One of the most crucial aspect of the 2012 Quebec student strike is that it was driven almost exclusively by student unions. This may seem surprising given the fact that today, representative student organisations everywhere seem almost completely co-opted by administrations and political parties. Many shy away from political action altogether and focus heavily on entertainment and cultural activities. By allowing themselves to become breeding grounds for managers and politicians, they have made themselves powerless to challenge education policies at any significant level.

Of course, many student unions in Quebec fit this description. But what’s characteristic of the student movement in Quebec is its strong syndicalist wing. Hailing from the very beginnings of student action in the sixties and inspired by early labor movements, it has refused to break from its history of radicalism. At the same time, it has kept alive a model of collective action: syndicalism.

While syndicalist unions in the student setting might not be a given, they can still make a lot of sense. To be sure, students don’t form a homogenous class to the same degree that workers do. On any given campus, students with a really wealthy background might rub shoulders with others who can barely make ends meet. But despite these different socio-economic backgrounds, students do form a community and they do have a certain set of common interests, independent of their political, philosophical or religious opinions. There is no shortage of issues which can cement support for student unions and which call out for protest.

At the same time, faced with strong adversity and a difficult organising context, many will choose to form or join campus activist clubs. Yet these tiny groups with little resources can’t hope to give birth to a movement on the scale of the 2012 Quebec student strike. As Jonathan Matthew Smucker of Alternet writes, “In a society that is self-selecting into ever more specific micro-aggregations, it makes sense that activism itself could become one such little niche. But when it comes to challenging entrenched power, we need more than little niches.”1

On the other hand, due to their nature, student unions aren’t automatically geared toward empowerment and social change. Through experience, the Quebec student movement has found certain useful concepts and practices which can help steer such organisations toward these goals.

• 1http://www.alternet.org/print/visions/why-we-cant-depend-activists-create-change

While the perception of legitimacy isn’t by itself an effective means to create change, it is important in creating community. How can a student union or a student strike be viewed as legitimate beyond a tiny group of activists? One has to begin by making the distinction between two different levels of legitimacy : internal and external.

Internal legitimacy reflects how legitimate the movement is in the eyes of the participants. This element is crucial because it’s a major factor influencing cohesion, resilience in the face of opposition, and broadness of the movement.

External legitimacy is the opposite: how legitimate the movement is for non-students or the general public. Of course external legitimacy is also important, but as activists, we have a lot less sway over this factor.

By definition, the movement to block the hike was a countercurrent. The political class, economic elite and media pundits largely supported the tuition hike. At the start of the campaign, none of the mainstream political parties opposed the hike and the propaganda machine had already been hard at work to push the idea that students needed to pay more and more for the privilege of higher education. Students themselves were not immune to its effects, so we knew that it would be difficult to effectively counter the neoliberal myths.

In this context, we knew that only a vast, grassroots effort to reach out to students would be powerful enough to have some measure of success. This means direct, non-mediated discussion: in hallways, classrooms, cafeterias and other places where students congregate. Debates and assemblies were organized specifically to discuss the tuition hike, and student unions made their own research and publications that addressed the issue, and distributed them hand-to-hand as part of their efforts to reach out.

This also explains why external legitimacy is harder to build up: progressive movements don’t have the means to establish the same kind of large-scale, direct discussion with millions of people.

In 2010, as organizing was ramping up, a majority of Quebecois were already favorable to the tuition hike, thanks to generous mass media coverage given to politicians to defend their project as well as sympathetic editorials. The external legitimacy of the movement was relatively low. Media rarely bothered to seriously report on the opinions and ideas of students regarding the hike. Student unions couldn’t hope to reverse that trend and force the issue into public debate through lobbyism and representation.

However, by attempting to disrupt business as usual, as social movements have done historically to further progressive causes, students could force the government into negotiations and make their resistance apparent to the public eye. We believed that disrupting economic and governmental activity was our best chance at building leverage against the political leadership.

Of course, we expected state repression before any negotiations took place, but we were confident in our ability to resist it. If the movement could cope with the attacks of the state, it would surely be victorious. Based on past experiences, we knew that an unlimited general strike had that kind of potential.

For such a strike to be successful, it needs very strong internal legitimacy. In that regard, escalation of tactics and direct democracy are two of ASSE’s (or CLASSE’s) most important principles. Through their application, we could convince more and more people to oppose the tuition hike and become involved in the process of building resistance.

This strategy consists in designing an action plan that proposes a series of actions that are progressively more radical, beginning with actions that aren’t very engaging for participants and are easy to take part. For example: petitions, political flash mobs or taking a position in a general assembly. We knew these tactics, by themselves, didn’t contribute much to stopping the hike. But before organizing more ambitious and effective protests, we needed to build up activist communities in many different CEGEPs (colleges) and universities. In colleges, where students are generally aged between 17 and 20 years old and turnover is high, political consciousness among the student body is low. Organizing simple actions like petitioning offers an opportunity for such students who are interested in doing something about the tuition hike and who might otherwise be very reluctant to get involved in anything that could lead to confrontation.

A lot of our collective experience as activists in Quebec taught us that building political campaigns through progressive involvement of participants is much more effective in elevating people’s political consciousness than mere information or propaganda campaigns. When a petition you’ve worked on fails to produce any results, when your pacifist sit-in is attacked by police or when a demonstration you were in is ridiculed or mocked in newspapers or on the radio, it tends to highlight the limits and contradictions of the system much better than a flyer might. Of course, it’s a process that takes time and which asks of experienced activists who might be veterans of radical movements to take part in some organizing that they would otherwise brush off as being a waste of effort.

Between 2010 and 2012, our commitment to this process led to a new generation of involved students who in turn, contributed massively to get more of their colleagues involved. In time, our rallies grew larger and larger and local unions were increasingly active and dynamic. On many campuses, we could count on solid cores of activists who eventually reached the conclusion, largely by themselves, that the only way to stop the hike was with an unlimited general student strike.

Yet, escalation of tactics alone isn’t enough. Getting people involved needs to go beyond simply asking people to join actions. Building a rock-solid basis for a movement requires giving real power in the hands of participants and bringing them to the center of the decision-making process.

This idea is embodied in ASSE’s (CLASSE) core principle of direct democracy. A simple, democratic, transparent structure was crucial to the success of our strike.

Firstly, the supreme ruling body in local unions is the General Assembly, sometimes also called the general membership meeting. Elected officials such as members of the executive or administrative boards are under the authority of this assembly, which is open to the union’s entire membership.

Everyone is equal during these meetings: staff and board members aren’t given any kinds of privileges such as special seating in front of the assembly or right-of-reply. Rules of order, such as “Robert’s Rules of Order” are used and strictly applied by a facilitator as a means of structuring the meeting and orienting debates toward collective decision-making. Applying rules of order isn’t always easy and sometimes there’s a temptation to do away with them altogether. However, in our experience, a formal structure and process which everyone recognises and which can be applied openly and respectfully is much better than informal structure where shadowy power relationships between participants can influence the decision-making process to the advantage of an individual or a group. To ensure that knowledge of the rules of order in itself doesn’t become a source of inequality among participants, unions publish and make sure the rules of order are available to all, while facilitators take time as needed to explain them and make sure everyone in the meeting understands the processes.

As members of the union, elected union officials can bring motions to the floor and participate in discussion; but once the general assembly has passed a motion, their role is to apply that decision: not to discuss it or debate it further. Acting against general assembly resolutions is a grave offense and grounds for impeachment.

At the provincial level, decisions are made by a congress composed of delegates of every local union. Delegates are not representatives of their union’s membership, entitled to speak on behalf of the student body, nor are they sent in to express their personal views. Their role is to bring up and defend the positions of their union’s own general assembly and abstain from casting a vote if they don’t have one on a particular proposal. As a result, only motions which have the support of a majority of local general assemblies can pass.

As in local unions, the role of elected members of ASSE (CLASSE) is to implement the decisions of the congress.

In the two years leading up to the strike, local unions would hold about three or four general assemblies per semester, while ASSE (CLASSE) held no more than one or two congresses per semester. When the strike began, however, that rhythm was accelerated with local unions holding at least one general assembly per week and congresses also happening on a weekly basis, during weekends.

Frequent assemblies and congresses meant that decisions made at the provincial level would echo as much as possible those made at the grassroots level.

As in local unions, important internal policies and mechanisms are in place to foster a culture of horizontality in which no individual or group holds higher status or symbolic power over others. The idea is to minimize the distance between those who have an official function (staff and elected members) and the rank and file.

Examples of these policies include:

[ul][li]No special speaking priority in meetings for staff or elected members;[/li]
[li]No special seating (ie. up front) for staff or elected members in general assemblies and congresses and they do not facilitate these meetings;[/li]
[li]No salary or special scholarships for elected members;[/li]
[li]Number of staff is kept to a minimum;[/li]
[li]Stipends are available to whoever is taking on tasks;[/li]
[li]No special/corporate clothing, name-tags or jewelry for staff and elected members and no personalized business cards;[/li]
[li]No luxury furniture in union offices (TVs, leather couches, etc.);[/li]
[li]Non-hierarchical labels for elective functions: no presidents, vice-presidents, directors, chairmen, etc.;[/li]
[li]Undefined member limits for most elected committees, eliminating competition for positions.[/li][/ul]

When union officials aren’t a class apart, when they get the same treatment as everyone else, and when union orientations arise from general assemblies, participation increases as students, having been able to contribute in a meaningful way, are naturally drawn into the process of implementing collective decisions. Additionally, open structures with unelected participants such as “mobilization committees” are key to channeling motivation and enthusiasm towards implementing general assembly resolutions and concrete organizing.

In a few words, a mobilization committee is an informal structure that gathers anyone willing to participate in a political campaign on campus. It often works in concert with the student union, which gives it a budget and some independence allowing it to take political initiatives. The mobilization committee’s meetings typically involve the integration of new members, mobilization planning (ie. making flyers, classroom visits, postering, etc.) and dispatching tasks. Those meetings are more informal than general assemblies, but are also guided by the ideas of horizontal organizing. It’s customary that elected union officials make themselves inconspicuous in those meetings, the idea being to share information and involve everyone willing to help on an equal basis.

The combination of direct democracy and escalation of tactics helped us build robust internal legitimacy: democratic decision-making and progressive involvement contribute a lot towards the notion that the union really embodies the will of the majority. As a result, decisions made in general assemblies, even though they might not be backed by law, are widely respected by students.

The strike itself is perhaps the best example. In Quebec, student strikes have no legal basis whatsoever. Furthermore, enforcing the strike using picket lines and blockades of buildings is illegal. But unions’ internal legitimacy is so strong that even while students know that the strike isn’t explicitly lawful, picket lines are respected, even by students who oppose the strike.

That’s important, because it means student strikes are possible anywhere. It also means that we don’t have to wait for the state or universities to recognize our unions, our general assemblies and our democratic decisions. Autonomous organization allows us to build a level of internal legitimacy so strong that it can override laws and other efforts to silence us.