a ray of hope in an otherwise gloomy situation. By calling for this week of action, the CFS is providing a very important political space in which tens of thousands of students and educational workers not actively involved in anti-cutback activity can display their collective anger at the ravages of government cutbacks and the corporate invasion of post-secondary education. The demonstrations, protests, and occupations will represent a high point of political activity and movement-building which everyone on the left should actively support.
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Nonetheless, there are several ways in which the CFS week of action will fall way short of its potential, and ways in which socialists and others should work to change it. To begin with, there is the obvious fact that we will need much more than a few (or, as the OFL has shown us, many) "days of action" to turn back the onslaught of government cutbacks to post-secondary education. The government/corporate restructuring of education from kindergarten to graduate programs is based upon the economic pressures of capitalism, and not upon the "misguided" choices of a few politicians. Thus, it will take forms of protest based upon the exercise of social power, rather than a kind of "moral witnessing" at how bad the cuts are, to actually stop the cuts.
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In a format similar to the days of action of the OFL, the CFS seems to be unable to visualize anything other than the traditional "march down the streets with placards and slogans to hear the speeches of student and labour leaders and then go home again" style of protest we have grown too familiar with. Along with the character of these demonstrations as one day "shows of support" for CFS attempts to lobby government or to garner favourable media coverage, a fundamental weakness of these actions Iies in the way they are organized.
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The days themselves - their dates, their demands, the participation of students on the demonstrations and in planning - are all more or less organized from the top down by the heads of student associations that make up the decision making bodies of the CFS. Hastily put together "coalitions" of local student activists that primarily do the shit work of building the day of action, with little say about its overall political direction, are how the campaigns are implemented. Typically, once the day of action is finished, the action committees wind down and then fall apart without any clear idea as to how to maintain the momentum gained in the lead up to the day of action. The students who were mobilized in the day of action go back to their usual routine.
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While some socialists might participate in building CFS days of action, primarily to recruit members and advance their "mini-party" into the vacuum created by the end of the day of action, socialists who are committed to non-vanguardist movement-building must find ways to be able to extend the strength and scope of the student movement before, during, and after the days of action. This means working to build non-sectarian participatory organizing structures that do not see the day of action as an end in itself, but rather seek to extend its scope and to help politicize the participants through inventive tactics of mass mobilization.
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If the CFS is ever going to become a force able to seriously challenge government restructuring through the mobilization of its membership as effectively as the mass mobilizations in recent years of French, German, and Quebecois students, a priority will have to be made to shift resources into the building of local student mobilization committees capable of building ongoing movements at the grass roots. If today there was a networked, mutually supporting organization of student activists at CFS and non-CFS-affiliated campuses capable of working together around days of action such as October's, we would be in a much better position to turn the symbolic protest represented by a day of action into the kind of sustained resistance needed to defeat the agenda of neo-liberal govemments and big business. A socialist perspective on the CFS week of action must be based around trying to bring such networks into existence, and not simply "tailing" the CFS leadership. 
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﻿<font﻿ ﻿size="1"﻿>﻿Tom Keefer is a member of the New Socialist Group and an activist at the University of Guelph in local student action committees.﻿</font>﻿</font>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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