Against the tide: André Frappier’s journey as a class-struggle militant

Introduction

I first met André Frappier in the late 1970s, when we were members of the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue ouvrière révolutionnaire, a pan-Canadian Marxist cadre organization. When the league decided to hoist its banner in the 1980 federal election campaign, André — already well-known as a union militant — was chosen as our candidate in a downtown Montréal riding. (No, he was not elected!)

Along with many others, André and I parted company with the RWL/LOR soon afterward. For André, this was by no means the end of his political activism, quite the contrary, as this recent interview by Pierre Beaudet shows. It is published in the current issue of Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, no. 25, winter 2021, under the title “À contre-courant : André Frappier, toujours présent,” also published as a separate text on the NCS webpage.

My translation, along with a few supplementary notes and this introduction.

– Richard Fidler

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André Frappier became an activist in the 1970s, in the student movements. He was then hired at Canada Post, where for several decades he became one of the pillars of the combative Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). Later, André became an active member of Québec solidaire (QS) which he sees as a potential tool for our emancipation.

From the CEGEP, where you had your first activist experience, you went on to the Post Office...

I spent a good part of my time as a CEGEP student[1] in activism, especially in solidarity with Chile, then at the heart of the political debates. It was fascinating to watch an attempt to transition to socialism without revolution, which contradicted what we were learning from Marxism. Finally, the coup d’état in 1973 put an end to the experiment, reminding us that the capitalist class does not allow itself to be controlled so easily [1]. On May 1, 1974, several of us in the Québec-Chile student solidarity committee occupied the Chilean consulate. We were all arrested, and I spent a night in a cell. My political vision was to deepen after that, as internationalism is decisive in the fight for an egalitarian society.

I had not completed my college diploma when I was called to the Post Office for an interview in August 1975. Among the 1000 hired (out of 10,000 applicants), I was ranked 740th! As soon as I got to work, I took part in my first major strike, which lasted six weeks.

In the union, there was a great leader...

For two decades, the Syndicat des postiers du Canada (SPC) [2] in Montreal was Marcel Perreault. He had been president of the largest section in Quebec since 1968 (over 4,000 members) and the second largest in Canada after Toronto. He was a fiery leader who knew how to command respect among his members as well as in other unions. He was vice-president of the FTQ (Quebec Federation of Labour) and president of the Montreal Labour Council (CTM) for several years. In 1977, I attended my first “national” convention in Halifax, when Joe Davidson was president [3]. It was at this congress that an extraordinary trade unionist, Jean-Claude Parrot, became national president [4]. In 1978, a strike that was initially legal was declared illegal with Bill C-8. Parrot found himself on the front lines and was sentenced to three months in prison, after being cravenly abandoned by the president of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), Dennis McDermott.[2]

You had to follow the “line”...

In congresses, Perreault required the Quebec delegation to vote with one voice. However, at the 1980 convention, I dared to vote with two other comrades in favour of a resolution aimed at adjusting the union dues of part-time employees according to the hours worked. Perreault was opposed to it, but the proposal had the support of the rest of Canada. During the adjournment, National Director Clément Morel ordered our expulsion from the Quebec caucus. At that time, I had just been fired by management and was awaiting arbitration of my grievance. I was somewhat distraught. My friend Paul Heffernan from the Toronto local advised me to report this event to the convention. The next day, I went to the microphone and asked the national director of Quebec to explain why he had expelled three members of his delegation. I got a standing ovation from delegations from the rest of Canada who took a dim view of the rigid discipline to which we were subjected in the union.

In the end, I was able to gain some respect. A few years later, to my surprise, Clément Morel confided in me that he did not fully share Perreault’s feelings! In the meantime, my friend Paul Heffernan had become president of his local. In my opinion, one of the best Toronto has seen.

Perreault was opposed to everything that was progressive...

Despicably, he had fought the establishment of a women’s committee on which several women had worked for months [5]. Perreault had also opposed the proposals from the Western region concerning sexual harassment at the 1983 convention as well as the plans for day care and child care costs. The majority of delegates from Quebec, overwhelmingly made up of men, registered their dissent when these policies were adopted at the 1986 convention. That same year, when the votes were counted for the local union elections, the children of parents who supported my candidacy were expelled by the union marshals, made up exclusively of Perreault supporters.

He was even against the unification of unions at the Post Office...

He fiercely opposed the merger with the Union of Postal and Communications Employees (UPCE), which took place anyway, and helped sabotage the merger with the Letter Carriers Union of Canada (LCUC). It was not until the vote ordered by the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) in February 1989, following the plan to overhaul the certification units by Canada Post, that this unification could take place. The 23,000-member CUPW won over the 21,000-member LCUC with a majority of just 901 votes.

The new union, which was not based on mutual agreement, gave rise to an open war in which Perreault took delight in provoking the former members of the LCUC. He rebuked them for their interventions and set up a union marshalling squad made up of about fifteen men dressed in black who stood at the front of the room. At one meeting he even called in the police. It took a long time to pick up the pieces, even after his election defeat in 1991. In fact, it required a new generation to take over on both the former CUPW and LCUC sides.

During all these battles, did you have a hard time?

At each union meeting, he was waiting for me around the corner. Perreault’s discourse was based on a narrow nationalism which hardened the Quebec members against the positions of the members in the rest of Canada. He used my support for Parrot and my links with several union activists in the rest of Canada to present me as a spy for the Canadians and a traitor in Quebec!

In March 1987, I attended an important meeting on a draft collective agreement. In the room, the seats around me were empty, no one dared be seen beside me. Perreault spoke of the “four-page rag”, referring to a tract published in my recent union election campaign. He tried to entertain the room with a dubious play on words: “Je ne vous demande quand même pas que vous le Frappier” [“I’m not even asking you to hit him!” Frappier is close to frapper, to hit.]

It got pretty wild?

During all these years, I helped to put together teams in local elections with a democratization program and I ran against him for the presidency. I wanted us to deepen our ties with the FTQ, to participate in political battles. We had to put forward the demands of women who had been sidelined for so long. To my surprise, in my first election in 1983, despite all the pressure and the smear campaign against me, I got almost a third of the votes. It encouraged me a lot. I naively believed that since I had made a show of strength Perreault would calm down a bit and that we could finally hope for a more serene climate in the union. The opposite happened, he took it as a danger to his survival. After this election, a few comrades and I were put on a blacklist, distributed by members of the executive during the assemblies to elect delegates to union bodies and to congresses. It was ten years before we could participate again.

Your resistance ended up getting some results...

Perreault continued to protect his power by taking advantage of a conservative ideology. He was a brake on trade-union unity, so necessary in this context of a government offensive. In 1981, more than 100,000 workers, including several thousand SPC members, protested in front of parliament against the economic policies of the federal government. The following year, when the Parti québécois (PQ) government wanted to cut Quebec civil service salaries by 20%, Jean-Claude Parrot offered financial assistance of five dollars per union member both in Canada and Quebec to organize the resistance. But Perreault was opposed, on the pretext that we were not allowed to play with the union dues. However, it was clear that the governments were organizing an offensive against the public services and that union unity was more urgent than ever.

Things came to a head in 1987...

During negotiations, the national leadership of the union understood that the government was going to pass a special law. The National Executive Council wanted to keep up the pressure while preventing the government from legislating. Rotating strikes were the appropriate way to achieve this. Perreault opposed this, adopting the false image of a radical trade unionist. He hoped anti-union legislation would allow him to blame the government and the national leadership while relieving himself of all responsibility. When the time came to vote he made a fiery speech against rotating strikes. No debate was allowed, and Perreault was going to proceed to a strike vote by show of hands, contrary to the rules of procedure. I walked to the front of the room and demanded microphones. The union marshals expelled me manu militari. I had, however, opened a crack; several members who ordinarily would not have dared to speak congratulated me. The media were present and reported the event. During this period, I thought about resigning my duties as a union delegate and quitting my activism, but I was too proud to do so!

But in the end, the tide turned...

It was at this point that Perreault lost his bid for re-election to Richard Forget. The arrival of the LCUC members in 1989 was the factor that hastened his downfall. His strategies were aimed not at strengthening the trade union movement, but dodging to make others bear the burden of possible compromises. The iron fist imposed on militants was now arousing growing discontent. His defeat made it possible to move on. It was high time!

Did Perreault’s departure open the door?

Faced with the growing rebellion against Perreault, the vice-president of the Montreal local, Richard Forget, won the union elections of 1991 by promising some democratization. I had worked hard and was disappointed that he did not call on me. He had actually backed the cheap blows against me, but we were in new times, hope was finally allowed, so I supported him without hesitation. In the first general meetings, Perreault and his supporters persisted in their attacks on the new executive and the president. I came to his defence, giving Perreault a good lesson in democracy. He was now unable to come to terms with the decision of the members, which he regarded as the basis of the union when he was in power. I was warmly applauded, it was a first for me, I almost felt like crying.

In the end, you manage to break down the wall...

In the subsequent election of the Montreal section in 1993, I was elected to the Forget team, in charge of union education. Gradually, our union began to function normally, apart from the opaque games of the former president. Yet I thought we were marking time, especially since Canada Post, managed by the Liberal party, wanted to “restructure” the postal service, which meant cutting jobs, reducing wages and increasing productivity. The threat of privatization loomed on the horizon.

Finally, you become president of the Montreal local of CUPW...

Richard Forget wasn’t a bad guy, but he had retained his old reflexes. Information circulated in dribbles to the executive except among those close to him. This had repercussions among the members and discontent grew in the general assemblies, especially on the side of the letter carriers who were still smarting and remained suspicious. Finally, the majority of the executive committee wanted to put together a new team. I was elected president in 1996 with the majority of our team. In anticipation of the 1997 negotiations, we felt that our 6,000 members really had to regain control of their union. Trade union unity and participatory democracy were at the heart of our platform. The Montreal section thus threw itself into mobilization. In the spring of 1998, more than 1,000 members from Montreal demonstrated at the Parliament in Ottawa. In the fall, 300 militants occupied the Canada Post headquarters in downtown Montréal. The following week, we occupied Place des Arts on the evening when the Post Office had invited its executives and contractors to a concert at its expense.

A few years later, you change course...

The six years in the presidency had worn me out. There had been some real political battles, but also factional battles, the two sometimes intertwined. I therefore decided to leave the presidency and to run for the post of national director in 2002. This post would offer a more political role, in particular through developing union strategies during negotiations. I was happy to take charge of organizing campaigns including that of the rural route mail couriers, which was a big step forward. This made it possible to get better terms for people who had been classed as independent contractors without the right to unionize. To get around this legal obstacle, we negotiated an agreement with Minister André Ouellet in the 2004 collective agreement. It was not a smooth process for our troops. Without saying so directly, some of our members resented our spending a lot of money from the available funds at our disposal on achieving the first collective agreement of the Organization of Rural Route Mail Couriers (ORRMC). I argued that this cheap labour in rural areas allowed Canada Post management to exert downward pressure on working conditions, which affected everyone. In the end, we managed to organize 6,000 new members, bolstering the union with new militant strength. This is how Nancy Beauchamp, who was one of these precariously employed people, was the first woman to be elected to the position of national director for the Montréal region. She is now an executive member of the FTQ.

Throughout, you got involved with activists from the “Rest of Canada”...

I had developed links for a long time with militants outside Quebec. My tenure as National Director now allowed me to work more closely with them. National Executive Council (NEC) meetings lasted a week and took place once every two months in Ottawa, but during negotiations it was often monthly. I really enjoyed this experience and learned a lot from it. Despite our differences, I learned to better understand the reality of activism outside Quebec. I also appreciated the fact that the Quebec reality was respected. I had the good fortune to work under the presidency of Deborah Bourque, a visionary woman very concerned about democracy. Her defeat at the hands of Denis Lemelin in 2008 was certainly the event that most disappointed and saddened me in this union.

At the CLC convention in Vancouver in 1999, I took the floor and made my speech entirely in French, which nobody had dared to do. There was an interpretation service, but the majority of delegates from the rest of Canada did not use it, with the exception of the CUPW delegation! At the end of my speech, I asked those who understood what I had said to raise their hands. That was revealing, and everyone got the point. But it will take a long time to change entrenched attitudes.

Anti-Quebec prejudices remained strong...

The CLC reflected the incomprehension that the Canadian labour movement had in relation to Quebec. It must be said that the major Canadian media practice Quebec bashing regularly and to their heart’s content, as in the Maclean’s magazine article that charged Quebec with being the most corrupt province in Canada. With the exception of CUPW, very few pan-Canadian unions, including the CLC itself, have taken a position that unambiguously expresses Quebec’s right to self-determination.

A few years later, in 2002, on the occasion of Jean-Claude Parrot’s departure from the CLC, I had the honour to present on the rostrum a tribute to his work on behalf of the Quebec delegation; this time everyone used the interpretation devices…

In 2004, you got involved in an election with the New Democratic Party (NDP)...

I thought there was some momentum with a leader who had also been present in Quebec. Jack Layton wanted to change things and to include Quebec while respecting its autonomy. He even told me that he didn’t mind having a pro-sovereignty candidate. So I took the plunge in Papineau riding, which had long been held by the Liberal party. My friend Pierre Laliberté did the same thing and ran in Gatineau. I had the support of my local, and also of Michel Taylor, president of the Montréal Regional FTQ Council, as well as of CUPW national president Deborah Bourque. At the nomination meeting several other trade union members were present, including my friends from the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN).

Navigating in a federalist party was not easy...

The NDP communications officer was always by my side, making sure that I avoided answering directly to the “question” of my pro-independence beliefs. This did not, however, prevent Stéphane Dion, in a letter published in The Globe and Mail, from criticizing Jack Layton for having accepted the candidacy of an evil “séparatisse” in Papineau. After the election (I received 8% of the vote), the NDP concluded that its pro-Quebec discourse had not produced the hoped-for results and that instead this position had caused it to suffer losses in Western Canada. With Pierre Laliberté, we agreed that this desired alliance with the NDP did not have much of a future.

In 2005, your re-election as National Director of CUPW did not go very well...

When I ran for the position of National Director, I knew I was putting myself in a risky position. At the local level, thousands of members vote by mail for those running for the executive, but a national director is to be elected at convention by the 70 delegates from Montreal. My opponents knew it and worked more effectively than I. It must be said that I had often put my head on the chopping block, defending what I thought was important for the union, such as the collective agreement which made it possible to integrate the rural route mail couriers. I lost narrowly, by three votes.

For you, CUPW has been and remains a progressive union...

CUPW is one of the few unions that has played an important role on the Canadian political scene. It has led battles and strike actions from one end to another of Canada “and Quebec” which have been at the centre of media news. This union was a forerunner in obtaining the right to strike at the federal level, in the fight for a reduction in working time without loss of pay, and in obtaining parental leave. The mobilizations and political credit that it was able to build on a pan-Canadian scale have made it an imposing union force, but also a political force in opposing the Canadian government and the private companies that have always sought to gain entry to this sector for their profit. The fact that the Canadian postal sector has not yet been totally privatized, as it has been in many countries, is an achievement on the part of the union. No wonder it has been in the cross-hairs of governments.

Did you come back to basics then?

At the time, my defeat really disheartened me. But I went back to being a letter carrier, a job that I really liked. At the same time, I worked with the Montreal section of CUPW, which put me in charge of a special project at the Youville branch where I worked. The idea was to test an improvement in the flyer delivery process for the next collective agreement.

I also got involved again with the Regional Council of the Montréal FTQ and I was elected for a second time to the executive. With Michel Ducharme, we wanted to bring unions closer to popular groups mobilized in the Coalition Main rouge [Red hand coalition], formed in the fall of 2009 following the announcement by the then Liberal government that it would make greater use of user fees on public services and implement budgetary austerity [6].

You came up against the so-called concertation approach that prevailed at the FTQ...

The then president of the FTQ, Michel Arsenault, was not sympathetic to the Coalition Main Rouge. Like many union leaders, he feared this kind of coalition where unions are on an equal footing with many smaller groups. But ultimately, I think these positions were motivated more by the FTQ’s preference for tripartite consultation and partnership. In fact, it is only some local unions and regional labour bodies like the Montréal Central Council of the CSN and the Montréal Regional Council of the FTQ that have joined.

The concertation orientation has limited struggles and even resulted in defeats. In 2012, during the historic social mobilization in response to the student upsurge, the unions simply gave it lip service and prevented this movement from moving to a higher level. During the negotiations with the government, the leaderships of the centrals at no time threatened the government with a mobilization of their forces in aid of the student movement. In fact, these leaderships exerted more pressure on the student spokespersons than they did on the government [7]. In the years that followed, the various governments have continued their policies of social disengagement in education and health, the tragic consequences of which can be seen today.

Life then took you elsewhere...

I retired in the late summer of 2010, but soon after was hired by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) to work on union organizing with a bunch of young and dynamic activists who were at ASSÉ (Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante), including a certain Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. In the meantime, my involvement with Québec solidaire grew. I was part of the QS National Coordinating Committee for six years from 2012 to 2018. We had many debates, particularly with regard to electoral alliances with the Parti québécois, which raised several questions concerning our democratic functioning. The members had spoken out against these alliances twice, at the congresses preceding the elections of 2012 and 2014. But the day after the elections, it was as if we were faced with a blank page. This long road ended at the 2017 congress where the idea of ​​an alliance with the PQ was defeated after a wide-ranging debate that lasted several months. Fortunately, everyone agrees now. The results of 2018 [when QS elected 10 members to the National Assembly] would not have been the same if we had fallen into the trap of Jean-François Lisée, head of the PQ.[3] Since then, we have not made much progress in terms of our way of implementing this independence project and our strategy with regard to the Canadian state.

This question has led you to new initiatives...

The clarification of QS’s positions on these issues has been at the heart of my engagement within this party. Along with others, including mainly my comrade and friend Andrea Levy, we have established a pan-Canadian progressive network that met virtually almost monthly for several years. The emergence of Québec solidaire as an independentist left party raised many questions among the Canadian left, to which answers and perspectives had to be provided. The Canadian people have no interest in defending their own establishment against the people of Quebec fighting for their emancipation. Conversely, the support of the Canadian working class is essential to the survival of this project. For lack of support, we saw the failures of the Greek and Catalan progressive parties in 2015 and 2017.

Did this liaison work continue later?

I took part in several conferences in Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto and Calgary and I reported to the leadership bodies of Québec solidaire. I also worked closely with Naomi Klein’s team for the creation of the Leap Manifesto, along with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Roger Rashi, by trying among other things to adapt the text of the declaration to the reality of Quebec. For several years now, I have been writing a column in the journal Canadian Dimension which focuses mainly on politics in Quebec. At the same time, as QS’s (interim) co-spokesperson, I became more familiar with the struggles of the Indigenous nations. In the winter of 2013, I was in Ottawa during the Indigenous protests in support of the hunger strike of Theresa Spence, Chief of the Attawapiskat Nation, at the start of the Idle No More mobilizations. In the spring of that year, I met with the Algonquin population of Lac-Barrière accompanied by Geneviève Beaudet and André Richer, also of QS.[8]. In a delegation of 14 people, we heard the message of the Indigenous people and their very different vision of the territory. Michel Thusky, an elder in the community, explained to us that “the land does not belong to anyone, everyone can occupy it by respecting it and ensuring the sustainability of its resources. White governments see this same territory not as a precious ecosystem to be respected, but as an asset to be squandered.”

True to your convictions since the beginning of your activist life, international solidarity is always present...

In October 2014, I participated in Toronto, on behalf of QS, in an international meeting on public transport organized by Die Linke, the German left party. This gave me the opportunity to lay the groundwork that led to the invitation of Andreas Gunther, a representative of this party, to our congress in May 2015. In the meantime, Benoit Renaud worked to invite Cat Boyd of the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland. This was the beginning of our openness to international guests at congresses. In October 2017, I represented QS within a delegation of the international left in Barcelona at the initiative of the independentist left party CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy). In return, we invited to the QS congress in December 2017 two elected CUP members, Anna Gabriel and Eulalia Reguant.

In November 2018, thanks to you, my friend Pierre Beaudet, I had the opportunity to participate in the thematic Social forum on the mining and extractivist economy in Johannesburg, where I represented Québec solidaire. Then, in the summer of 2019, I attended the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention in Atlanta on behalf of QS, because although I have not been a member of the National Coordinating Committee since the National Council in December 2018, I am part of the party’s commission on global justice issues. As a socialist, internationalism is not an “extra” activity or a luxury, but a necessity. It is not always easy, but we must continue.

We have no choice, we have to look to the future...

COVID-19 has intensified the challenges of securing basic living needs on a level not seen since the recession of 1929. The crisis is global, global warming has caused devastating fires in Australia and California while the last plateau of unspoiled Canadian Arctic ice has just collapsed. The future of society depends on us. Neoliberal political parties cannot represent a way out, they are at the origin of the crisis.

The challenges are high. The unions have had some victories, but they have not been able to address the source of the problems, constantly restarting the cycle of gains and setbacks, which eventually deepen. The broad left has succeeded in building a political party since 2006 with Québec solidaire, but the junction with social movements and unions has not really materialized.

If there are common traits in the various struggles of my militant life, I would say that democracy would be at the top of the list. This fight is taking on decisive importance today. We have seen how easy it can be for a government like that of François Legault of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to lead by decree if we lack vigilance.

Horizontal democracy must become a fundamental value within Québec solidaire because it is, even more in this time of confinement, the essential basis for the mobilization and life of the party.

The lessons of the coup d’état in Chile have also guided my activist journey throughout my life. If neoliberal governments can be ousted, the capitalist institutions that support them will still be present. Another eloquent illustration was the economic crushing of the Syriza government by the troika [9] in Greece in 2015.

We cannot conceive of our struggles without the development of an internationalist strategy. The future of the planet in environmental, social and health terms depends on it. The Quebec for which we are campaigning and whose population will regain control of its destiny, will constitute a step forward and generate a new social dynamic which, we hope, will transcend our borders. But the Canadian establishment will not stand idly by. Building solidarity with the working class in the rest of Canada, in alliance with the Indigenous nations, remains an unavoidable challenge. This has been and still continues to be at the centre of my militant journey.

NOTES

[1] Popular Unity was an alliance that brought together a broad spectrum ranging from Communists to the Christian left and had the support of the unions. Elected in 1970, it proposed a program to fight inflation, revive the agrarian economy, nationalize the banks and the copper industry in which the United States and Canada had interests. Pinochet’s coup d’état was made possible by operations undertaken by the CIA in 1970. See: “Un dictateur mis en place par les États-Unis,” Le Devoir, December 11, 2006.

[2] The Syndicat des postiers du Canada changed its name after merging with the Letter Carriers Union of Canada (LCUC) to become the Syndicat des travailleurs et travailleuses des postes (STTP). The name in English has remained unchanged: Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).

[3] See his autobiography: Joe Davidson and John Deverell, Joe Davidson (Toronto, James Lorimer & Company Publishers, 1978).

[4] See his autobiography, Jean-Claude Parrot, Ma vie de syndicaliste (Montréal, Boréal 2005). [In English, My Union, My Life (Fernwood, 2005).] Note, the terms national president or national leadership are used by the union.

[5] This is recounted in Julie White’s book, Mail and Female. Women and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (Toronto, Thompson Educational Publishing, 1990).

[6] See the Declaration of the Red Hand Coalition: <https://www.nonauxhausses.org/declaration/>.

[7] See on this subject the collective work, Le printemps des carrés rouges, by André Frappier, Richard Poulin and Bernard Rioux (Saint-Joseph-du-lac, M éditeur, 2012).

[8] At the time, QS did not have any activist representing the indigenous nations. [At the QS congress in November 2019, the delegates voted unanimously to establish a National Indigenous Commission (CAN in its French acronym) to give voice to the party’s First Nations and Inuit members. https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2019/11/with-little-debate-but-few-skirmishes.html]

[9] The troika appoints the experts representing the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

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[1] The CEGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel, or general and vocational college) is a public post-secondary, pre-university college peculiar to the Quebec education system.

[2] See Jean-Claude Parrot, My Union, My Life (see text note 4), chapters six and seven.

[3] See “Québec solidaire: No to an electoral pact with the PQ, Yes to a united front against austerity, for energy transition and for independence,” https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2017/05/quebec-solidaire-no-to-electoral-pact.html

Révolution écosocialiste: A strategic perspective for uniting ecosocialists in Quebec

Newly formed organization proposes a green, ecosocialist and democratic program for building a mass movement in the 21st century.

Introduction

Published below is the “Basis of Unity” adopted by Quebec ecosocialist activists at the founding meeting on October 18 of a new organization, Révolution écosocialiste. First published in the web journal Presse-toi à gauche, the statement was signed by prominent members of the left party Québec solidaire. My English translation was first published in Climate & Capitalism.

Interviewed by the magazine Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, Benoit Renaud explained that he and the other signatories felt that an earlier networking group, the Réseau écosocialiste founded in 2013, was no longer the activist organization they had originally envisaged, and instead functioned as little more than a “talk shop” (lieu d’échange). The new organization, he said, would succeed the Réseau, which will now be dissolved. “The mass mobilizations of recent years over climate change and the emergence of more radical groups within this movement (like Extinction Rebellion) indicate to us that the future of the struggle for socialism will probably unfold to a large degree through the political development of the ecology movement.”

Asked about the new group’s relation to Québec solidaire, Renaud said that while they thought the electoral and parliamentary action of QS was essential, it should be “subordinate to the development of social struggles.” A mass ecosocialist party is needed, but whether QS could become such a party was an open question, he said. As a result of its electoral success, the party was becoming bureaucratized, a small minority of “political specialists” tending to substitute for the membership and to see themselves as the party leaders. Révolution écosocialiste would fight to get the party to adopt “horizontal, inclusive and participationist structures,” and to help make QS more a “party of the streets,” not just the ballot box.

It would also seek to radicalize the party’s orientation, to make it a party of system change. “But we are not ‘resolutionaries’. Révolution écosocialiste wants to build the movements that will enable us to overcome the present crisis of civilization.”

In an accompanying article on “a green, ecosocialist and democratic plan for the 21^st century,” founding members Bernard Rioux and Roger Rashi critique the Legault government’s “green economy plan” — “a smokescreen” — and outline their idea of “a green plan that opens the way to a fundamental transformation.” It includes nationalization of the energy industry, socialization of the banks and financial institutions, and massive public investment in green, quality jobs.

The founding members have also published proposals on the structures and functioning of Révolution écosocialiste. They plan to hold general membership meetings “every two months or more often as needed.” Among the proposed structures are an editorial committee to manage an RE web site, and an educational committee, each with at least four members elected on a gender-parity basis. As well there will be a women’s caucus. Membership dues will be set at $10 a month.

Révolution écosocialiste was publicly launched on December 15 in a webinar featuring presentations and comments by some of RE’s founding members. Pending development of its website, RE can be contacted at the following address: info@ecosocialisme.ca.

Révolution écosocialiste has set itself ambitious goals. Socialists outside Quebec will want to collaborate with RE and learn from it in a spirit of solidarity.

– Richard Fidler

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Ecosocialist Revolution: Basis of Unity

Révolution écosocialiste contributes to the construction of a socialist movement in which a mass socialist party will be called upon to play a key role. This requires a renewal of the trade union movement and the development of combative and democratic social movements. To be successful, our campaigns ‒ electoral, union or social ‒ must be situated within an overall strategy, which must itself be based on an analysis of the economic and political system and our historical situation. Our basis of unity, which unites us, presents our strategic perspective and our vision of the socialist movement to be built.

A. For socialism

A1 We want to help build a socialist world that will end the exploitation and oppression that are inherent in capitalism. Everyone has the right to a free and fully creative life. In a socialist society, a democratically planned and administered economy will enable us to meet the challenge of climate change and to preserve our ecosystems and biodiversity. A socialist democracy will redefine politics by extending democracy to our workplaces and within our communities.

B. The strategic centrality of the class struggle to overthrow capitalism

B1 Capitalism is based on exploitation and commodification. Capitalist society is divided into classes. A small minority dominates the economy and monopolizes the means of production and distribution from which the great majority subject to this domination is dispossessed. The resources to which people are entitled and what they must do to survive are determined by their social class, but also by their racialized group, gender identity, and ability.

B2 Capitalist firms are in competition and must therefore maximize profits by reducing costs, intensifying labour and adopting technologies that increase its productivity while making it more precarious. Financial companies are also competing for a share of household debt and developing more and more murky financial products for this purpose. This frantic race for profitability in the context of an unplanned economy leads to recurring crises, both economic and ecological.

B3 While immense wealth is produced, the majority of the population struggles to make ends meet, and our access to what is necessary for a dignified and fulfilling life remains far removed from what it could be. At the top, society is dominated by the capitalist class ‒ a small minority of large property owners and their managers. The profits of this class are derived from the efforts of the vast majority, the working class.

B4 The profits of those above depend on the work of the vast majority below. This gives us enormous potential power, therefore. We have the power to stop production and the flow of profits, or to create a political crisis with a public service strike. We are the vast majority of the population and we have the power to transform a political system that protects the power of capital.

B5 Improving our lives now and eventually putting an end to capitalism requires the mobilization of this immense potential power and poses the central strategic question of the organization of the working class ‒ the construction of its unity in all its diversity. This project is at the heart of our strategic perspective.

C. Against the other systems of exploitation

C1 Capitalism and the other systems of exploitation ‒ racism, colonialism and patriarchy ‒ are co-constituted; that is, they are interdependent and feed on each other. Employers use sexist or racist tactics to divide their employees. Beyond these tactics, the normal process of capitalist accumulation inevitably fuels racial and gender divisions within society. Conversely, the division of society into classes is also modulated by patriarchy, racism and various other systems of oppression and exploitation (castes, capacities, religions, heteronormativity, cissexism, colonialism, poverty, etc.). In particular, class membership is determined in part by gender and even more largely by race.

C2 Fighting against patriarchy and racism requires confronting the power of capital because it opposes, for example, the taxation of its profits that is necessary to finance a network of public, free and quality childcare centres, or because it helps maintain the hyper-precarious status of migrant workers. Conversely, effectively confronting capital involves attacking patriarchy, racism, and all the forms of oppression and exploitation that divide us. In this, we recognize that the sexual and racial division of labour (including self-employment and underemployment) as well as racist and patriarchal violence (including police, domestic and sexual violence) are central issues that cannot be solved only by struggle against capitalism.

C3 Ecofeminism must also be part of our analysis of oppressions. If the capitalist can transform the earth into a commodity by extracting natural wealth and that he can mutilate, burn, or sterilize the earth, so also does he treat women as a commodity, and people who identify as women suffer rape, violence, assault and feminicide.

C4 In order to build a truly free society, the socialists therefore aim to end all oppressions and forms of exploitation. To achieve this goal, we strive for the organization of workers as a class united in all its diversity. This implies balancing the demands of class, gender and ethnic origins.

C5 We stress the importance of struggles for demands from which the entire working class will benefit ‒ free and quality public health and education systems; the right to decent housing; the strengthening of trade union rights, etc. ‒ to the extent that they also make it possible to attack other oppressions and forms of exploitation. These demands are particularly beneficial for those who identify as women and for people of colour, as they reduce the competition for resources that fuels prejudice and divisions within the working class. By contributing to the socioeconomic security of oppressed and superexploited people, they thereby reduce the power of the oppressors and exploiters, including that of abusive bosses, violent spouses, abusive government practices or racist landlords.

C6 These demands, which will benefit all workers, are however insufficient. Socialists must also directly address the forms of domination and exploitation that divide the working class and and we must support the autonomous movements of oppressed groups. In Quebec, this includes, among others (but not exclusively!) the fight against violations of the rights of racialized minorities, for example Islamophobia; the defense and extension of the right to abortion; the fight against the sexual division of labour and violence against women; support of Indigenous struggles;defensee of the rights of LGBTQ + people; and defense of the rights of people with disabilities.

C7 The socialists must help turn these struggles into mass mobilizations and work to integrate their demands into an overall strategy. While some argue that the organization and autonomous struggles of people who identify as women or of racialized people undermine class solidarity, we believe on the contrary that they can nourish it. The experience of collective power of people who identify as women and / or racialized people in struggle can lead them to aim for broader class solidarity, and inspire other groups to build our power in the face of capital. Solidarity is contagious.

C8 Our search for class unity, on the other hand, leads us to reject the perspective which would simply attribute oppressions and the various forms of exploitation to erroneous or harmful ideas rather than target their systemic sources, and which resort to shaming tactics in order to transform behaviour. Such a perspective makes emancipation dependent on the goodwill of the oppressor and undermines class solidarity and struggles against exploitation and oppression by dividing our forces. Having said that, we consider the concept of privilege, as well as the theory and activism informed by this concept, to be compatible with a socialist approach, and we recognize that a political group must have an internal and formalized policy in order to fight against the oppression within it.

C9 To fight against other systems of exploitation, the groups concerned must necessarily organize and fight on an autonomous basis. For example, history shows us that the demands, the realities of women, the violence they suffer are not resolved only by the abolition of capitalism. Patriarchy has for too long survived different forms of social organization. It is necessary that the groups concerned organize themselves on their own bases and remain organized throughout the various struggles, both at the very base in the unions, political parties, neighbourhoods, and community groups with forms of caucus and on regional, national, continental and global bases in broad, gender-specific and democratic coalitions. Women-only forms are essential to enable the groups concerned to take their place, to develop their confidence and to combat the violence suffered. This is the best way to make clear the stigma left by the different systems of exploitation and oppression.

C10 A socialist organization that claims to be feminist must work to build such autonomous movements. For example, socialist activists who are involved in the struggles of the women’s movement work to strengthen this unity and solidarity of all people who identify as women without exception. But as socialists, they must also advance demands that challenge patriarchy and capitalism and create within this autonomous movement a class-struggle current. The World March of Women brings together groups, coalitions and women’s centres internationally and is the embryo of such a movement. And from this autonomous movement, it is possible to organize mass movements bringing together first people who identify as women. The Chilean and Argentine examples are important demonstrations of this.

D. The neoliberal offensive against our gains

D1 Anchoring our struggles against exploitation and oppression in the current historical context requires taking note of the defeat of the working class, a defeat which put an end to the struggles and achievements of the post-war boom. Trade union rights are under attack, union membership stagnates or shrinks, the number of strikes is at record lows, and workers are forced into unending concessions. Many social movements have limited themselves to their narrow corporate interests and been co-opted by the State. The social democratic parties have taken a decidedly neoliberal turn, and the communist parties continue their long decline to insignificance. For the first time since the end of the 19th century, the working class in many countries no longer has parties capable of expressing their interests.

D2 Neoliberalism has a material anchorage and is not just an ideology ‒ it is the politics of Capital but it is not encountering effective mass resistance. The defeat and fragmentation of the working class leads to a degradation of working and living conditions. It entails as well a stagnation in real wages, even as labour productivity continues to rise. The erosion of social programs and the commodification of public services encourage recourse to debt. All of this fuels the growth of inequalities and prompts the search for regressive individual solutions such as tax cuts.

D3 The economic situation is characterized by a triple crisis. The Great Recession of 2008 (as well as the slowdown in growth and the period of austerity it opened), the ecological and climate emergency, and the crisis of liberal democracies (parties succeed each other in office, neoliberal policies remain, and the far right gains ground!) are among the many dimensions of the growing loss of legitimacy of the political and economic systems in place.

D4 It is in this context that many large-scale mobilizations have taken place in recent years. For lack of organizations and strategic perspectives that would allow it, however, most of these struggles produce little or nothing in the way of an accumulation of popular anticapitalist forces.

D5 After an initial impetus in this direction in Latin America, we have more recently seen a return of resistance movements towards partisan politics in the countries of the Global North. Québec Solidaire, Bernie Sanders, the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and Podemos are just some of the examples. These are promising signs that may allow for better articulation and defense of the interests of the working classes.

D6 Social mobilizations and partisan politics must, however, find a way to express themselves within an overall strategy.

E. Advance towards socialism

E1 We know that winning elections is not the same as taking power. Without an organized class of workers (primarily in the workplace, where our potential power is greatest), a socialist electoral victory means little.

E2 We reject a strategy limited to gradual reforms which does not contemplate the necessary break with capitalism. Fighting for reforms is essential but reformism, which aims to administer the capitalist economy to the advantage of both capital and workers, means locking ourselves into a dead end. Reformism seeks to support the profitability and productivity of companies in order to create the resources necessary to finance better wages and social programs ... even as the support of profitability and productivity under capitalism requires slashing wages, intensifying work, and liberalizing markets. While some progress can be achieved during a period of growth, crises ‒ recurrent and inevitable under capitalism ‒ will eventually impose austerity policies. These are the “automatic” and inevitable disciplinary mechanisms of capitalism.

E3 Many historical examples clearly show the impossibility of a reformist approach: the social democratic government of the 1970s in Sweden, the socialist government of François Mitterrand in the early 1980s, the government of the NDP in Ontario in the early 1990s, or the one developed by Syriza, in Greece, from 2015 to 2019, to name just a few. All of these leftist governments abandoned their progressive agendas in favour of austerity measures.

E4 There are reasons for this. In addition to the disciplinary mechanisms already mentioned, the capitalists, if their interests are threatened, will lead ‒ or threaten to lead ‒ an “investment strike.” A socialist government will also be exposed to sabotage by the senior civil service, the command structures of the police and armed forces ‒ which may lead to the suspension of democracy, as was the case in Chile in 1973.

E5 Conversely, we also reject an ultra-leftist posture that substitutes the adventures of a small number of activists in place of organized and democratic mass movements. We reject a sectarian and purely propagandist political posture that adopts an air of radicalism but which can rally only a small minority of people who are already convinced.

E6 A break with capitalism is clearly not on the political agenda in the short term. The question is therefore how we can advance towards this rupture.

E7 The work of socialist organization must be directed towards the great majority of workers who are not yet politically active. We need to get people to openly confront the capitalists and their politicians on the basis of immediate demands, while linking each specific immediate issue to its root cause: capitalism. Our aim is to create a mass movement that forces the elites to make concessions ‒ and eventually ousts them from power.

E8 Accordingly, our strategic perspective aims to combine the work of social mobilization and electoral work within a socialist outlook. Our essential task is to participate in the reconstruction of the power of the working class, which will ultimately have to fight for the seizure of power. In our work within the social movements we must seek above all to organize a current that gives priority to the development of a class and mass struggle perspective. In Quebec, this means today striving to make Québec solidaire a mass party of the working class.

E9 Québec Solidaire must become a party that will combine its electoral campaigns with the support of extra-parliamentary mobilizations in order to convince a growing number of workers of the impasse of capitalism and the need for socialism. This requires fighting for structural reforms which, in addition to improving living conditions, bring about a transfer of power from capital to our class. These are transitional reforms which go beyond the capitalist horizon, and which involve struggles that develop capacities and raise the expectations of working people.

E10 We do not claim to know exactly how the transition from capitalism to socialism will take place, but we wish to contribute to the construction of a party is able to intervene in the crisis of legitimacy of capitalism and of the State as it becomes more acute. Québec solidaire could even contribute to creating such a crisis by supporting the development of democratic resistance movements controlled by their rank and file ‒ masses of people leading in the organization of strikes, the occupation of workplaces, student strikes, massive demonstrations ‒ and by forming a government that implements structural reforms that attack the power of capital.

E11 Such massive and democratic mobilizations, combined with a government committed to structural reforms, will have to lead to a situation of rupture with capitalism. Since the ruling class never cedes power without resistance, a socialist government supported by popular mobilizations will have to do whatever is necessary to defend democracy and its mandate and to accomplish a program of redistribution, expropriation, and radical democratic reform of state institutions. At the same time, the government will have to support the development of new popular democratic institutions that are sure to emerge from the grassroots in the workplaces and communities.

F. Class-struggle election campaigns

F1 We want to form a mass class-based party that both conducts election campaigns and helps to build the social movements. We want Québec solidaire to become such a party. This implies contributing to the development of struggles and a class unity that is much greater than what exists today.

F2 Just as the party’s goal cannot simply be to win elections, its election campaigns cannot be reduced to “communications strategies”. The interests of workers are not created by rhetoric. The party discourse must articulate material interests and class conflicts that already exist latently in society. Between the lukewarmness of opportunist discourse and propagandist slang, we must develop a discourse that is anchored in people’s daily problems, explicitly links them to class relations, and helps to build our mobilizations.

F3 For the majority of the population, politics boils down to elections. To ignore the importance of electoral work is therefore to confine oneself to the margins and political insignificance. Our aim, however, is to help broaden the popular conception of politics, to take it beyond elections and parliament.

F4 One of our biggest challenges is to use electoral politics to develop our power while avoiding the trap of cooptation. The deputies and the governments of the left must serve our movement, never the other way around. Socialist politicians should act first as organizers of the movement, and then as legislators. They must use their positions and parliamentary resources to support the organization of workers and demonstrate how capitalist politicians are standing in the way of necessary changes.

G. A bottom-up strategy

G1 The most important task for socialists is to help develop a combative movement of workers, diverse and democratic. Our class-struggle electoral campaigns must be part of a socialism “from below” which involves democratically organized struggles and enables those leading them to develop their capacities and their political consciousness. As we strive to change our political and economic context, we transform ourselves ‒ it is this process of self-transformation and development of our capacities that will help us to organize our political and economic institutions democratically.

G2 Because capitalists depend on their exploitation for profit, the greatest potential power of workers is in the workplace. These places bring together individuals from all social backgrounds and generate common interests that can serve as a basis for powerful movements.

G3 With this in mind, socialists should help organize grassroots workers and build the link between a socialist movement and the militant minority that is already organizing and struggling in the workplace. Together, we can build democratic and combative unions that confront employers, organize unorganized workers, and lead political campaigns that go beyond the workplace. Likewise, we must support democratic and combative tendencies in other social movements.

G4 It is above all not a question of “infiltrating” and interfering in trade union and social movements without their knowledge, but on the contrary of contributing to the democratization and autonomy of movements within which we ourselves are rooted. There is a gradation of levels and methods of support. We can provide concrete, tactical and material support for the organization of struggles on the ground. We can produce analyzes that situate struggles in their broader political and socio-economic context. Eventually, and when a real implantation allows it, we can contribute to the strategic debates that orient the struggles in a transparent and democratic way.

G5 Given our limited resources, our attention should shift to strategic economic sectors and social movements ‒ those in which workers have the best chance to organize and exercise maximum power over employers. Where possible, we should work with union leaders and institutions, bearing in mind that union leaders and staff are often resistant to our perspective of union renewal. Knowing this, and when possible, we must prioritize the formation of caucuses of members who aim to democratize and revitalize their union organizations from the grassroots.

H. The struggle for independence

H1 The Canadian state was built through a colonial policy aimed at the assimilation of the Aboriginal, Métis, Inuit, Acadian and Quebec nations. The social and political struggles waged from the 1960s made it possible to largely decouple class exploitation and the national oppression of the Québécois, which had until then been largely interwoven. Today, workers in Quebec are exploited as much by Canadian, American and globalized capital as by that of Québec Inc., whose leaders have sided with the federalist camp. The Quebec nation is not an ethnic group or a simple subjective identity, but a block of classes linked by a common history and territory, a culture in constant evolution, a diversity of social groups and common institutions that define its trajectory and its possibilities.

H2 However, the rights (political, economic, social, etc.) of the Quebec nation are still being violated. The Canadian Constitution does not recognize the existence of a distinct Quebec nation and the federal state denies it its right to self-determination and dispossesses it of several fundamental political and economic levers. Today, national oppression is expressed in the constitutional and fiscal constraints that the federal state imposes on the Quebec state. These are first of all the inability of the Quebec nation to freely determine its political future (the Clarity Act), the imperialism of the Canadian state (a petro-state state, laws serving the interests of of mining companies, tax havens) and the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments prevents the Quebec nation from acting collectively to improve its conditions, to develop a society that is just, ecological, democratic and based on social solidarity.

H3 At the same time, the First Nations continue to suffer a degrading oppression and a denial of their fundamental rights. The colonial oppression suffered by Indigenous peoples is as much the responsibility of the federal state as of the Quebec provincial state, which is a subordinate cog of the Canadian state. The liberation of Quebec and Indigenous peoples therefore implies breaking the Canadian colonial state. Regardless of who its perpetrators are, colonialism must be fought in all its forms: territorial dispossession, denial of human rights, cultural genocide, exploitation of immigrants and people of colour by the bosses, the state and its police, environmental destruction, manufacturing and sale of arms in support of imperialist projects, etc.

H4 The struggle for the independence of Quebec and the liberation of the other oppressed nations must be a key element of our socialist strategy. One of the main flaws of Canadian capitalism lies in the federalism which serves as its political envelope while oppressing the minority nations within it. The struggle for independence must go beyond the provincialist framework and be firmly part of a pan-Canadian strategy. This struggle must break out of the bourgeois nationalist straitjacket ‒ the idea that our interests are closer to the capitalists here than to those of workers in other nations. The task is not to oppose the Quebec nation to the minorities within it, as the identity-based nationalists so crudely, but to bring together the working classes, the unemployed, subordinate groups and Indigenous peoples within a plurinational liberation project. An emancipatory independence project must provide a socialist, anti-racist and decolonial content to the national question, and this implies a break with the Parti Québécois, which has turned the aspiration for national independence into its opposite, in particular by supporting free trade and US foreign policy. The nationalist elites have also promoted a conception of national identity that has fuelled racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.

H5 The independentist left must instead link its struggle to a project for a socialist society while supporting the self-determination of the Indigenous nations and developing solidarity with popular mobilizations across Canada. Thus, the struggles of the Quebec nation for independence and of the Indigenous peoples for their self-determination can and must encourage workers in the Rest of Canada to break with the majority nationalism which is part and parcel of their exploitation. We support any approach aimed, on the one hand, at the immediate decolonization of current Canadian and Quebec institutions, and on the other hand, the constitution of new institutions based on the principle of self-determination of peoples as well as the democratization of political and economic life in the territory occupied by Canada. Thus, we want to contribute to the establishment of a common front between the different forces at work to put in place concrete measures such as reparations for Indigenous peoples, popular constituent assemblies, the abolition of tax havens for mining companies, as well as the dismantling of the Canadian military-industrial complex.

J. A necessary internationalism

J1 The struggle for independence and for socialism in Quebec must also necessarily be part of an internationalist policy. The Canadian state is a full-fledged imperialist state and a partner of US imperialism. The struggle within ‒ and in opposition to ‒ the Canadian state must be waged in solidarity with resistance to imperialism and colonialism throughout the world. Likewise, we must confront the Quebec state, which supports the exploitation of labour and natural resources internationally and on its territory (the employment of temporary migrant workers).

J2 We are in solidarity with socialist and democratic struggles, against capitalism and against dictatorships everywhere on the planet. Consequently, we reject the false logic that “the enemy of our enemy is our friend” (sometimes called “camp-ism”) ‒ a political position that can lead to the defense of dictatorships in the name of anti-imperialism.

J3 Although these struggles must be fought in separate national frameworks, workers ultimately form a class exploited by capital on a global scale. We therefore want a socialist movement which accumulates victories throughout the world. This implies building strong relationships with socialist parties and organizations in other countries, and therefore sending and receiving delegations, participating in international strategic debates and ultimately coordinating our respective national strategies.

K. Just transition and ecosocialism

K1 The international scientific community is clear: a rapid and decisive change of course must be carried out in the face of the climate and environmental emergency. We cannot trust the capitalists to do this. A small number of large multinational companies produce the majority of carbon emissions. The solution to the climate emergency cannot be based on individual actions, or even simply on technical and scientific proposals. It is a question of power and control over the economy, which requires powerful collective action.

K2 In other words, the environmental issue is a class issue. First, because it is the poorest everywhere on the planet who suffer the most from the impacts of climate change. Secondly, because avoiding the necessary energy transition serves the interests of capital, while large companies produce the commodities that limit and guide our consumption choices while maximizing their profits. Finally, because it is the workers who are best positioned strategically to impose a transition on the capitalists by exercising the power they have to stop the normal functioning of the economic system.

K3 The environmental struggle must therefore be based on the working class and actively involve the trade union movement. It must be carried out in such a way as to explicitly serve the material interests of this class, not to blame its members.

K4 Carbon taxes and carbon trading go against the interests of workers and are ineffective; in Canada the revenues generated are largely paid as compensation in the form of dividends rather than financing the transition. These policies leave the initiative in the hands of private companies ‒ which necessarily prioritize maximizing their profits ‒ and total carbon emissions therefore continue to rise. What needs to be taxed is not a molecule (carbon) ‒ it is the rich and the corporations that benefit from this system. The revenues generated must be used to finance a just transition plan that allows us to exit the carbon economy. This plan must substantially and immediately improve the living conditions of the workers. This means, for example, infrastructure projects and the conversion of large undertakings that guarantee green, quality jobs, the development of mass public transit that drastically reduces congestion, and the nationalization and democratization of key economic sectors.

K5 There will be no green capitalism, and socialism will have to be “ecosocialism,” helping to bring about a transformation of our relationship with nature through a democratization of the economy. We will then be able to organize production not to maximize profits, but to meet our needs while preserving the only planet we have.

(Thanks to Roger Rashi for assistance with the translation.)

Quebec, Canada and the Indigenous Peoples: Toward Plurinational Alliances around a Decolonial Outlook?

Introduction

The latest issue of the Quebec journal Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, published in September, revisits the Quebec national question in light of the mounting struggle against climate catastrophe, the growth of Indigenous resistance, and the crisis of Quebec’s national movement. A number of articles probe the potential for creation of the strategic class alliances and perspectives that are needed if we are to begin a fundamental social transformation that re-imagines not only the Quebec reality but its place in the creation of an ecosocialist society in the Canadian, North American and global context.

I publish below, in my translation, an article by NCS editor Pierre Beaudet introducing some of the key themes in this issue, followed by what I consider an outstanding contribution by Dalie Giroux that challenges the Quebec left to rethink national emancipation within a decolonial perspective that can help enlist Indigenous and international solidarity around a common project of rethinking the relationship between national and social emancipation.

‒ Richard Fidler

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Our friends in Canada

By Pierre Beaudet

Until the 1960s, the left in Canada and in Quebec was mainly Canadian and Anglophone. During Premier Maurice Duplessis’s “Grande Noirceur” (the great darkness), the provincial government drew heavily on the reactionary right wing of the Catholic church, making life very difficult for Quebec progressives. Some trade unionists and artists chose exile instead. In this period, as well, the Canadian left, from the Communist party to the social-democracy (later the NDP) held fast to the idea of a strong federal state as the vehicle for implementing the social changes sought by the popular classes, such as medicare, social welfare, etc.

Quebec demands for national emancipation were relegated to the sidelines, regarded as an abhorrence to be fought by all means. The CP denounced the “separatist threat” in terms not notably dissimilar from those used by Ottawa’s political establishment; a courageous exception, sometimes, was the party’s intellectual leader and historian Stanley Ryerson who defended the right to self-determination of the Quebec people. After much debate, the NDP shut the door on its Quebec branch, which went on to form the Parti Socialiste du Québec and called for constitutional protection of that right. Later, the NDP campaigned alongside the parties of reaction for the No side in the 1980 and 1995 referendums. However, while this effectively eliminated the Canadian left from Quebec it opened room for the creation and development of a pro-independence Quebec left.¹ But the links between Canadian and Quebec progressives remained infrequent apart from the efforts of a few courageous trade unions that fought for social emancipation linked with national emancipation. Examples are the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Some decades later

This non-dialogue had many perverse effects. In Canada, the left failed to wage a resolute fight against the post-colonial state structures, not even when the Constitution was “patriated” by Pierre Trudeau in 1982 in the face of intense opposition from Quebec’s National Assembly and public opinion. After the 1995 referendum, the NDP members of Parliament (with few exceptions) voted for the so-called “Clarity bill” which limited even the likelihood of a negotiated agreement with Canada following a Quebec vote for independence. In the short period during which he led that party, Jack Layton tried to shift the party’s position, but after his death the party under Thomas Mulcair’s leadership returned to its hard-line federalist alignment. Quebec’s attraction to the NDP was short-lived.

The non-dialogue did not help the cause of the left in either Quebec or Canada, and efforts to achieve coordination on inter-provincial issues were difficult and uncertain. During the Summit of the Peoples of the Americas, in Quebec City in April 2001, in opposition to the proposal of a hemispheric free-trade area of the Americas (FTAA), groups such as the Council of Canadians tried to impose the same Canadian perspective “from coast to coast.” Canadian unions more attuned to Quebec concerns supported the position of almost all Quebec participants that the fight against the FTAA was not tied to “strengthening” the Canadian state. A progressive magazine published in Winnipeg, Canadian Dimension, upheld this point (as it still does), providing Canadian progressives with information and analyses concerning Quebec’s popular movements and struggles.²

Subsequently, attempts at dialogue outside the framework of the formal organizations were initiated by André Frappier of Québec solidaire, who met over several years with various left-oriented groups in Toronto, Edmonton, Halifax and Vancouver.³ The basic idea was to meet and discuss the national questions in the Canadian state, in an effort to combat the substantial indifference on these issues in both the Quebec and Canadian left. Some progress was made with a small part of the Canadian left, but it can hardly be said that the fundamental idea in the Quebec left of combining anticapitalist struggle with a challenge to “made in Canada” colonialism is widely understood or accepted among Canadian progressives.⁴

This timid reopening to dialogue has been encouraged by political developments among the Indigenous peoples. Their reawakening and leadership of some mass movements targets the very essence of the Canadian state, built upon a persisting colonial dispossession and thus challenging the legitimacy of the federal government. As the Dené intellectual activist Glen Coulthard has said, the Indigenous struggle will go nowhere if it does not become a wider anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggle.⁵

In recent years some Indigenous leaders like Roméo Saganash have voiced publicly what many Indigenous think, that their anticolonial struggle will be strengthened if it finds ways to interface with the struggle for Quebec emancipation. And this requires that the Québécois openly acknowledge the right to self-determination of the Indigenous peoples.⁶

The Quebec challenge

The struggle for Quebec emancipation will be conducted in Quebec, of course. However, we must be conscious of the balance of forces that exists between this project and its opponents. Those elites are politically organized around the federal state and its subaltern relays in the provinces. They have their counterparts in the Quebec bourgeoisie and its political expressions in the Quebec Liberal party and the Coalition Avenir Québec, now the government. They are supported overwhelmingly by U.S. imperialism, which our first sovereigntist premier René Lévesque failed to see when he tried to convince the big shots in New York and Washington that the sovereigntist project would be completely harmless in the North American context and that Quebec would remain a subaltern ally like Canada. This dream that Quebec’s independence could be negotiated peacefully misled the people, including in the two referendums. It is not hard to see that for U.S. imperialism, access to Canada’s rich resources, and the interests of continental defense against the Russian and Chinese “threat” are priorities, which means that it is imperative for the rulers in both Washington and Ottawa to keep Canada as it is. Long ago Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon, to mention only them, understood this very well, which is why they emphasized the need for connecting with the forces of change in the Americas.

Break down the wall

How are we going to breach this wall of indifference in English Canada? As Andrea Levy and André Frappier argue,

“it is necessary to define a strategy of common organized struggle to retake power in the Canadian state. The struggle must be common because in Quebec alone we cannot manage to create an egalitarian and independent society without confronting the Canadian state, and because an ecologist perspective cannot be implemented solely within our borders. Quebec needs the support and collaboration of the workers and popular groups in English Canada, and these cannot develop an emancipatory perspective without adhering to a strategy of common anticapitalist struggle with the progressive forces of Quebec.”⁷

That was in fact the message that was conveyed in 2014 with the Peoples Social Forum that brought together in Ottawa several hundred activists and thinkers from Quebec, Canada and the First Nations. With Québec solidaire and the social movements, we need to continue these efforts, engaging in manifestations of mutual support and solidarity.

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Indigenous peoples and Quebec: Rethinking decolonization

By Dalie Giroux

Dalie Giroux teaches in the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. She has published, inter alia, many studies on the cultural and scientific relationships between the Indigenous peoples and state cultures within capitalist society.

My purpose here is to outline some thoughts that can assist in a reassessment of the question of Quebec independence in light of relations between Quebec and the Indigenous peoples. This entails in part undertaking a necessary albeit painful critique of the history of these relations since the election of the Parti québécois (PQ) in 1976. It also means proposing some principles that can guide us in a new development of Quebec anticolonialist thinking, which up to now has failed to question the British colonial regime from a truly inclusive standpoint, and without serious or sufficient consideration being given to the Indigenous presence on this continent for thousands of years.

Quebec’s colonial legacy, its obscure expression in law, its mentality, the form of its productive activity, was established in successive steps through the operation of a set of dispossession measures that we must inspect, understand, criticize and dismantle if we are to pursue a collective policy of fighting this dispossession. Approaching dispossession from a decolonial perspective based on the Quebec situation is not inspired by some patriotic necessity but rather expresses the need to confront a history that we did not choose but inherited, as we have inherited and cultivated the ethical tensions inscribed in our political life. This rethinking must address the following questions:

• How can we escape, all of us, in the here and now, from the complex structure of dispossession that is the legacy of French and British colonialisms?

• How are we to undermine and eliminate the measures of dispossession by accumulation that define that structure?

• How, especially, can we combine all the mutual expressions of struggles for emancipation – decolonial, antiracist, feminist, pro-immigration, ecologist – within a materialist horizon, without eliminating the singular features of the places, affects, temporalities, and narratives that constitute, traverse and animate our specific common habitat?

Masters in our own house?

Let us begin by backtracking a bit. Modern Quebec arose at the turn of the 1960s around the proposal to become “Maîtres chez nous,” masters in our own house, and to take control of the whole of the provincial territory the limits of which had been fixed in 1912 by federal legislation. Retroactively, it must be observed that this Quebec, master of itself, had been built on the basis of a colonial-type state. Quebec’s exit from the Canadian constitutional fold, as set out in the sovereignty project put forward by the Quebec nationalist forces, was not an accomplished movement of decolonization, that is, of rupture with the structure of dispossession inherited from French and British colonialism. It rather involved giving the Québécois the privilege of acquiring the status of colonizer they had lost with the British Conquest. As Zebedee Nungak writes:

“No one would question the ‘masters’ part of the slogan if Quebec’s borders were confined to the locations in which Champlain’s descendants lived and farmed the land in order to maintain and sustain their distinct French identity, their language and culture as they wished. The problem lies in the part that reads ‘in our own house,’ which has come to encompass Eeyou Estchee (the Cri territory) and the Inuit nunangat, including large swathes of territory where there is not an ounce of French history, language or culture. These lands should never have been incorporated in the French ‘house.’ But that is exactly what happened when Quebec rushed headlong toward carrying out its James Bay hydroelectric project.”⁸

In reality, a major portion of the territories over which Quebec governments have exercised their power to the explicit benefit of the Francophone majority have never been surrendered within the meaning of the British Canadian colonial regime. Access to the territory north of the 49^th parallel, and its occupation by the populations needed for colonization, exploitation and control over the groundwater, hydro-electric, forest, mineral, marine and tourist resources, have been defended both by the Canadian courts and successive Quebec governments as pertaining, in Canadian legal language, to “compelling and substantial governmental objectives.” Moreover, although the Canadian and Quebec governments have signed a series of treaties in the terms peculiar to modern treaties, the result has been the consolidation of the Crown’s sovereignty and the colonial enterprise of generalized extraction to the benefit of the owners of the means of production and the resulting rents. The jurisdictional and financial compensation negotiated between the Indigenous groups and the state, and the renunciation of the inherent right to the territory implied in almost all of the cases involving this type of treaty have constituted an irreparable loss of sovereignty for all of the Indigenous peoples and the consolidation of an extractive economy of dispossession.

The contradictions in the PQ project

The election of the Parti québécois in 1976 marked an important turning point in the march of the “Masters in our own house” and highlights the ambiguous political role of the Québécois within the British empire. An explicitly sovereigntist government was in place in Quebec City and held the reins of the provincial state. Today it is hard to imagine the power of that moment for the descendants of the “anciens Canadiens”: an illiterate, residual people with a bastardized language, had acceded to the institutional pinnacle of the state, through their own efforts and in opposition to the entire history of British Canada which had sought its tranquil submission and cultural assimilation. The people without a state proved to the English colonizer that it was worthy of a state and of power. It was a revenge and an exploit, promising a new world – a victory over themselves and over the adverse forces of history.

It was not long, however, before this enthusiasm came up against the Indigenous question. Rémi Savard, the anthropologist who studied this question for many years, himself a fervent independentist, asked himself whether the Indigenous policy of the first PQ government, headed by René Lévesque, could really challenge the colonial relationship between Quebec and the First Nations. Instead, he found that the Quebec of the PQ’s first term of office had positioned itself along the lines of British colonialism:

“In the spring of 1977 Bérubé, the minister, was proclaiming on Radio-Canada, without batting an eyelid, his government’s formal and definitive opposition to any recognition of the right of the Indigenous to self-determination, explaining that it was inconceivable since ‘we are the proprietors of the soil’.”⁹

Yves Bérubé was at the time minister of natural resources and lands and forests, and what he was defending against the sovereignty claims of the Indigenous peoples was also clear: the exploitation of natural resources is the foundation of Quebec’s strategy of mastery in its own house, through economic development in French and in our name. This mastery of resources was accompanied by a claim to “ownership of the soil” and referred to the public land held by the state. The unceded Indigenous territories of north-eastern Quebec were located, as it happens, almost entirely on these public lands, 90% of the territory of the Province of Quebec. The PQ minister’s statement was quite explicit about the nature of the mastery claimed by the Québécois through their “national” government: “we are the lords of the public lands, and no political claim over these lands is conceivable.” In the following year Gérald Godin, now the minister, repeated the PQ position, citing the right of conquest inherited from the British crown. Savard concluded that the sovereignty project was proclaiming explicitly the pursuit of the genocide anticipated by the Canadian government “and which has often targeted the Québécois people.”¹⁰

Some dissident approaches

While the sovereignty project has been unable to go beyond the colonial framework, there is no denying the transformative potential of Quebec’s struggle for national emancipation. This struggle, which to a large degree has ensured the passage from servitude to mastery, is one of the major political experiments of the 20^th century. Moreover, some Quebec intellectual and political actors have indeed seen the need to integrate a global overcoming of colonialism within the liberatory dynamic. For example, Pierre Vallières stated that the Indigenous peoples were more oppressed than the French Canadians of Quebec. That led him to nurture a certain distrust toward the promotion of nationalism as the ultimate goal of Quebec struggles and to uphold the claims of Indigenous sovereignty.¹¹ Charles Gagnon, too, thought it was necessary to integrate the anti-racism fight and the Indigenous struggles in his revolutionary project of anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggle:

“This does not mean, and cannot mean, making Quebec a new Mexico, politically ‘independent’ but economically exploited, pillaged, dispossessed. It does not mean creating one or more Black or American Indian capitalist states subject to imperialism. It does mean destroying imperialism and racism; it means building in North America a new society in which the different races and ethnic populations cohabit in harmony because each has endowed itself with the structures and institutions it considers favourable to its fulfilment.”¹²

Rémi Savard, the anthropologist, through his research and his attempts to develop solidarity between the Quebec and Indigenous peoples, thought the opposition of the Québécois to Indigenous claims was linked to the fact that they themselves were wronged by the Canadian constitutional regime. He criticized the colonial posture of the first independentist government in Quebec’s history which, he said, while comprising an undeniable economic motivation, was based on an opportunist legal conservatism. This posture profoundly shaped the relations between the Quebec state and the Indigenous peoples on the territory that we have inherited, through its refusal to respect the minimal requirements of peoples’ justice that the Indigenous peoples were developing on the international level.

The missed encounters

Overall, the independentist movement failed to take the hand proferred to it by the Indigenous peoples, and this was a factor, as we know today, in its political marginalization and the failure of its project. Savard reports that in 1978, two years before the referendum on Quebec sovereignty, Noel Starblanket, then chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (which became the Assembly of First Nations in 1982), wrote to René Lévesque:

“We have studied your project of sovereignty-association. This political platform suits us because it coincides with the demands of the Indians throughout Canada who want to exercise the greatest possible power over their natural resources and establish normal relations with their neighbours. We are starting from a position the opposite of yours: you are in Confederation and want to put a foot outside of it, while we who have never been a confederative club want to set foot in it. In practice, however, we agree completely. Extend us your hand. Let us, together, put an end to the federal government’s colonial power over us. But to the benefit of our respective collectivities. Not to put the Indians under the rule of some other white power, in this instance that of Quebec and the other Canadian provinces.”¹³

As to the sovereignty-association proposed by the Parti québécois, the chief stated, on behalf of his organization, that “this political platform suits us.” The subaltern position of the Francophones in the Canadian regime, as well as their existence as a collective entity, were acknowledged outright. Starblanket went on to propose an alliance between Quebec and the First Nations, against the colonial power of the federal government. This alliance, he said, was conditional on the equality of the parties: Quebec, in its approach to independence, was not to replace the federal government as a colonizer. It would have to work for the concurrent liberation of the First Peoples. In short, to break up the post-British Canadian regime in the interests of the peoples, Francophone and Indigenous, who were minorities within it.

Like Noel Starblanket, another leading Indigenous leader, Georges Erasmus, openly called for an alliance between the Indigenous peoples and Quebec to counter Ottawa’s approach to patriating the Constitution without recognizing the national minorities.

“We the Indigenous, have been pushed, along with Quebec, under the rug of the country that Trudeau and his sidekicks of the English provinces have just constituted. I call on the government and people of Quebec, and on René Lévesque in particular, to make known their reaction to this and to express their feeling about the rights of the Indigenous populations to self-determination. I challenge the people of Quebec – if in fact this people believes in self-determination – now is the time to support the Indigenous people. It is not the time for us to remain separated and to lead ourselves individually to defeat. We must act now. This is the moment of our reckoning. We, the Indigenous, need Quebec’s support in the coming hours. We need the support of the Quebec people. The country is in a state of national emergency and this demands that the Indigenous and Québécois unite their forces.”¹⁴

Given these quite dramatic statements at the time, Savard was adamant as to the conditions of any possible Francophone political existence in America:

“As to the project of Quebec self-determination itself, I think there is no chance it will come about in the short, medium or long term unless it begins to articulate the pan-Amerindian dynamic. [...] The worst disservice we can render to our descendants is to underestimate the political meaning of Indigenous aspirations and the continental reach of the present immense political awakening.”¹⁵

He lamented the fact that this invitation to an alliance had remained a dead letter, testimony to the sovereigntist élite’s very poor understanding of the continental colonial situation at the time.

“The imprecise desires of the Indigenous peoples for political autonomy may very well unleash furious reactions among many citizens against the threat of creating so many de facto holes in our national territory. That’s the Canadian side, somewhat buccaneering I would say, of our nationalism. It is also what prevents us, to the great relief of the federalists, from grasping the historical perch now being tendered to us, as explicitly as can be, by the Indigenous peoples of Canada as a whole.”¹⁶

Rethinking the terms of emancipation

The history of decolonization experiences offers many examples of national emancipation carried out by the state and capital that produce the results we have experienced in Quebec: the self-dispossession of the peoples through the exercise of the privileges of a national-state within the framework of a globalized economy, and the renewal of the oppressions suffered by other, subaltern populations, other minorities.

That said, the Quebec republican resistance, which has taken the colonial institutions as its emancipation model, has helped to constitute within the continental colonial space a place of distinct power, Quebec, the existence of which has undeniable ethical, political and epistemological value. If we start from that reality, that place, it is possible for us today to rethink emancipation in a more complete and more inclusive form. But this reconsideration must be radical, and not make any commitment as to the continental, colonial, historical and economic situation of Quebec.

To reinterpret the spirit of independence that gave rise to “Masters in Our Own House,” it is truly and urgently necessary to rethink the relations between the peoples inhabiting the territory of the province, the ways in which they mutually conceive the frontiers of this territory, and the way in which we draw from this our subsistance and the powers of dispossession that we support (and that support us). The emancipatory policy of the 21^st century, which will be conceived on the basis of Quebec’s situation, cannot elude this thinking, which necessarily challenges the life style of the majority and the legitimacy of the claim to mastery over the “national” territory, but has the merit that it invites us to escape the colonial political imagination and to begin to think about the alliance that remains to be formulated.

A second dimension that must be advanced if a decolonial tension is to be introduced in the Quebec emancipation current is that of the Indigenous presence in the territories placed under the jurisdiction of the Province of Quebec, 90% of which is classified as being property of the Quebec state – the Quebec equivalent of Crown lands.

The chain of solidarity that could begin to develop through a rethinking of independence within North America and the need for alliances that must inform it can only be developed or experienced not from the Quebec “majority” standpoint, but by and through a psycho-political and material process of dis-identification with the colonial state and the capitalist, extractive life of dispossession that this state imposes, supports, renews, generalizes and legitimates. Accordingly, we must in this context study the genealogy of the cognitive, material and political tools through which the populations involved in the colonization self-identified existentially with the structures of dispossession that were, for better or worse, the conditions of formation of the peoples of the New World. We have to revisit frankly our relations with the other peoples on this territory as well as the genesis and onto-juridical framework of our present relations.

The big challenge

This is a sizable challenge for a people whose existence is closely linked to the colonial undertaking, a motley people, intrinsically diasporic, without age-old tradition or inherent rights toward which to turn as the basis for its coherence and collective action, who do not and will not have the political aura of the European colonizer or the prestige of the white decolonizations of the 19^th century, or the ethical presence of the present decolonial and antiracist forces today. For a people dismissed and removed from power over the territory, a people whose initial segment is a product of a remaining, residual, demobilized, rebellious population lacking in social mobility and the possibility of representation, this seems to me to be also an opportunity to think otherwise and directly the questions of possession and dispossession, to go counter to colonization, to invent other ways of living, and to constitute ourselves as a hybrid, perhaps in a hitherto unseen form of upstream humility and downstream hospitality.

The political issue for Quebec in the 21^st century will not be to find the road to becoming masters in our own house – which would mean pursuing the European colonization of the Americas in our own name – but to think and act in terms of the real and urgent objective of abolishing, through a grand alliance, all relations of servitude that make up the French and British colonial forms of dispossession that we have inherited.

1 See Pierre Beaudet, “La gauche canadienne et le Québec. Les multiples dimensions d’un dialogue inachevé,” in Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, No. 24, Autumn 2020.

2 Canadian Dimension, https://canadiandimension.com/ Among the regular contributors to CD are Andrea Levy and André Frappier, members of the NCS Collectif d’analyse politique.

3 Frappier also attended the 2016 Socialist Scholars conference in Calgary, where he participated as a resource person in several workshops. -- R.F.

4 See “Le défi de lutter ensemble,” by André Frappier and Andrea Levy, NCS No. 24.

5 Glen Coulthard, “Marx et la grande tortue,” NCS No. 21 (Winter 2019).

6 Which Québec solidaire has done, unlike the other parties including the Parti québécois.

7 “Le défi de lutter ensemble,” NCS No. 24.

8 Zebedee Nungak, Contre le colonialisme dopé aux stéroïdes. Le combat des Inuits du Québec pour leurs terres ancestrales (Montréal, Boréal, 2019 [2017]), p. 42.

9 Rémi Savard, Destins d’Amérique. Les autochtones et nous (Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1979), p. 109.

10 Ibid., p. 110.

11 Daniel Samson-Legault, Dissident. Pierre Vallières (1938-1998). Au-delà des Nègres blancs d’Amérique (Montréal: Québec Amérique, 2018), p. 391.

12 Charles Gagnon, Feu sur l’Amérique. Écrits politiques, Vol. 1 (1966-1972) (Montréal: Lux, 2006), p. 117

13 Savard, op. cit., p. 145. [My retranslation from the French. - R.F.]

14 Quoted (and translated from the English) in Jean Morisset, Sur la piste du Canada errant (Montréal: Boréal, 2018). [My retranslation from the French – R.F.]

15 Savard, op. cit., p. 110.

16 Ibid., p. 154`