ABSTRACT
Long before the demonstrations paralysed the city centres with acts of mass civil disobedience, before the manif-actions blocked economic hubs, before the student general strike was launched, the decision to fight for a right to education in Quebec began with students initiating petitions and convening general assemblies. In spite of the heavy-handed state repression that followed, the 2012 Quebec unlimited general strike1 lasted over six months and succeeded in turning student resistance into a popular struggle that radicalized beyond a single cohort of students. Following this success, student organizers from the United States exchanged
intensively with their Quebec counterparts on the lessons to be learnt from the student movement and explored how sustained movements like student strikes can be organized in the US. In particular, the topics of different structures and campus organizing approaches have remained at the forefront of these discussions. With these attempts in mind, we focus our analytical lens to understand why these attempts fell short of developing ways of organizing that would enable US organizers to mobilize and sustain a critical mass. In this chapter, we develop a comparative people-structure-culture (PSC) framework to understand the movement building processes (affinities) that fostered the organizational successes of the Quebec student movement (QSM) and examine the processes/dynamics presently hampering US organizing efforts (barricades). This work remains a broad assessment, though we have sought to integrate a variety of examples, which highlight our general observations. We begin by covering the methods employed, followed by sections on orga-
nizing landscapes in Quebec and the US that provide a historical background. The detailed analysis in the following section begins with the formulation of the PSC framework, which is then applied to Quebec organizing. We then employ the framework to analyse the organizing efforts in the US. We conclude the chapter by synthesizing the comparison between Quebec and the US organizing and by identifying the relevance of the framework to other democratic grassroots movements.
