Political parties and student struggle

Jean Chrétien, Liberal Prime Minister
of Canada from 1993-2003 

Commentary
By Rebel Youth

Other articles and series on this theme: the student fight back and struggle today; our coverage of the Quebec Student Strike; Students of Canada Rise Up; YCLer Marianne Breton Fontaine speaks on Student Solidarity tour; Call to 2013 YCL student conference.

Can elections be used as markers in time and struggle? Perhaps only with the full knowledge that, as Marxists understand, history is not made by the comings and goings of bourgeois political parties in polite rotation through their bourgeois parliaments, like so many characters in a Swiss Cuckoo Clock -- but by the struggles of the masses.

Still, the Canadian federal election in October 1993 is significant moment to tag. The outcome shaped the terrain of struggle of the youth and student movement in many new ways. The unpopular Conservative government (formerly led by Brian Mulroney) was swept out of office in crushing defeat -- reduced from 156 seats to just two, it lost official party status. The landslide victory of Jean Chretien's Liberals began thirteen years of that party's rule.

Swept to office on somewhat vague promises of change and anti-Free Trade sentiment, the Liberal's quickly dropped their proposals like renegotiating NAFTA and made their true colours clear to all by shifting attention towards balancing the budget -- ie. paying back the big capitalist creditors. Still in their honeymoon period, the Liberal's announced that all of Canada's social programs would be reviewed with sweeping and significant changes likely to come. Cut backs would be deep.

Student struggles in Canada

Excerpt from the 25th Central Convention documents of the Young Communist League of Canada on the struggle of high school and post-secondary students.

The primary contradiction in the struggle for increased access to education is: corporations want a trained workforce but they will not pay for it through corporate taxes, forcing the people to pay for education through wages, savings and especially debt. The working people want accessible, emancipatory education.

This class perspective is often obscured. The struggle for access is presented as a simply universal fight against the government. Right-social democratic ideas in the student movement deliberately avoid class perspectives and misrepresent the state as neutral. Yet the state’s decisions are, generally, in line with the banks and businesses. And the single largest group of youth impeded and excluded from post-secondary are youth from the working-class majority.