Reader’s Mail
Treating higher education as a right is not in vogue in Quebec. The last few years have given us a few examples of this, notably with the indexation of tuition fees in 20131, the sharp increase in fees for non-resident students in 20232, and their dizzying rise as a source of revenue in university institutional budgets since 20113. All these measures, coupled with government budgetary austerity4, indicate that a process of commodification of education is underway today. By commodification, I mean that education is now considered a consumer product (i.e., a commodity). Thus, it is no longer useful to “educate” ourselves unless it is profitable to do so, and in return, education is considered worth paying for only if it brings us economic value (employment, skills, etc.).
In Marxist tradition, a commodity is a product of human labor that has two main values: exchange value (price) and use value (utility). Exchange value is roughly determined by the amount of human labor required to produce it. Capitalist commodification can therefore be summarized as a process in which the exchange value of a commodity takes precedence over its use value.
— Source : Marx, K. (1870, réédition 1993). Chap. I – La Marchandise. Dans Le Capital : critique de l’économie politique, les Éditions sociales, pp. 39-95.
Faced with this challenge, there are several possible solutions. For CASSE5, since education is now a commodity, we should be paid to participate in it. Their view is that universities would benefit from additional visibility and revenue thanks to free student academic output (papers, dissertations, theses, articles, etc.), which in turn would justify paying students a salary.
The diagnosis offered by CASSE6 is surgically precise when it targets the most glaring form of educational exploitation: unpaid internships. There is no doubt that internships must be paid in order to ensure a decent quality of life and studies for interns, especially given the gendered dimension of the exploitation experienced by many of them in state-run care sectors (education, health, social services, etc.). However, I believe that we must seriously question the broader demand of CASSE, namely student wages. Although their diagnosis of commercial education and unpaid work is reliable, we believe that their proposed solution is flawed. Here’s why:
Demanding student wages means abandoning education to commodification.
CASSE is right; education in its current form is heavily commodified and is essential to the reproduction of the capitalist system. However, I believe that accepting this state of affairs means adopting a resigned position on education. We refuse to see that education could be more than it is today. If we accept wage labor as the premise of the student struggle, we abandon the idea that education can be non-commercial. By retreating into the position of wage earners, we lock ourselves into a horizon of struggle circumscribed by capitalist relations of production, and we abandon the idea of transcending these conditions.
Demanding student wages means becoming more deeply entrenched in capitalist relations.
The position of salaried employee comes with immense subordination and exploitation. In my view, wanting to fully embrace this condition is dangerous. I don’t think we want to be locked in the gilded cage of a salary, paid in monetary terms in exchange for subordination to capital. This is not to say that the idea of being compensated during one’s studies is bad, far from it. But thinking of financial aid for studies in terms of wages is, in my opinion, misguided. Salaried employment, in addition to being an intrinsically subordinate status, involves 1001 technocratic modalities. Will student wages be based on the number of credits enrolled? The number of hours per semester? Grades or GPA? The value we place on commercial education? Could failing a course result in a wage deduction? Wouldn’t all these measures lead to greater competition, rather than solidarity, among students? In my opinion, this model could exacerbate disparities among students and impose the problems of the working world on schools.
Student wages would threaten our associative model
Even if CASSE primarily views its demand for student wages as a political tool aimed at highlighting the contradictions in our system7, it is necessary to consider the consequences of this for our associative milieu. If student wages were won, would student associations not be relegated to the same role that workers unions occupy today? Would they have to negotiate collective agreements with the government and/or their institutions? Would student strikes be regulated in a similar way to those of unions? Wouldn’t all this limit our ability to show solidarity with other struggles? Salaried employment would therefore have the potential to undermine student unionism.
In short, I believe that the assumptions underlying this struggle and its potential consequences are too great a risk to be worth the effort. For me, there is one simple solution to overcoming the commodification of education: free education. Here is why I believe this is relevant:
1) Free education offers tangible material benefits to students
Market-driven education creates lifelong debt and daily costs. In the short term, free education would save university students thousands of dollars a year. This would be a real boost in the context of a major increase in the cost of living. In the long term, free education would relieve many of us of the immense burden of student debt, helping us to free ourselves from market forces8.
2) Free education would dramatically increase access to higher education9
How many people are unable to attend university because of the cost? Tuition fees are a de facto barrier to higher education for the working class. By making university free, entire generations of people living in precarious circumstances could benefit from the removal of this financial barrier, thereby combating class disparities in our society.
3) Free education offers a liberating political horizon10
The fight for free education gives us an opportunity to go on the offensive and break down commodification. By making education free, we could prove that a better world is possible, and that Big Business does not have to dictate every aspect of our lives. By fighting for a decommodified education, we demonstrate that it is possible to organize society in ways other than under the imperative of economic productivity, and we could inspire a broader movement in other sectors.
Obviously, free education, and therefore its decommodification11, is not the end of the struggle. I am not advocating the “nationalization” of education, ending the fight once free education has been achieved. Rather, I believe that decommodification is a prerequisite for achieving emancipatory education. Conversely, inviting wage labor into schools would reinforce the embedding of education in the commercial sphere and make it extremely difficult to extricate it from the clutches of capital. I therefore invite my comrades at CASSE to rethink their approach to the wage laborization of student work and to reconsider a solution that lives up to our emancipatory aspirations: free education.
- Radio-Canada (26 février 2013). Droits de scolarité : Québec imposera l’indexation. ↩︎
- Labbé, J. (13 octobre 2023). Québec haussera les tarifs pour les étudiants universitaires non-résidents. Radio-Canada. ↩︎
- Lesage, S.-É. (2026, octobre). Quel avenir pour le financement des universités ? [Note]. INSTITUT DE RECHERCHE ET D’INFORMATIONS SOCIOÉCONOMIQUES (IRIS), p.1 ↩︎
- Goudreault, Z. (25 mars 2025). Un budget « qui ne rassure pas » en éducation et en enseignement supérieur. Le Devoir. ↩︎
- Autonomous and Solidary Convergence for Student Wages/Convergence Autonome et Solidaire pour le Salariat Étudiant ↩︎
- Inspired by the CUTEs (Comités Unitaires pour le Travail Étudiant), leading the fight for internships in 2018-19 ↩︎
- CASSE, (automne 2025). Le salariat étudiant pour se libérer de la précarité! Le Débordement, no. 2, p. 11. ↩︎
- To learn more about debt and free education : Martin, É. et Lesage, S.-É. (2022, août). Peut-on réaliser la gratuité scolaire au Québec ? [Note]. INSTITUT DE RECHERCHE ET D’INFORMATIONS SOCIOÉCONOMIQUES, pp. 10-12. ↩︎
- To learn more about debt and free education : Martin, É. et Lesage, S.-É. (2022, août). Peut-on réaliser la gratuité scolaire au Québec ? [Note]. INSTITUT DE RECHERCHE ET D’INFORMATIONS SOCIOÉCONOMIQUES (IRIS), pp. 3-4. ↩︎
- To learn more about the liberating potential of free education (in education and in general) : Ariès, P. (août 2018). Éloge de la gratuité. Le Monde diplomatique, p. 28. ↩︎
- Does free education lead to complete decommodification? I leave this question open to the reader. ↩︎