WASHINGTON DC, June 1 — Occupy DC, including PL’ers, marched through the streets here today to the Canadian Embassy. Occupiers banged pots and pans like their brothers and sisters in Quebec, chanting “From Montreal to DC, Education Must Be Free,”  marching in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of striking Canadian students and workers in Quebec.

The Quebec student strike is in its 16th week and must become a rallying point for opposition to austerity policies around the world. Worker-student unity is key. Over the past year, the Canadian bosses’ government has repeatedly used emergency legislation to break anti-concession strikes by Air Canada, Canada Post and Canadian Pacific railway workers.

Marchers briefly picked up two chants in French, expressing unity with the French-speaking Québecois:  “Prend les rues (Take the streets!)” and “Ce n’est qu’un debut, La lutte continue (This is only the beginning; the struggle continues.)”

 Shocked embassy staff quickly locked down the building to prevent Occupiers from entering. Despite the pouring rain, demonstrators rallied and kept the embassy closed. A Canadian student waved his passport in the face of the embassy, declaring that it was an illusion that Canadian bosses are more compassionate than U.S. bosses and that their fascist crackdown on the student strikers proved this.

The Quebec government passed Bill 78 outlawing demonstrations near universities. In response, over 300,000 protesters have attacked this law and faced 2,000 arrests and brutal attacks by the police.

For decades, university education in Quebec has been seemingly free, since education is actually paid for by workers’ taxes. But the bosses’ government is determined to make a “user-pay” principle the new Quebec norm for public services, starting with university education, which will actually be an additional tax on working-class students. The government is demanding tuition fee increases of 82% over seven years. If it succeeds, it will then move on to other “user fees” for other public services, increasing the exploitation of the entire working class.

Despite the boldness and militancy of the Quebec students, illusions still run deep. Many students here and around the world are convinced that education is the ticket to a better life. While communists believe in learning for everyone, we know that a bourgeois university serves the ruling class, teaching capitalist ideas to tie students to the needs of the profit system. To make this bosses’ education more accessible to all is a reform to a system that can never serve workers’ interest. In their struggle student leaders have been willing to make concessions, allying with sellout union leaders and the “lesser-evil” Parti Québecois (PQ) to oppose the “more evil” Liberal Party that is in power. 

But no electoral circus will address the underlying crisis of capitalism that is driving austerity measures from Greece to Quebec to the U.S. The bosses worldwide seek to increase the surplus-value or profit extracted from workers by driving down both wages, benefits, and “social wages” (public services used by the working class). They redouble their efforts to do this when they are in a severe economic crisis.

Capitalism can never meet our needs. Instead of allying with a party that works within the capitalist system, whether it’s the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Socialist Party in France, or the PQ in Quebec, workers and students need to build the Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary organization with the goal of abolition of the profit system through a mass communist revolution and workers’ power on a global basis. Marx’s declaration in 1848 still rings true. “Workers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains, we have a world to win!”