(published in LA HAUSSE EN QUESTION and distributed in Montreal, March 27th, 2012. For info on the student strike in Montreal, see Bloquons la hausse or Stop the hike)
1. The “Outside Agitatorâ€: a person who fights in a movement where they “don’t belongâ€; for example, a non-student fighting alongside a student movement.
2. Contrary to how we’ve been lead to feel, free education is as much the fight of the worker as the student, as the University is inextricably linked to all aspects of society, from work to prison.
3. In California, in the Fall  of 2009, under the pretense of economic meltdown and empty coffers, the public universities proposed tuition hikes that would be neither subtle nor gradual.
4. In the face of these hikes, students and allies at the University of California occupied their administrative buildings. A statement was penned by “Three Non-Matriculating Proletariansâ€:
5. “The assaults on police officers, the confrontations with the administration, the refusal of lectures, and the squatted buildings point the objective struggle in the direction of the complete and total negation of the university.
6. That is, brick by brick smashing the academic monolith into pieces and abolishing the college as a specialized institution restricted to a specific segment of society.
7. This will require the instillation of technique known as learning to be wholly subverted and recomposing education as a generalized and practical activity of the entire population: an undermining through which the student shall auto-destruct.â€
8. While the movement officially refused to offer demands, it is clear that this is because they felt that the university could not give them that which they desired.
9. The protesters in California wished to explode the identity of “student,†to reintegrate practical working life and the act of learning, and to forge a space to host the creativity required to fix what ails society.
10. These goals are made impossible when we are instead forced into meaningless jobs by a cloud of debt and anxiety.
11. We should demand tuition freeze, and further: free education.
12. When the State will not give it to us, we (both ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ of the University) must occupy, and take what is ours.
Solidarity with the students of Quebec!
