POLS 1500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Nonviolence, Arab Spring, Peter Gelderloos
15 May 2018
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Thursday, November 2, 2017
Street Politics 101
Street Politics 101 is a half hour video describing the six month student
strike in Montreal in February 2012 against a $325 tuition increase. At
one point, there were 400,000 protesters in the street, and they
eventually overwhelmed police with smaller (numbering thousands)
protests focused on “economic disruption” (e.g. blockading
businesses, destroying corporate property and disrupting conferences).
They eventually forced the Quebec premier to call a new election. When
the Party Quebecois came to power, they rescinded the tuition
increase.!
The film outlines the step-by-step strategy the student organization Classe employed to
expand the tuition hike protest to embrace broader anti-capitalist, indigenous and
environmental issues. This strategy was extremely effective in drawing non-students
into the movement. However, as often happens, unprovoked police violence was the
most important draw card. Demonstrations were initially nonviolent until police viciously
attacked nonviolent protestors. This led to both rioting, as well as “masking-up” to
reduce protestors’ fear of defending themselves.
Peter Gelderloos notes the success of the Montreal student strike in his 2013 book The
Failure of Nonviolence: From Arab Spring to Occupy. It meets all four of his criteria for a
successful direct action: it gave hundreds of thousands of students direct experience in
self-organization through debate and peoples assemblies and spread critiques of debt,
austerity and capitalism throughout Quebecois and Canadian society. It was also
uniformly denounced by ruling politicians and media and ultimately successful in
winning student demands.
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Document Summary
Street politics 101 is a half hour video describing the six month student strike in montreal in february 2012 against a tuition increase. At one point, there were 400,000 protesters in the street, and they eventually overwhelmed police with smaller (numbering thousands) protests focused on economic disruption (e. g. blockading businesses, destroying corporate property and disrupting conferences). They eventually forced the quebec premier to call a new election. When the party quebecois came to power, they rescinded the tuition increase. The lm outlines the step-by-step strategy the student organization classe employed to expand the tuition hike protest to embrace broader anti-capitalist, indigenous and environmental issues. This strategy was extremely effective in drawing non-students into the movement. However, as often happens, unprovoked police violence was the most important draw card. Demonstrations were initially nonviolent until police viciously attacked nonviolent protestors. This led to both rioting, as well as masking-up to reduce protestors" fear of defending themselves.
