Instead, the university system is a devious mechanism of social control. An education has become a highly effective mix of product and privilege. It is sold to the masses at such a high price that they are shackled in debt for the first and most creative years of their adulthood. At the same time, not all university educations are created equal, and those privileged few able to afford the highest tier are fast-tracked nearly automatically into positions of continued power. There are scholarships that allow for some amount of social mobility, but these are few enough that the wealthy ruling class remains firmly in control.  With the tuition hikes that students face, we now find ourselves at the forefront of this issue.

To be fair, there is logic in the argument for tuition hikes: the diplomas that we are paying for will allow us to secure higher-paying jobs, if we choose to seek them out. In this way, going to university is an investment in ourselves, and it is unfair to ask the general public – which on average makes less money than we expect to – to subsidize us with their taxes. But this argument depends on student motivation generated by striving towards an elite class, and the reality of the existence of this elite has become a burden that we cannot support. It has become apparent that we need a different model.  We can see it already. Austerity measures make life for the non-affluent more difficult, higher tuition makes social mobility a myth, and the empowered classes languish in their security. The very few and very bright are only allowed to move up from the lower classes through scholarships, and they do revitalize the upper class to some extent. However, their innovation is outweighed by the mass of the unmotivated rich, who cause our bureaucracy and management to bloat and stagnate.   For a functional capitalism to exist, new ideas must have the chance to be developed and tested in the free market. This idea is called “free enterprise.” Unfortunately, it’s not actually free. It takes a huge amount of money to put new ideas into practice, and that money has to come from somewhere. In most cases, this money is held by the already wealthy, and this is a major force of stasis. These people have a vested interest in maintaining certain processes – the most problematic ones, such as fossil industries – because they own these industries, and continue to profit from them.

This is why a free university independent from industry and capable of investigations in self-determined directions is essential. This gives the much larger (and often more motivated) population access to the free market in the way that its creators intended.

With all the challenges facing our world, we need everyone’s input and ideas if we are to have a chance at building a sustainable future. Without this access, free enterprise is just a term used by irresponsible oligarchy that can explain away any need to tend to those less fortunate in terms of “equal opportunity.”  In this light, allowing tuition increases is just another step towards a more corporate model of education. A patent factory where undergrads are only consumers and where graduate students are underpaid workers. We must stop these tuition hikes in their tracks, and we must change our schools of privilege into schools of freedom.

Alex Briggs is a U3 Engineering student. Please contact him with ideas and dreams at alexander.briggs@mail.mcgill.ca. The Mob Squad is a horizontal assembly of students concerned with the issues raised in this piece, such as tuition rises and austerity, please contact them to help organize and resist at mcgill.mob.squad@gmail.com.

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We need to accept some things. We are running out of resources: water, oil, space, and the time to change the way we use them. First I’ll say where we’re headed, then where we could go.

The crash is inevitable. The established order – corporate capitalism – will never allow our society to make the necessary changes. A transformation is fundamentally opposed to their interests: the world is ruled by money, money is driven by energy, and energy is driven by oil. Those with money made it from oil (one way or another) and they continue to profit from the petroleum addiction – the change we need will never be top-down. We must step up.

As easy oil runs out it will become more expensive: a Wikileaks cable revealed that the largest oil reserve in the world is overstated by nearly 40 per cent. The days when a barrel of oil trading at one-third the price of water are ending. The globalized economy will flounder and fail: shipping consumer goods across oceans will cost too much, and even after cutting wages and benefits, prices will begin to deter consumers – then depression will strike.

It is the small southern countries that will suffer greatest. Populations that have ballooned on fossil-fuelled agriculture will burst and the trauma caused will scar these regions for generations to come. Established populist movements will help, but there just won’t be enough to go around. Civil strife will be rampant. Migrations will move away from the hot deserts and encroaching coasts. The Middle East, Australia, and much of Africa will boil. Starving humans will devour everything, biodiversity will plummet, and as it does ecosystems will fail – feeding back in to the crisis as the food web unravels.

Most governments will fail. Democracy will vanish: it is too ungainly. Small countries and communities may escape. States will survive by stripping humans of their dignity and squeezing them into the slots necessary to run their machines. Small, participatory communities may survive by learning to cohabit and live in balance with their ecosystems.

Here lies our hope. Self-sufficient societies live within their boundaries – it is outsourcing that causes cancerous growth. Localization also makes technical sense: engines turn only 40 per cent of their fuel to electricity, the rest is lost to heat – which accounts for over 50 per cent of what we use that electricity for! If we generate that power on-site, then the waste heat isn’t wasted at all. Nearly anything can provide us with the energy we need: the sun, our feces, crop stalks, grass, algae, the wind, or one of those plastic-bag whirlpools (the size of Texas!) that collect in our oceans. We have plenty of options, if we stop waiting for capitalism to do what it won’t and start building alternatives ourselves.

Life will be better. Contributing directly to your own self-sustaining community is extremely gratifying. We won’t need drugs (prescription or otherwise) to pretend to be happy. School will no longer be a system to build uniformity, but rather one that grows dynamically with the needs and desires of you and your loved ones.

We can even keep the internet – the most amazing invention of humanity to date – and this can be the basis for a new and revolutionary form of government: direct participatory democracy. I am referring to the time-honoured creation of the ancient Greeks, not this frustrating lobby-fest pig-circus that we call representation today. Politicians would fuse with the media to serve as the mediator in debate and to clarify the issues, but they would hold no more voting power than anyone else.

A world democracy could grow from coordinated and cooperative grassroots activist movements that would defend everyone’s human (and non-human) rights and allow them to represent their own interests fully. Police would be made obsolete and violence would vanish along with repression, while psychosis would be recognized and dealt with by communities before it escalated. Another world is possible!

But it probably won’t come about. Money does continue to hold a lot of power in our world, and those with money also hold a lot of guns. Still, look at any population curve from biology and you can see where we stand – our numbers are booming, and soon they will bust. Luckily, among all the strife and suffering, the corporate-crony governments will no longer be able to control the entire world. Spaces will open where those with the will and the preparation can begin to rebuild refreshingly functional societies. If I survive the crash, I hope to find one – and I hope that you do too.

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Alex Briggs is a U2 Mechanical Engineering student. Write him at  ajhbriggs@gmail.com.

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Alex Briggs is a U2 Mechanical Engineering student. Write him at  ajhbriggs@gmail.com.

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It’s true that $3.75 will get you a sandwich or a beer. But it’s also true that Midnight Kitchen will feed you for free, and Campus Crops (a QPIRG working group whose legs are being cut from under them) will teach you how to ferment your own alcohol for the rest of your life.

McGill imparts a certain amount of privilege on its students simply through their attendance, and I believe that we thus hold a responsibility to contribute to our troubled world in a positive way. I feel the idea that we students are entitled to an extra sandwich, to the detriment of a social justice group like QPIRG, is horribly self-centred.

It’s true that QPIRG supports Tadamon! (an Arabic word that means “solidarity”), but if you take the time to read the About section of their website, you’ll find they explicitly oppose anti-Semitism, along with Islamaphobia. And if you take the opportunity to meet a Tadamon! member, you may gain a personal perspective on the Middle Eastern conflict.
Tadamon! is not anti-Semitic, and neither is QPIRG. They are anti-imperialist, and this is a position that I think is held by the majority of McGill students. Claiming they are otherwise only damages their funding, while generating more hate and ignorance – directly fuelling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That QPIRG is anarchist and anti-democratic is a contradiction. Organizing around anarchist principles means complete democracy through intolerance to oppression and opposition to power structures that impose upon people’s freedom. It’s the politics of freedom, and in this light, I believe most students would agree with it, but it is painted with burning buildings and smashed windows. QPIRG has no affiliation to such tactics, and if you took the time to engage them, you’d know this.

This is the ultimate problem with the opt-out campaign. QPIRG itself called for students to have the option to opt-out of the fees long before it was imposed – an opt-out that only required students come to the office, see what it was like, and then end their support permanently if they so chose.

So the problem isn’t with the opt-out. It’s with the campaign, and the ease with which some students can sell-out of their responsibility to social justice without learning a thing about it. Our planet has incredible diversity, distrust, and conflict. We are running out of resources and space, and our only chance for a bright future is cooperation. The first step to reconciliation is dialogue, and QPIRG strives to give a voice to those who often go unheard. University should expose students to the whole spectrum of ideas – and QPIRG is a very important part of that spectrum.

The opt-out campaign is one based on misinformation and ignorance driven by greed – if your politics force you to opt-out, I can’t change that. I only hope that your decision is informed.

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Alex Briggs is a U2 Mechanical Engineering student. Write him at  ajhbriggs@gmail.com For more information about QPIRG, go to: http://qpirgmcgill.org/

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Corporations express our society’s movement toward less democratic control, further dissociation from one another, and less accountability. A CEO’s conscience (if they have one) is protected, by their stakeholders’ wallets, against the stings of guilt. Meanwhile, the shareholders are safe from the nasty details of their livelihood. From their perspective, the executives must make as much money as humanly (or inhumanely) possible, or else sabotage the lives of their dependents. This plays directly into the arms of the innate tendency to separate into “us” and “them:” a phenomenon seen from middle school cafeterias up through racism and genocide. And that is exactly what it accomplishes: the slow murder of billions of people around our planet, along with all other life and the health of the earth itself.

I am writing to break from this tradition and invite you to do the same. We live within a system of incredible waste, and still we are told there is not enough to go around! Luckily this waste gives us the space we need to grow into engaged citizens on a new earth – if we can only find the will.

I hope these words ring with some truth – but I am afraid that this task sounds trying. As an engineering student activist, I know that the load can be heavy, but I want you to realize that this is the reality of our lives. We have come to the end of the golden era; easy oil has run out: the Gulf oil spill, the tar sands, and shale gas exploration should be all the proof we need. Now we need to build a life that can weather the storms to come.

The first step is to learn to think for ourselves. We have been taught to solve problems; now we must learn to find them. Far from being given, they are usually hidden from the public eye. The second step is to shed all the dead weight.

Unaccountable corporations must be the first to go. Capitalism could be the best way to encourage innovation – but there is no argument for the progress of monopoly and exploitation.

We have to eat; this need is the definition of inelastic. If Aramark is left as the sole provider of this service, do you expect them to bother making our food enjoyable, nutritious, or equitable? Make no mistake, they are driven by the bottom line – and it is not quality.

At every turn, students’ rights and interests are under attack as McGill sells its educational quality to become a moneymaking patent factory. It is time to stand up for those rights if we care to keep them, or resign ourselves to a corporate-controlled world where our freedoms are eroded under every step. The choice is ours – but the time is now. By tomorrow, we will have even further to climb.

Alex Briggs is a U2 Mechanical Engineering student and a member of Mobilization McGill. Write him at ajhbriggs@gmail.com.

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The Café was a sun-lit escape from looming masses of unfinished homework and unprepared-for exams, a place to enjoy some healthy food and warm company before stepping back out into the dark and stressful winter.

But somehow McGill does not hear our side, even though we pay thousands of dollars every semester. The last rally demonstrated this: the Café was taken off the table – without discussion – amid the cries of a large and diverse protest. We were shown we have no control over the place to which we devote so much of our lives. Unfortunately, it is Mendelson’s right to make such unilateral decisions over our objections.

It’s time for change.

A motion put to Senate will create an accountable and transparent committee to assess the Architecture Café closure, and will reassert our rights as students in a democratic institution – nullifying the closure until the committee has submitted its report. For the full motion, visit sites.google.com/site/mobilizationmcgill.

This motion must pass. Although its scope is limited to the closure of this single café, it will set an important precedent for the student body: that we will stand for what is right for us, and not be crammed into cost-effective boxes for the University’s bureaucracy to stack.

Next Monday, the boycott will begin in earnest. We hope that the student body will realize that this issue is far larger than tasty brownies and cheap food: it is about respect. We pay enough as is to attend this university. And the Aramark contract, which appears to give them exclusivity rights on campus, is an underhanded measure to make us pay even more – more money for worse food provided without accountability.

More information will be available on the picket lines. They will be set in front of the major cafeterias, with stands serving wraps provided by Midnight Kitchen as a working alternative to the corporate model. We hope that some of the student body will be moved to stand with us on these lines, as well as to wear white arm bands demanding their right to a democratic university.

Most of all, we need another rally – bigger, better, and louder. This time we will have a focus, we will know our purpose – and we will not stand to be ignored. We will gather outside of the Senate meeting at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, 20 October, and we will be heard. Whether or not you have ever stepped inside Architecture Café, we hope you will raise your voices and raise your fists to give us back some say in our lives.

Bring your lunch, bring your voices, and take back your rights.

Alex Briggs is a U2 Mechanical Engineering student and a member of Mobilization McGill. Write him at ajhbriggs@gmail.com. Want to help out? Email mobMcGill@gmail.com.

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