Greetings Troublemakers. Welcome to Trouble....
my name is not important.
This year marks the 50th anniversary
of the tumultuous events of 1968,
when an unprecedented wave of revolt
broke out in multiple countries around the world,
sending a collective shiver
down the spines of the ruling class.
This was arguably the closest
that humanity has ever come to a global revolution,
and the reverberations of this shock
lasted well into the next decade,
as capitalists scrambled
to restructure the international economy
and states passed a series of reforms
aimed at desperately reasserting their legitimacy.
While there were many different local factors
and a wide cross-section of participants to the riots of '68,
a recurring theme was the leading role
played by a generation of insurgent youth,
fed up with the alienation and misery
of everyday life under capitalism.
Some of the most iconic scenes of '68 played out in Paris,
where tens of thousands of university
and high-school students took to the streets,
erected barricades
and fought pitched street battles with the cops.
Inspired by the bravery
and uncompromising militancy of these youth,
millions of workers joined the fray,
launching the biggest wildcat strike in history,
and nearly toppling the French state in the process.
Students also played a key role
in kicking-off protests that year in
Italy, Spain, West Germany,
Sweden, Poland, Yugoslavia, Mexico,
Brazil, Colombia, Argentina,
Jamaica, and the United States.
Five years later,
students at the Athens Polytechnic played a decisive role
in toppling the fascist military junta in Greece.
Sadly, the revolutionary upsurge of the 60's and 70's
was ultimately put down,
and is now confined to the annals of history.
But student unrest has persisted,
and today it continues to play a key role
in fomenting political crises
and articulating broader critiques
of capitalism and the state.
Over the next thirty minutes,
we'll explore contemporary student struggles
from so-called Puerto Rico, Montreal and Chile,
and speak with current and former student organizers
as they share their experiences
of launching strikes, occupying buildings,
taking to the streets
and making a whole lot of trouble.
Considering that the economic crisis
is not only seen in Puerto Rico, but globally,
universities as a whole
in almost all parts of the world are being affected.
The case of Puerto Rico
can be seen as more problematic
considering that this country is a colony of the USA.
The economic disaster,
both in the empire and in the colony
is exacerbated more in terms
of general education.
And mainly in the aspect of higher education,
which has led to seeing the future as
something very tragic.
Each year there are less students.
And obviously that’s because of the crisis.
Every year more people leave the country
- especially young people.
More youth join the army.
They go study at institutes.
They go study in the US.
Historically, the University of Puerto Rico,
which is the public university of the country,
is and continues to be,
generally speaking,
a bastion of critical thought.
To be able to talk about the 2010 strike
- or, specifically about how the strike began in 2010 -
we have to go back and talk about the 2005 strike.
In 2005, a new increase in tuition was taking place.
We're talking about a 33% tuition increase.
The strike was sparked because of that.
It was sparked so that education could stay accessible.
It was also the strike in which the campus was occupied
and shut down.
The organizing was typical
of traditional leftist socialist political organizations
- very centralized -
which created resentments and tensions.
We cannot call it a failure,
although the tuition freeze was not won.
Yes, the tuition hike was carried out...
the strike ended in a very chaotic way
But it led many to an awareness of what we want.
At the beginning of 2009
we started to re-organize the university.
We began to realize that we had to break down
these traditional centralized and hierarchical structures.
We began to decentralize.
We began to form affinity groups
- they were called action committees.
From there came the idea of creating a university union.
Action committees were organized by faculty,
in the case of the Rio Piedras campus.
And they allowed us to have a strike committee
overnight, without even having a strike.
Then we started to push the assembly to strike.
And in the assembly, it was already organic.
We were no longer going with the purpose
of convincing people.
We were going to vote for the strike.
And so the strike started.
And the strike was like a snowball.
As the snowball kept rolling, it kept growing.
And from there 11 campuses were occupied.
To be able to carry out the strike and be successful,
we had to sacrifice our studies.
So the occupation of the campuses,
of each of the faculties, was that.
To create the impossibility for normality.
We're on strike... therefore there are no classes.
Making a fortress of the Rio Piedras campus
- as did our comrades did in the other campuses -
was done to avoid a confrontation with the cops
That would have kicked us out,
and then the strike would have ended.
That still happened.
But inside, there was an atmosphere of freedom.
An atmosphere of coexistence
and social transformation.
That's where that idea comes in.
We learned to make barricades.
We learned to confront the police like never before.
"Out! Out! Cops get out!"
We learned to think strategically.
We learned to attract the people, the public.
Not only was the campus taken,
the streets were taken too.
I think that 2010 and 2011 transformed people.
It allowed the strike of 2017
to be a different strike.
There was a consciousness,
and the genie was out of the bottle.
<
on the so-called ‘PROMESA’ bill,
which would establish a means for Puerto Rico
to restructure its 72 billion dollars in debt
but would also impose a Financial Control Board
- or what I and other people call it -
a colonial control board
over the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.>>
The Fiscal Control Board
overrules the government of Puerto Rico
and decides the austerity measures to be imposed
on the people.
And one of the first things it did
was propose cuts to the University of Puerto Rico.
The cuts - first they were $300 million
now they are $450 million.
One of the things that was discussed in the fiscal plan
was a tuition increase.
In 2016, when us students found this out,
we began to organize.
And we went on strike
in 2010-11 committees were organized by faculty.
In 2017, we did the same thing.
But new committees were created,
such as the athlete's committee,
the seed-garden committee,
and other committees and working groups,
such as the gender working group.
The strike was also connected to the crisis
that the country was going through.
it was tied to the fight against the Fiscal Control Board,
to the struggle for independence.
The majority of our protests
were outside the university.
The fact that we were on strike
helped a lot with organizing May Day,
and the tactics that were used.
Black bloc tactics were used,
and striking students were able to
organize that black bloc.
They were able to make contacts with other people
who were not students,
but who could participate in the strike, because
even though it was a student strike
it was open to the people.
On May 22nd 2012,
over 200,000 people took to the streets of Montreal,
in the largest act of civil disobedience
to ever occur in the territories ruled
by the Canadian state.
This demonstration was part of the so-called Maple Spring,
a massive general strike involving over 300,000 students
of Quebec's universities and CEGEP's,
or Collèges d'enseignement général et professionnel,
a province-wide network
of publicly-funded vocational colleges.
Like many other demos that occurred
in the weeks and months that followed,
the May 22 manif was illegal.
Those marching that day were doing so
in open defiance of the so-called Special Law,
Bill 78, a repressive piece of legislation
that had recently been passed by the Liberal government,
and which had sought to criminalize all demonstrations
whose routes were not submitted to the police in advance.
Quebec has a long and storied history of student radicalism,
and the province has seen no less than ten
student-led general strikes in the past fifty years.
But the 2012 strike lasted nearly eight months,
making it by far the longest,
and largest such strike in Quebec history.
The social upheaval provoked by this movement
ended up toppling the provincial government of Jean Charest,
and rolling back the proposed tuition increase
that it had originally been launched to oppose.
And yet... the fact that the end of the strike
still felt like a crushing defeat,
despite ostensibly achieving its goals,
is a testament to the conviction
it had inspired in its participants
that an entirely new world was within their grasp.
In Quebec specifically,
the student movement is a big political force
and it has a continuity through history
of social and political organizing.
The francophone student movement in Quebec
goes back to the 60's,
where in Quebec we had this movement
called “the Quiet Revolution”.
Because most of the universities were controlled
either by the Church,
or by the anglophones.
So only really rich francophones could go
to universities and colleges.
The CEGEPs were founded by actual occupations of colleges
demanding for accessible schooling.
And it led to a huge wave of francophones and poor people
getting access to so-called higher education.
One of the interesting aspects
about the Quebec student movement
is that there's a certain level of institutionalization
of student unions.
Students are able to follow through
from struggle to struggle.
So for example in 2005,
where students might have been involved
at the CGEP level, at the college level
– in 2012 they would have been at the university level
and they could have been involved
in transferring their experience
and their knowledge to younger generations of activists.
It has had a lot of impact on the youth in general,
and the way school is held in Quebec.
ASSE is a federation of local student unions
that was created in 2001 to fight off the influence
of the two other main student union federations,
that were more on the political lobbying scene.
ASSE has always seen the government as an enemy
that needs to be combated.
We don't wanna negotiate with these people.
We wanna force them to act.
What ASSE is about is really grouping together
local student unions and providing spaces
in which these local student unions
are able to interact with each other, exchange information
— and most importantly, take collective action.
So how it works is that
you've got many different colleges and universities
that are members of the ASSE, and in between
– like in colleges and universities specifically –
the unions are separated by faculties.
If a student union wants to become a member of ASSE,
it has to organize on the principle of direct democracy.
There is no talk of doing lobby work with politicians,
for example,
there's no talk of even doing a demo
without it being voted in a GA.
I don't think striking would have been possible
without this kind of organization.
A general assembly, or a GA,
is just the practice of getting together as a group
to discuss matters at hand that concern you.
Everybody can come in and can vote
and propose whatever they want.
There has to be some procedures,
but the idea is to have the structure as open as possible
for everybody to be able to speak
on different subjects and matters
and propose what they want.
It's so important that students have this space
to meet and organize together.
Having a general assembly go on strike
means that the whole faculty goes on strike.
The whole collective is bound to that decision.
And that meant we could block the whole campus.
I was one of the people you could say
was politically born in 2012.
As was the case for thousands of people in Quebec.
What happened then was magical.
It was a social upheaval like you don't see very often,
and it schooled us to street politics,
to radical democracy,
to what can really be obtained
by making strong bonds and fighting together.
The 2012 strike was a result of, I would say,
at least three years of grassroots organizing.
We knew in 2009
that the government was planning to raise up tuition fees.
So we had time to prepare.
Our goal was to go step-by-step,
and then to have increasingly radical actions.
And eventually,
when the government decided to raise the tuition,
we were able to tell the people
“we've done everything.”
Y'know, we've done petitions. We've sent letters.
We called everybody.
We did all these things that we knew wouldn't work.
And now the only thing we have left to do
is to go on a general strike.
So there's this whole build up
that was really important to the success of that strike.
What the student strike does,
by massively shutting down campuses
in universities and colleges
is it frees up students to
not only organize within the struggle,
but also think about the issues that are outside.
And at the beginning, people were saying
“oh, y'know... these people are striking against tuition fees.
It's a very student-centric struggle.
They only want to protect themselves.”
But eventually they saw that what we wanted
was more radical than just striking against tuition hikes.
We were for a really different society.
And the strike was only a representation of that.
The context of 2012 really opened space,
opened cracks within people's daily lives
to consider other methods of struggle,
other methods of organizing.
The 2012 strike was about student debt,
which is incredibly high for everybody.
But then it also gave us a chance
to touch on debt in general.
Why is everybody so in debt?
Why is everybody so poor,
when they're working all their lives away?
During the summer of 2012
we saw the emergence of assemblies,
of, like, neighbourhood assemblies,
which were called APAQs
– Assemblées Populaire Autonome de Quartier.
So basically autonomous neighbourhood assemblies.
I think it was a gateway for
a lot of more in-depth thinking
about the current situation,
which everybody shares.
Everybody can realize, y'know, we're being fucked over.
And eventually,
after maybe five months of all the universities
and the colleges being paralyzed,
the government decided to pass a special law
banning public demonstrations.
And that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
People started banging pots on their balconies one night,
and then the night afterwards,
everybody was in the streets banging pots
against the general law.
So Jean Charest is sending Quebeckers to the polls.
We really faced a wall when the government decided
that they couldn't go on,
and decided to call an election.
It was taken back from us by sold-out politicians
that gained capital on our struggle.
A lot of people just thought... we had won.
Because everybody was gonna vote on something,
and elections would solve everything.
We have to beware of elections as a way to solve struggles.
Because it didn't solve anything.
Following 2012 there was three years
of very brutal repression in the streets,
specifically targeting student organization,
in the hopes of breaking down the student movement.
And so in 2015,
there was an independent group that formed
within the walls of UQAM
– Université du Québec à Montréal –
to start organizing again and fight back.
It was an anarchist strike,
in the sense that it was a refusal to let the institutions
and the corporations instrumentalize us
and put words in our mouth.
So 2015 was really about the heritage of 2012.
But it was also a message to the ones coming up
that it was still possible.
We still have the structures to get up and fight together.
Without a doubt
the most sustained student movement
in the so-called Americas
can be found in the territories ruled by the Chilean state.
Since the 2006 protests
popularly known as the Penguin's Revolution,
through the Chilean Winter of 2011-2013,
and continuing to today,
the Chilean student movement
has represented a consistent pole of radical activity
in the southern Andean country,
drawing in hundreds of thousands of participants
and helping to topple multiple governments,
seemingly without breaking stride.
While its roots lie
in the militant youth wings
of the socialist and communist parties
that once formed an important pillar of support
for former president Salvador Allende,
student radicalism was effectively suppressed in Chile
during the long years of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Today's student movement is still struggling
against the economic legacies of this period,
in which the regime embraced neoliberal shock doctrines
that led to one of the most heavily privatized
education systems in the world.
While the demands of today's reconstituted student movement
began with relatively humble requests,
such as free bus passes
and the waiving of onerous fees
for university admission tests,
they have since evolved into militant calls
for free post-secondary education
that have brought the entire capitalist system into question.
Education in Chile is deeply segregated by class.
The level of privatization caused students to go into debt.
Families would be spending such a large portion
of their earnings to pay for education
that people started to realize that it was a right
that they were being deprived of
and that they had to begin to mobilize.
Traditional universities, especially state universities,
have a long tradition of student organizing and mobilizing,
where student federations are established organizations
and are “accepted” by the rectories
and the government as a valid interlocutor
when discussing student issues.
The private universities that were established in 1981
are institutions that,
generally speaking,
have only had university federations since the 2000s.
It was at that moment that the students began
to demand their right to organize
in a federation that was legitimized
by the rectories of those institutions.
The university federations are grouped in CONFECH.
The CONFECH is the federation of Chilean students
and is like the main body
bringing together the different university federations
of the majority of Chilean universities,
whether they be private or public.
The movement of 2011 was a really defining moment.
People felt and believed in a struggle of their own,
and seeing that the demonstrations
began to attract many students,
a much deeper analysis began to take form
with regards to education.
The main slogans that guided the mobilization
cover different areas.
The first has to do with free education,
the demand that higher education
be free and accessible for all students,
regardless of the socio-economic level of their families.
The second has to do
with the forgiveness of debts incurred by Chilean families
during the process of educating their children.
The third has to do with the orientation
that education has in our country.
And there, the CONFECH’s demand
is to advance the creation
of a national development project,
in which the universities
– and in particular the public and state universities –
play a strategic role in the design of public policies,
in conjunction with the state.
It was at that point that secondary students
also came together with their own demands,
and the need to coordinate
with high school students was sparked,
since they also had been resisting, since 2006
– which was known as the Penguin's Revolution.
We could see a level of support
that no other kind of social movement
during the last decades had seen,
since the end of the dictatorship.
There were even polls that pointed to
over 80% of the population supporting student demands.
We saw demonstrations
of up to one million people in the capital,
with entire families participating,
with workers' unions participating,
with people in the streets
who were not affiliated
with any political organization supporting.
The student demands
had resonated with a great majority of the country.
For example, the fight against indebtedness,
but also the struggle for a less classist educational system
that contributes to the development of the country,
and not just to the profits of the ruling class.
Within what was called the anarchist movement,
it was thought that the participation of anarchists
within the dynamics of the student movement
– for example in the election leaders,
participation in voting,
participation in assemblies, etc –
was something that did not correspond
to the principles of the anarchist movement.
As of 2003, we decided that it was something
that did not correspond to our current reality,
that as a libertarian movement
we had the responsibility to nourish the student movement
with our political perspective.
And that if it meant that our comrades
had to take on representational roles
in an attempt to to democratize those spaces,
it had to be done.
There were different visions.
On the one hand,
there were groups that were very, like, platform based,
and who called themselves anarchists.
But they were groups that, after all,
also sought leadership positions.
And on the other hand,
there were young people who were looking
for a much more horizontal organization,
a much more direct manifestation, or, direct action.
Beginning with small affinity groups,
a movement that unites from below.
I think it served to effectively keep up the pressure.
So that it wasn’t so easy to impose the direction
that this movement could take.
It was already super distorted
by the filters of the political parties
that directed the assemblies in some way.
f we did not resist in some way,
we were going to let it be much easier
for them to control things.
At the end of the day,
you realized that it served to link you with other people
who were not even part of your student organizations.
But who also had their own networks.
And it allowed you to see what the mistakes were,
or the things that don't really make sense
in the spaces in which people were mobilizing.
I think it's possible to draw several lessons
from the experience the Chilean student movement
has accumulated during the last decade and a half.
One of them has to do with the ability
of the student movement and its political organizations
to protect its internal democratic structures.
That allows students in the country
to be represented democratically,
and grants legitimacy to their spaces of representation.
The other lesson has to do with the need to move
from economic demands to political demands.
Questioning not only the way in which neoliberalism
expresses itself concretely in terms of education,
but by questioning the foundations
of neoliberal educational policy.
And what that means, is questioning, for example,
the role that banks and the private sector
play in education to the detriment of the public sector.
Another lesson has to do with the ability
of the student movement to exercise,
or establish ties of solidarity with other social movements.
During 2011-2012,
we forged a process of coordination
and relationship with labour unions,
with neighbourhood organizations,
with environmental organizations,
with organizations that fought for
and demanded gender equality,
and with an endless number of other social groups
within Chilean society
that share with us a critique of neoliberal society.
Because that allows their political demand
not to be exhausted within the educational demand,
but rather to be projected into a political project
that overcomes the student struggle,
and that is ultimately related to
the struggle against the neoliberal model
– and therefore to the construction
of a different political alternative.
Students that go to school in areas without
an established radical student movement
often face structural and political obstacles
to the types of grassroots organizing required
to call general strikes,
or otherwise coordinate mass mobilizations
of thousands of rowdy youth
eager to throw down against the cops.
In so-called Canada,
student unions outside of Quebec
are run according to the logic of representative democracy,
whereby decision-making is heavily concentrated
in the hands of a small executive body,
whose members are elected to annual terms.
These schools also lack institutions
of popular participation and direct democracy,
such as the general assemblies
that proved so crucial to helping to kick off
the 2012 student strike in Quebec.
Making matters even worse,
many of these local student unions are grouped into large,
reformist student blocks like the CFS,
or Canadian Federation of Students,
who are heavily invested in the status quo.
Each year, the CFS national executive
collects millions of dollars out of students' tuition fees,
which they then funnel into harmlessly lobbying politicians
and paying their own bloated salaries.
Not only do groups like the CFS
occupy a space where a potentially revolutionary
national student federation could exist,
but they often employ a ruthless mix of lawyers,
fear-mongering campaigns
and procedural red tape in order to maintain their control
and ensure that no radical threats to their position
are allowed to emerge.
But resistance has to start somewhere.
The secret is discovering where to begin.
These are very transforming times in one's life.
So it's a time to learn how to act together
and take control on the world,
which needs you.
It's going bad out there.
And there is such poor political culture.
And the only way to break that
is to learn to speak to one another on common grounds
and find what can spur us towards action.
There's really a deep interconnection
between student organizing
and anti-capitalist and anarchist organizing in Montreal.
The student movement in Quebec
has existed and has organized grassroots struggles
long before student unions were officially recognized.
And certainly within the student movement,
these ideas of direct democracy
– they don't come out of the ether.
In the coming years,
we will confront the austerity measures
of the Fiscal Control Board
and US Congress.
But I think that we're stronger now
because students are more organized.
I think one of the things, also,
that anti-capitalists can bring to the student movement
– and they have brought it, and it's been welcomed, also –
is this analysis that striking for student issues
is really important.
But ultimately, blocking a tuition hike
isn't going to overthrow society.
It's not going to overthrow capitalism
and it's not gonna really solve
the day-to-day problems that students face.
What the student movement does,
by organizing a political struggle,
is that it exposes the state, and its policies
and the government for what they really are.
To be able to defend the right to mobilize,
we have to be capable of formulating a political discourse
that allows us to count on
the substantial support of the people,
so that our demands are understood.
So that the tactics utilized
- be they street battles,
street demonstrations,
or university building occupations,
is understood by the citizens.
To achieve that, it's important to
publicize our objectives.
To publish videos explaining why we are mobilizing
- the reasons why we are mobilizing -
and connect the demands of the students
with the hardships that workers endure every day.
If we don't fight to transform our country,
we won't be able to fight for a real education.
The independence of Puerto Rico would be
one aspect of our success.
Quality public education is
one aspect of our struggle.
The education of the street is
another aspect of our struggle.
I can say that many of the comrades who
were involved in the 2010-11 strike,
and the one in 2017,
understood that.
That's why they are organizing alternative projects.
New organizations emerge
that were not tied to past political groups.
These new organizations emerge
to meet the needs of the students.
Give priority to grassroots organizing more than
groups that direct from the top.
Otherwise it becomes an imaginary mobilization.
One of the big stumbling blocks, I think,
that has to be broken down elsewhere
is that representative student democracy
is really just a breeding ground for politicians.
And we know, like, what politicians are about.
And they're not about defending students
and defending student issues.
It's hard to bring a new student union
that was used to the more lobbying sphere,
to a more grassroots organizing.
Because you have to organize.
You have to mobilize people.
It's a lot of work, but it's also very rewarding.
You talk to people, you politicize them,
and you have the impression you're really changing things.
This mindset is very different from
the other big student federations in Canada and Quebec
that tends to see the government as,
not an ally, but something that can be reasoned with.
We've heard about how CFS has used legal devices
and lawyers and courts
to try and keep student unions under control.
But I think it's becoming more and more clear
to students across Canada that the CFS is really
more about control and money
than actual student organizing.
Organizing with the people,
and having a broad movement
is a really strong thing.
It might sound cheesy,
but I truly believe that it can be a gateway
for better friendships,
deeper relationships
with the people you share your life with,
your spaces with... your neighbourhood with.
It was the massive student movement,
plus the support of the people for our political demands
that allowed us to confront the repression
with a violence of self-defense
that was legitimized
by a large group of the population.
Police and state repression
transformed us.
It radicalized us.
Changing us from student fighters
into street fighters.
Do it!
You guys are what's coming.
As the global political climate
continues to accelerate from bad to worse,
prospects for our collective future
are looking pretty bleak.
Today's generations are faced
with a myriad of seemingly intractable problems,
rooted in an increasingly authoritarian
and repressive international capitalist regime,
and whose dire consequences
pose existential threats to the planet
and even humanity itself.
Many of the radicals of '68
have now been incorporated into the very systems of control
they once rose up to oppose.
If we hope to alter the dangerous trajectory
we now find ourselves on,
it is vital that a new generation of revolutionaries
rise up to address these challenges head-on.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you
that Trouble is intended to be watched in groups,
and to be used as a resource
to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you a student that's interested in carrying out
revolutionary anti-capitalist organizing
on your university or college campus,
or even in your high school?
Consider getting together with some comrades,
organizing a screening of this film,
and discussing a strategy for where you might get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble
at your campus, infoshop, community center,
or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month,
we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show,
and a screening kit featuring additional resources
and some questions you can use to get a discussion going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download
all our content for free off our website:
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics,
or just want to get in touch,
drop us a line at trouble@sub.media.
We're stoked to announce
that we reached our fundraising goals
for the upcoming year,
meaning that we've been able to grow the subMedia team.
The next couple of months
will be a bit of an adjustment period,
but you can all look forward
to Stim's return with a brand new show
sometime in the not-too-distant future,
as well as an increased output of videos
throughout 2018 and beyond.
We're really excited about it,
and wanna give a big shout-out
to all those who kicked in to make it possible.
Stay tuned for part two of this series next month,
as we take a closer look at another batch
of student movements from around the globe.
This episode would not have been possible
without the generous support of Josh and Christian.
Now get out there... and make some trouble!