Student Strike Week 13: Quebec students are rejecting government’s inadequate offer despite fact it was presented under threat of 200,000+ students losing academic year. Students are getting an education in politics, struggle and the anti-people nature of the capitalist system that will last them a lifetime! At this time, wanted to share this recent statement supporting the strike from the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, of which I am the General Secretary. – Malcolm
Issued by the Office of the Chairperson International League of Peoples’ Struggle
The ILPS salutes the fighting spirit and determination of the students in Quebec presently involved in an historic 11-week strike which has shaken the highest echelons of power and their neoliberal agenda and has mobilized thousands of students and supporters in an epic battle for the Right to Education. The students are targeting moves by the Québec Liberal government to go back on past promises and to hike post-secondary tuition fees by CAD $1,625 over the next five years, doubling present rates. A powerful grassroots battle is underway as students and supporters hold major street protests, sit-ins and other creative actions.
200,000 demonstrate in Montreal, Quebec on March 22, 2012 for the Right to Education (Photo Le Devoir)
Over 200,000 people marched through Quebec’s largest city, Montréal on March 22, 2012, to support the strike, and there have been daily rolling protests for the past two months hitting government buildings along with banks and the stock exchange. Walking along the city’s streets the symbol of the student strike, red squares, are everywhere, attached to people’s jackets, hats, bags and backpacks. At the recent Earth Day rally attended by a record crowd of 250,000+ in Montréal, again the red squares were evident throughout the throng as the student strike seems to be lighting fires of resistance across the province.
After repeated refusals to meet with the students, the Liberal government of Jean Charest has finally been forced to negotiate with representatives of the three major student organizations. The government had been trying to split the student groups by demanding that the most militant wing first denounce so-called student “violence”. Meanwhile, the government of Jean Charest sent in the police to attack and arrest dozens of demonstrators, professors, teachers and supporters during the strike actions while private security forces were hired by the universities to try to force students and professors to attend classes.
There are presently 180,000 students out of the 475,000 university and college students on unlimited strike across Quebec. Three organizations are involved; the Federation of University Students, the Federation of College Students, and Assé, or l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (Association for Student Union Solidarity), the most militant organization made of independent student associations. Assé has united students under the umbrella of the smartly named CLASSE in French (Coalition large de l’ASSÉ – Class in English), a temporary united front to fight the tuition fee hikes and to coordinate a proposed general strike. Their slogan is Ensemble, bloquons la hausse / Together Stop the Hike!
Assé, particularly, has reached out to community groups, parents, unions and teachers, viewing the present struggle for the right to quality education that is free, accessible, public and non discriminatory, as part of the wider social struggle against public service cutbacks and the capitalist offensive against working people. Many students, for example, attended actions alongside indigenous people – which were violently repressed – to oppose the Quebec government’s “Plan Nord (Plan North)”. This Plan, with its false promises of thousands of jobs, will essentially allow mining and forestry corporations to destroy the north of the province in the search for quick profits. Continuer la lecture / Continue reading Quebec Student Strike enters week 13: ILPS statement in support
Marie Boti (green scarf) with friends holding International Women's Alliance banner.
15,000 Grassroots Women Gather at the End of the World
by Marie Boti
Bariloche, Patagonia, October 2011. Open desert, tufts of prairie grass, flat landscape—it looks like the Alberta badlands. But we are at the fin del mundo, the “end of the world” in the south of Argentina. I’m on a 6-hour bus ride, following a 15-hour plane trip from Quito, Ecuador. My plane could not land in Bariloche because of ash fall from an active Chilean volcano upwind. The sun is shining but low clouds are gathering. It’s a typical spring day in October.
It is evening when I finally arrive in the resort town of San Carlos de Bariloche, Patagonia. This picturesque town in the Nahuel Whapi National Park is the location of the 26th Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres de Argentina. Fifteen thousand grass roots women have travelled up to 40 hours by bus to attend. The Encuentro takes place in a different location each year, but on the same long weekend, a school holiday, making the schools available for the Encuentro’s workshops and lodging.
The two accompanying videos feature a song by Japanese musician Imawano Kiyoshiro (あこがれの北朝鮮 – “North Korea’s aspirations”) and are a welcome antidote to the recent “Americano-Eurocentric” and anti-Communist diatribes launched against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea following the death of Kim Jong Il.
“あこがれの北朝鮮” was released in 1995. In 2003, the song was censored by Tokyo FM, which interrupted its live broadcast of the Earth Day concert at Budokan that year to excise the offending performance. The accompanying text is a translation of the lyrics of two versions of the song as performed in the videos below. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.
This material from the online version of the progressive US magazine Monthly Review @ http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/kiyoshiro160409.html Check out Monthly Review for more articles and books on Korea, among many other subjects, and subscribe if you can.
Let’s go play in North Korea
Merry North Korea
North Korea is a good country
North Korea is for everyone
Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Hyun-hui, Kim Hye-gyong
If you shout, “Hey, Kim”
Everyone will turn around
Let’s go play in North Korea
Our beloved North Korea
North Korea is a good country
They get you there for free
Take a walk on the beach with your sweetheart
And they’ll kidnap you to get you there
Someday surely we’ll all get along
Someday surely we’ll live in such a world
There’ll be no discrimination, no prejudice, no borders
There’ll be no food shortage, no nuclear inspections, no spy ships, no Taepodongs
Our beloved Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Let’s go play in North Korea
Merry North Korea
North Korea is a good country
North Korea is for everyone
Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim, Kim, Kim Hyun-hui
If you shout, “Hey, Kim”
Everyone will turn around
Let’s go play in North Korea
Our beloved North Korea
North Korea is a good country
Peaceful North Korea
Our beloved North Korea
Someday surely we’ll all get along
Someday surely we’ll live in such a world
There’ll be no discrimination, no prejudice, no borders
Our beloved Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
A sea change is underway in Canada as the country shifts away from traditional immigration towards a “rent a worker” policy all too prevalent around the globe. And it is taking place without public debate or official announcements.
November 2010, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico: At a majestic conference centre in this tourist mecca on Mexico’s Pacific coast, the future of one billion people, the world’s migrant workers, is being discussed at the government-supported Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD).
We are presently completing a documentary on Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, entitled The End of Immigration (La fin de l’immigration?) to be broadcast on Radio Canada (and elsewhere we hope) in the spring of 2012. This article originally appeared in the magazine, Canadian Dimension (May 17, 2011 – http://canadiandimension.com/articles/3974/ ).
Two Filipino temporary workers with a supporter in Winnipeg, Canada. The two workers, along with a co-worker, were recently deported from Canada.
Meanwhile, hundreds of migrant workers, their families and supporters, who have traveled two days by bus from another very important but less ostentatious forum on migration in Mexico City, the International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR), are trying to have their voices heard by the delegates to the GFMD. But riot police keep them far enough away that their cries for justice go unheard over the clink of wine glasses and opening speeches for the 700 delegates from 131 countries.
In many ways, these two conferences symbolize two sides of a crucial debate around the largest mobility of workers ever seen[i]and the “legal trade” in a global disposable workforce of 1 billion migrants, of which approximately one quarter migrate internationally and three quarters internally; a debate in which Canadian corporations and their supporters in Ottawa, far from being innocent observers, are actively participating in and profiting from.
DR. DAYA VARMA’S book, The Art and Science of Healing Since Antiquity, is fascinating, rich, and full of insights into the history, science, political economy, cultural and social aspects of medicine. It is a people’s history of medicine and a refreshingly non-Eurocentric view of medical science. It goes a long way to de-mystify medical practice with a dialectical materialist approach. It should be recommended reading for all health workers to obtain a broader outlook on their profession, as well as for anyone who is concerned with today’s health care.
Dr. Varma poses and answers two important and profound questions. “Why are there many schools of medicine when this is not true for other sciences such as physics and chemistry?” And the (Joseph) Needham question: “why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilisation (or Indian or Islamic) but only in that of Europe?”
To answer the first question, Varma through extensive scholarship, documents the development of the art and science of medicine since antiquity. The author writes, “The modern medicine, like all schools of medicine, is a child of spiritual medicine commonly known as witchcraft. It has made gigantic advances, but not enough to remain unchallenged by other streams of the witchcraft. This book is an attempt to analyze how witchcraft unfolded into its different variants and why modern medicine is its most rational expression.” He postulates that the first healers were women, mothers taking care of their sick babies using whatever spiritual or material tools they had at hand.
Varma masterfully dissects and skilfully navigates through the various schools of medicine from the ancient empirical medicine of Egypt; transitioning to the materialist Indian Ayurveda and Chinese medicine systems; the Greek school of medicine upon which Western medicine inherited the Hippocratic oath; to the Islamic Unani-Tibb medicine. Along the way, he deals with other branches such as Allopathy and Homeopathy. The author delves in depth into the social, political and material conditions that gave rise to each of the ancient schools of medicine. All of these schools paved the way to the emergence of modern scientific medicine as cultivated in the West the past 200 years.
The author, a lifelong Marxist, shows that the reason for the uneven development of medical sciences around the world is mainly due to the state of the productive forces in the various societies. The three great rivers of the world, Yangtze, Ganges and Nile allowed China, India and Egypt to be self-sustaining and insular and “did not allow for despondency.” Whereas, Europe overthrew the yoke of feudalism. Through its exploitation of labour, and especially through its plunder of the overseas colonies, it accumulated the capital to push forward the Industrial Revolution with the required scientific and technical breakthroughs (Needham question). In the aftermath of feudalism, America inherited all the innovative characteristics of the Industrial Revolution to make its own advances in medical sciences, especially medical technology.
We are political activists and filmmakers in Montréal, Québec. For a number of years we have shared our thoughts and opinions mostly through our activist film making. But the films take a long time to produce and we go through such an intense rich process to make them… we thought it might be fun to share our thoughts and experiences along the way.
