Strike Now

It’s Dia dos Trabalhadores, May Day, which unlike in the UK is still a national holiday in Brasil. It has extra poignancy this year because the higher education Trade Unions are on strike. I have been a Trade Union activist all my life and spent many years on the committee at the University of Strathclyde, for four of them as chair. I have lost count of how many strikes I have been involved in either as a participant or organiser. The reasons for us being on strike here are almost identical to those that have affected the sector in Scotland and England in recent years. Wage freezes. Deteriorating working conditions, casualisation, and massive cuts in university funding. Introduced by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments, the cuts and attacks on workers’ rights represented what can only be seen as a full-blooded assault on intellectual culture. Predictably the Humanities have suffered most with an estimated fifty percent reduction in funding. It is scarily familiar. Right-wing ideologues who are scared of libraries have called for the Federal Universities to be privatised and sold off. Historically, students do not pay fees, so at stake, is nothing less than the defence of a free public education, an historical echo of the battle over higher education in Britain thirty years ago. Sensing the danger, students have  joined the struggle, voted to strike and are intent on paralysing the University system. Most classes have been suspended, but there are the usual suspects who do not believe in Trade Unions or Strikes and continue to work  in an effort to undermine what is an entirely legitimate and necessary  struggle. Negotiations are taking place, but the sense of foreboding is palpable. Make no mistake, a sinister agenda lurks in the authoritarian imagination. We really can’t have a population thinking freely and critically. It is bad for social stability and raises false expectations. Universities are crucibles of extremist thought. Full of anarchists, communists, environmental campaigners, and homosexuals. Something must be done. Withdraw budgets, cut grants,  cease investment in campus infrastructure, and soon they will be brought to their financial knees and forced to place themselves at the mercy of the market. I have often wondered what happened at school to the protagonists of this sort of world view. Maybe they were bullied by the smart kids as in the popular anecdote about how Wittgenstein mercilessly picked on a diminutive boy in the playground who harboured ambitions to go to art school. It was not the best attended rally, but for those of us that participated, it didn’t matter. I am not a great one for crowds but have always made a point of marching and demonstrating, for the simple reason that the experience of collective solidarity, of a shared struggle,  nurtures the belief that another world is possible.