"But the most interesting resistance happening right now is going on in Quebec, Canada. There are, according to one representative report, over 165,000 students on strike from class out of a 495,000 student body.
Quebec is looking to increase their tuition 75% over the next several years; students responded by starting what is now the longest strike in the province's history. It's gone on even though the government has offered to make student loans a nicer, kinder form of debt, with income-contingent repayments while not budging on the tuition hikes...
The campus combines several issues into one - the privatization of public services, the dismembering of social insurance and its replacement with a regime of debt and risk-shifting, the dismantling of the primary means of social mobility with one designed to entrench inequality, which all builds towards a lack of freedom to fully develop ones talents and abilities and be full, productive citizens.
These students are right to fight this battle at the beginning, during the initials cuts. Privatization creates its own justification; the more public universities are defunded and reconceived as a private good, the less civic interest there is in defending them as a public good. And they are also fighting at the beginning of their lives, both for what kind of world they want to live in while resisting the constraints of indenture that we see when this process of privatization and debt reaches its ultimate conclusion - a path the United States is much further along."
The Quebec Students Strike - Rorty
At this time strikes and protests are more oddities, although the numbers are growing.
In time they will become a trend and will be met by even harsher repression, Mideast-style, in the US, the UK and Canada.
It sometimes seems as though the leaders of the great world powers have decided not to fight among themselves, except in controlled regional conflicts. Blood keeps the ledgers green.
Rather, they have learned to cooperate with each other, to enrich themselves and increase their personal power which has always been the goal of the predator class, by dominating and abusing their own people, engaging in financial pogroms, and preparing the way for a de facto global government and planned economy of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite.
And so we see once again the dreams of world domination, the rhetoric of privilege over law, and the perennial rise of the ubermensch. Even the victims of yesteryear seem to be getting on board, or at least their leaders are for it, hoping to get their own piece of the pie.
How soon we forget, forsaking what is lasting and important, becoming wilfully blind out of pride, fear and greed. There are those who would have a world in flames, as long as they might own the ashes, winning. And so history repeats.
