Canada: 50,000 students to strike for Palestine

This is a massive step in the right direction for the Palestine movement in Quebec and Canada. At least 26 student associations representing 50,000 students will be on strike for Palestine on Nov. 21-22!

[Originally published at marxist.ca]

This number could rise to 84,000 as at least 34,000 students from a dozen student associations will also be holding strike votes this week.

After more than a year of genocide, the student movement is finally getting moving!

In August the Revolutionary Communist Party launched an open appeal to all student unions and pro-Palestine groups to unite and fight for a student strike for Palestine. We launched the Student Strike for Palestine campaign which brought this initiative to 45 campuses across the country. We worked tirelessly, arguing that consumer boycotts and demands on capitalist institutions like the government, the United Nations or university administrations were not working and that we needed revolutionary class struggle methods to defeat imperialism and liberate Palestine. This wave of student strikes is the fruit of that work.

Now students from Montreal, Sherbrooke, Quebec City, Laval, Ste-Thérèse, St-Jérôme and Rimouski will be on strike.

This strike is very significant. Nov. 21 will be the biggest student strike since the strike in the spring of 2015 against austerity in Quebec.

This movement is all the more significant for having overcome the language divide. All of Montreal’s main English and French-speaking campuses are involved!

But this strike was not built without obstacles. Activists and student leaders everywhere told us that students weren’t interested in the strike. A common argument was that young people in the West don’t want to fight for Palestine. Cynics and skeptics have been proven wrong.

In addition to the campuses on strike, at dozens of campuses all over the country, walkouts and demonstrations will take place on Nov. 21.

Throughout Quebec and Canada, the Revolutionary Communist Party will be mobilizing in full force to make this student strike a success.

We say: this is only the beginning! Now that the ice is broken, student associations and pro-Palestinian groups must continue promoting the idea of a strike across the country and work towards an all out strike to shut down the universities.

We appeal to all students in Canada – this struggle is your struggle! The same people aiding and abetting genocide are the same people destroying our education system. They are the same people who chain us in debt as tuition continues to go through the roof. They have billions for war, crumbs for housing.

The best service we can render to the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and elsewhere is to overthrow our own ruling class.

The genocide in Palestine and the war spreading across the Middle East—all with the active support of Western imperialists—offers a concentrate of the worst that capitalism has to offer. To end its suffering once and for all, the capitalist system must go.