Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (II)

Palestinian Liberation and the MENA Revolutions

By Joseph Daher

October 22, 2023

The following article was originally published by Joseph Daher, a Syrian/Swiss academic and internationalist, in the journal Tempest on July 5, 2021. I republish it here believing it provides important background, particularly on Palestinian formations and their politics. – RF

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Israel’s recent attacks against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza demonstrated, once again, the brutal colonial, racist, and apartheid nature of the Zionist state. The replacement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government by a new coalition led by ultranationalist Naftali Bennett will change nothing for Palestinians.

The new regime’s policy is no different than Netanyahu’s. Proving this reality, Bennett ordered fresh air strikes on Gaza just a few days after his assumption of power. These new acts of violence and repression prove why the international left must stand in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.

But we also must engage in the strategic debates about how to win liberation and our role in it. Socialists should see the Palestinian struggle as inextricably tied to the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) against all the region’s states, most importantly Israel. This combination of resistance in Palestine and regional revolution is the only realistic way to free Palestine and all the peoples of the region.

Israel: a settler-colonial state

The Zionist movement from its origins in Europe to its foundation of Israel in 1948 and its displacement of Palestinians today has been a settler-colonial project. To establish, maintain, and expand its territory, the Israeli state has had to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, homes, and jobs. Throughout this process it allied with, and found sponsorship from, imperialist powers, first the British empire and then the United States, which used Israel as their agent in the struggle against Arab nationalism and socialism.

Thus, the Israeli state’s support for Zionist settlers’ expropriation of Palestinians’ homes in Sheikh Jarrah must be seen as a continuation of the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) that drove over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. This process of ongoing colonization is the reason why more than 5 million Palestinians refugees live in camps and cities in the Middle East and North Africa.

Even mainstream groups now recognize the reactionary nature of Israeli colonization. For example, both Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem have recently denounced Israel’s ongoing seizure of Palestinian land. They have documented how Israel has violated international laws to back 620,000 colonists building colonies in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They also concluded that Israel is an apartheid state that gives Jews special privileges and reduces Palestinians to second-class citizenship.

Given the utterly reactionary nature of Israel, the far right’s political hegemony over the last decade should come as no surprise. It is in some sense the logical outgrowth of the Zionist movement, its ethnonationalism, Israel’s institutional racism, and its more than seven decades of oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. These create the conditions for the flourishing of right-wing Zionist mobs that march through Palestinian neighborhoods chanting “Death to Arabs.”

Mistaken alliances with authoritarian regimes

Just like any other population under colonial occupation and apartheid, Palestinians have the right to resist, including with military means. Support for this right should not be confused with support for the political perspectives of the various Palestinian political parties. None of these parties—Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and others—offer a political strategy capable of winning Palestinian liberation.

The dominant Palestinian political parties look not to the Palestinian masses and the regional working classes and oppressed peoples as the forces to win liberation. Instead they seek political alliances with the region’s ruling classes and their regimes to support their political and military struggle against Israel. They collaborate with these regimes, and argue for non-intervention, even as those regimes oppress their own popular classes and Palestinians within their borders.

One of the key examples in the evolution of this approach was in Jordan 1970, and culminated in the events known as Black September. Despite the strength, organization and popularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) within Jordan— a country whose population was seventy percent Palestinian— the Fatah leadership of Yasser Arafat initially refused to support a campaign to overthrow the country’s dictator, King Hussein. In response, and with the backing of the U.S and Israel, Hussein declared martial law, and with the regional Arab governments largely passive, Hussein attacked the PLO camps, killed thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians, and ultimately drove the PLO out of Jordan and into Syria and Lebanon.

Despite this history, and its subsequent experiences in exile, the PLO pursued this strategy of collaboration and non-intervention for decades. Today, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas supports Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s dictatorship in Egypt. In another shocking example, Abbas recently sent a message of congratulations to Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad on “his re-election” in May 2021, despite Assad’s brutal repression of Palestinians participating in the Syrian uprising and destruction of the Yarmouk refugee camp.

Hamas pursues a similar strategy; its leaders have cultivated alliances with monarchies in Gulf states, especially Qatar more recently, as well as the fundamentalist regime in Iran. In 2012, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza at the time, praised Bahrain’s “reforms” while the regime with the backing of its Gulf allies smashed the country’s democratic uprising. Many Hamas leaders viewed it as a “sectarian” coup d’état by the Shi’ites of Bahrain supported by Iran.

In April 2018, former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal praised Turkey’s invasion and occupation of Afrin in Syria during a visit to Ankara. He stated that “Turkey’s success in Afrin serves as a solid example” hopefully to be followed by similar “victories of the Islamic ummah in a lot of places in the world.” The occupation of Afrin by Turkish armed forces and its reactionary Syrian proxies drove out 200,000 mostly Kurdish people and repressed those who remained.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian left has for the most part implemented its own version of the same strategy. It too has withheld criticism of its allies’ repression of their people. The PFLP, for example, has not voiced any objections to the Syrian regime’s crimes and has even supported its army against “foreign conspiracies,” declaring that Damascus “will remain a thorn in the face of the Zionist enemy and its allies.” The PFLP’s relationship towards the theocracy in Iran, and the military dictatorship in Egypt follow a similar pattern.

Regimes betray the liberation struggle

Rather than advance the struggle, despotic states in the region have repeatedly betrayed it and even repressed Palestinians. As noted earlier, the Jordanian state crushed the Palestinian movement in 1970, killing thousands and expelling the PLO during Black September.

In 1976, Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria intervened in Lebanon against Palestinian and leftist organizations in support of far-right Lebanese parties. He also conducted military operations against Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. By 1990, approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were held in Syrian prisons.

Egypt has collaborated in Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007. Iran opportunistically seeks to use the Palestinian cause as a foreign policy tool to achieve its wider objectives in the region.

While the Syrian regime has supported Hamas, it drastically cut assistance to it when it refused to support the regime’s counter-revolution against the democratic uprising in 2011. Iran only resumed formal ties with Hamas after the election of Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh al-Arouri as the new leadership.

Tehran collaborated with U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s why during the recent Iraqi uprising protesters marched under the slogan “Neither USA, Nor Iran.” These examples alone demolish the idea that Iran is a reliable ally of the Palestinian cause or that is an anti-imperialist state.

Turkey, despite Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s criticisms of Israel, maintains close economic connections with it. Erdogan has increased the volume of trade with Tel Aviv from the $1.4 billion when he came to power to $6.5 billion in 2020. Thus, the regimes restrict their support for the cause to areas where it advances their regional interests and betray it when it doesn’t.

Dead end of peace deals brokered by U.S. imperialism

With the failure of its strategy of relying on political support from, and alliance with the regions regimes, the PLO turned to an even more bankrupt approach of pursuing a peace deal brokered by the U.S. and other great powers. The hope was to secure a two-state settlement through the Oslo Accords struck in 1993.

Instead of winning Palestinian liberation, such a settlement would amount to surrender, accepting Israeli colonialism in historic Palestine, while at best winning a Palestinian rump state, and betraying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their stolen land in Israel. In the final analysis, the peace process has reduced the PA to ruling over a bantustan entirely under the control of Israel.

This disastrous result should come as no surprise. The U.S. and other imperialist powers have supported Israel as their local police force against the revolutionary transformation of the region, an event that would challenge their control over its strategic energy reserves.

Israel served this purpose repeatedly since its founding. In 1956, it participated in France and Britain’s attack on Nasser’s Egypt following its nationalization of the Suez Canal. In 1967, Israel’s Six Day War targeted Nasser’s Egypt as well as the Syrian state during their radical nationalist phase.

Since then, the U.S. has backed Israel. Washington has poured an average of $4 billion annually into Tel Aviv’s coffers, backing its colonization of Palestine and its wars of aggression against progressive governments and movements in the region. Washington supported Israel’s military intervention in Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 that oversaw the terrible massacre of Sabra and Shatila, destroyed progressive Palestinian and Lebanese forces, and installed a friendly regime in Beirut.

Israel’s victories against Arab nationalist states and its intervention in Lebanon led to the retreat of radicalism in the region, isolating the PLO. This predicament led, in 1978, to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction adopting the two-state solution, a necessary step along the path to its signing off on the 1993 Oslo Accords.

In effect, this meant the surrender of the struggle for the liberation of historic Palestine, and the transformation of Fatah into the Palestinian Authority (PA), administering the occupied territories. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who opposed the Oslo agreement, declared that it represented “a massive abandonment of principles, the main currents of Palestinian history, and national goals” and “relegated the diaspora Palestinians to permanent exile or refugee status.”

The U.S. and Israel have supported the PA controlling Palestinians in the West Bank as well as Gaza (before the latter was taken over by Hamas in 2007). The PA has been happy to serve as Washington and Tel Aviv’s cop. For example, during the recent uprising, the PA arrested more than 20 activists for their social media posts and leadership of protests. More recently, Nizar Banat, a leading Palestinian activist and critic of the PA, was killed in a raid by its security forces on his home in Dura in Hebron.

With the PA functioning as a quisling regime, the U.S. has promoted Israel’s political and economic integration with states in the region, most recently through the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. This normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states further isolates the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Newly elected president Joe Biden has reaffirmed Washington’s unflinching support for Israel, whatever its crimes against Palestinians. In the midst of its most recent bombing of Gaza, a sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel passed Congress and the billions in annual aid will continue to pour in. The PA strategy of collaborating with the U.S. entails surrender to the occupier and its imperial sponsor.

The Weakness of the Palestinian Working Class

If strategies based on the region’s states and peace deals brokered by the U.S. are dead ends, what about an alternative orientation on the Palestinian working class? That too is foreclosed by Israel’s particular nature as a settler-colonial state.

Unlike apartheid South Africa, which relied on Black workers’ labor in its factories and mines, Israel has driven Palestinian workers out of any central role in its economy and replaced them with Jewish workers. As a result, Palestinian workers do not have the means to shut down the Israeli economy through strikes like Black workers did in South Africa.

That does not mean that the Palestinian resistance is powerless within the state of Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The struggle of workers of other groups remains central to the movement.

The most recent wave of Palestinian struggle demonstrates its power as well as its potential to forge a new strategy to supplant the failed one of relying on support from the region’s regimes. New youth and feminist groups such as Tal’at as well as the working class have been at the heart of the recent resistance.

The workers’ general strike on May 18 was called and led from below. It shut down sections of the economy from Israel to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As Haaretz noted: “The Israel Builders Association observed that Palestinian workers had observed the strike, with only 150 of the 65,000 Palestinian construction workers coming to work in Israel. This paralyzed building sites, causing losses estimated at 130 million shekels (nearly $40 million).”

The character of the strike, while extremely important, should not be exaggerated. As Assaf Adiv, the director of the MAAN Workers Association — the only Israeli trade union that organizes Palestinians in the industrial zones of the West Bank settlements (from which Palestinian trade unions are barred)—noted the observance of the strike by Palestinians who work in Israel was in part “due to closure of the checkpoints and uncertainty on the roads of the West Bank.”

Regardless of the breadth of the participation in the strike, the Israeli economy was relatively unscathed, showing that the Palestinian working class and other social movements need solidarity from other workers, peasants, and oppressed peoples. The question is which ones should Palestinians orient on to win a secular democracy in historic Palestine.

The Israeli working class—not a strategic ally

The first and perhaps obvious strategic orientation would seem to be on the Israeli working class. But it has always placed loyalty to Israel over and above class solidarity with the Palestinian masses.

This is not just the result of ideological devotion but material interest in the Israeli state, which provides Israeli workers with homes stolen from Palestinians as well as inflated standards of living. The Israeli ruling class and state thus integrate the Israeli working class as a collaborator in a common project of settler colonialism.

Its working class institutions such as its union, the Histadrut, have played a central role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Labor Zionist leaders established the Histadrut in 1920 as an exclusively Jewish union and used it to spearhead the displacement of Palestinian workers.

Its slogan “Jewish land, Jewish work, Jewish product” neatly summarizes its ethnonationalist class-collaborationist project and underlines how fundamentally hostile it is to solidarity with Palestinians. Applying these slogans during and after the founding of Israel, it has helped ensure that land was only leased to Jews; farms and industries hired only Jews; and Palestinian farms and industries were boycotted.

On top of that, the Israeli state has militarized the incorporation of Israeli workers through mandatory conscription. This compels them to participate in the repression of Palestinians, enforce the occupation, and defend Zionist settlers’ theft of Palestinian homes and land.

Given this incorporation into the colonial project, it should come as no surprise that, with few exceptions, workers supported the most recent assault on Gaza. In just one example among many, the union of the Israeli Electric Corp (IEC) went so far as to declare that it would not repair power lines to the Gaza Strip until two Israeli soldiers and a missing Israeli civilian were returned.

Does this mean that Palestinians should not seek collaboration with progressive sectors of the Israeli working class? Of course not. Examples of small-scale solidarity exist, but they are rare.

It is hard to imagine these becoming a counter to the overwhelming pattern of ethnonationalist unity of Israeli workers with the Zionist state. A strategy focused on trying to build working class unity against Zionism between Israeli and Palestinian workers is thus unrealistic.

The regional revolutionary strategy

The key to developing a better strategy for liberation is putting Palestine in the regional context. Because Palestinian refugees in their millions are integrated in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in North Africa, their national and class struggle is necessarily intertwined with that of the region’s masses.

Those workers and peasants remember their forebearers’ fight against colonialism, confront imperialist powers that support the regimes that oppress them, identify with the struggle of the Palestinians, and therefore see their own battle for democracy and equality as bound up with its victory. That’s why there is a dialectical relationship between the struggles; when Palestinians fight it triggers the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.

Their united revolt has the power to transform the entire region, overthrowing the regimes, expelling the imperialist powers, ending both forces’ support for the state of Israel, weakening it in the process, and proving to Israeli workers that the regional transformation can end their exploitation. Far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman admitted the danger posed to Israel by the Arab Spring in 2011 when he declared that the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to democracy was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.

The power and potential of this regional strategy has been repeatedly demonstrated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Palestinian movement spurred a rise in class struggle throughout the region. In 2000, the Second Intifada opened a new era of resistance, inspiring a wave of organizing that would eventually explode in 2011 with revolutions from Tunisia to Egypt to Syria.

In the summer of 2019, Palestinians in Lebanon organized massive demonstrations for weeks in refugee camps against the Labor Ministry’s decision to treat them as foreigners, an act they considered to be a form of discrimination and racism against them. Their resistance helped inspire the broader Lebanese uprising in October 2019, which in turn has led to the popular uprisings in Iraq.

To implement a strategy based on this regional solidarity, Palestinian groups and movements must abandon the policy embraced by the PA, Hamas, and most of the left of non-intervention in the affairs of countries in the region. Such non-intervention was the precondition of getting aid from various regimes. Accepting that policy means cutting Palestinians off from the social forces that can help them win liberation.

Instead, the Palestinian struggle must recover the regional revolutionary strategy that was pursued by leftists in the 1960s. Unfortunately, most abandoned this strategy to tail the PLO in allying with the region’s reactionary states.

The strategy of regional revolution based on class struggle from below is the only way to win liberation from Israel to Saudi Arabia and Syria as well as their imperialist backers from the U.S. to China and Russia. In that fight, Palestinians and those in other countries must embrace the demands of all those that suffer national oppression like the Kurds and others who suffer other forms of ethnic, sectarian, and social oppression.

Now is the time to resurrect the regional strategy. The whole of the Middle East and North Africa is in a long-term revolutionary process rooted in the masses’ blocked political and economic aspirations. There have already been two waves of uprisings, the first in 2011 that rocked the whole region and a second in 2018 and 2019 that swept through Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, and Iraq.

With none of the popular grievances won, no doubt a third wave is on its way. And Palestine can and must be at the center of this next wave in a fight to liberate it and the entire region.

Palestine in the revolutionary process

Only through this regional revolutionary strategy can we envision the establishment of a democratic, socialist, and secular state in historic Palestine with equal rights for both Palestinian and Jewish people within a socialist federation throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In the new Palestinian state, all Palestinians would have the right to return to their land and homes from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948, 1967, and after. In addition to this, the liberation of Palestine must also include a global project of economic development and reconstruction to guarantee Palestinians their social and economic rights.

To implement this strategy, Palestinians must forge a new political leadership committed to self-organization from below within historic Palestine and the region. They cannot do that alone but must do so through collaboration with socialists from Egypt to Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and all the other countries.

The most important task for those outside the region is to win the left, unions, progressive groups, and movements to support the campaign for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. Forcing this on institutions and corporations in the imperialist powers, especially the U.S., will help block their support for Israel and other despotic regimes and weaken their hold in the region.

The liberation of Palestine thus passes through the liberation of all the peoples living under tyrants in Damascus, Riyadh, Doha, Tehran, Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Amman, and all the others. As a Syrian revolutionary wrote from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the summer of 2014, “freedom—a common destiny for Gaza, Yarmouk and the Golan.” This slogan holds out the hope of regional revolutionary transformation, the only realistic strategy for liberation.

*I would like to thank Ashley Smith and Sai Englert for their help in the writing of the article.

Further reading

“Secular democracy and the future of Palestine,” by Haidar Eid, January 28, 2022  https://mondoweiss.net/2022/01/secular-democracy-and-the-future-of-palestine/

“A Secular Democratic State in Historic Palestine: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?” by Ghada Karmi http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=1690&CategoryId=8

One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel       by Ghada Karmi  One State (plutobooks.com)

Debates we should be having in Canada’s federal election

(3) NDP grapples with Quebec’s Law 21

I wrote the short article below for Canadian Dimension as a contribution to its federal election coverage. It addresses an aspect of the NDP’s campaign that has proved controversial in Quebec: both its opposition to the Legault government’s new law banning public employees from wearing clothing or other indications of their religious faith,[1] and the party’s refusal to endorse a federal government court challenge of the law. I argue that both positions are correct but the party appears unprepared to defend them. And I offer some explanations. – Richard Fidler

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NDP repudiates Quebec’s Law 21 but falters in its explanation

The NDP is fighting for its life in Quebec, where the Bloc Québécois supported by the right-wing Legault government threatens many if not all of the party’s current 14 seats, already much reduced from the 59 federal seats the NDP won in Quebec in 2011.

The BQ campaigns in support of Quebec’s Law 21 which prohibits provincial state employees, including public school teachers, from wearing religious symbols. Prime targets are Muslim women wearing headscarfs (hijabs), many of them newcomers from Africa and Asia – prompting critics to label the law, with justice, as racist and sexist. It was one of the first laws enacted by the Coalition Avenir Québec government, elected just a year ago. The Bloc equates its “support of Quebec interests” as support for the CAQ government and its laws and projects.

The NDP’s response to Law 21 has been confused and contradictory. Jagmeet Singh has correctly repudiated it (as have the other major party leaders). But he seems unable to explain why, as he says, it would be “inappropriate” for an NDP government to support a court challenge to it, saying only that he wants to “win people’s hearts.”

The party even trivializes the law with a French-language ad showing Singh with his long hair let down, followed by a glimpse of him winding a turban around his head. “Like, you, I’m proud of my identity,” he says in a voiceover. “[H]e can show his head without a turban,” says the party’s deputy leader Alexandre Boulerice, “and it’s not a big deal.” But surely it is “a big deal” if Singh’s turban would bar him from employment in a public sector job.

Law 21 restricts public expression of religious beliefs in the name of state “secularism,” or laïcité as it is usually termed in French. However, as the NDP’s Quebec counterpart Québec solidaire argues in its program, “It is the state that is secular, not individuals.” QS voted against Bill 21 in the National Assembly. A secular Quebec, says QS, would promote the separation of state and church, for example by ending the government’s funding of religious schools – while protecting individuals’ right to express their religious belief (or lack of such belief) as long as this does no harm to others. The NDP should adopt this conceptual distinction and be prepared to defend it.

Similarly, Singh’s reluctance to support a federal government court challenge to Law 21 can be easily defended. The NDP supports Quebec’s right to self-determination in its Sherbrooke Declaration, the party’s major statement of policy on the Quebec national question. And the NDP’s Quebec platform in this election, Ensemble pour le Québec, acknowledges for the first time that “the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982 without Quebec’s signature is an historic error.” A federal challenge to a Quebec law would necessarily be based on the 1982 Canadian constitution and accordingly lack legitimacy in Quebec, whatever its prospects of legal success – in the process fuelling the reactionary BQ campaign in defense of the CAQ government.

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[1] An Act respecting the laicity of the State, S.Q. c. 12.

Québec solidaire vows to fight CAQ government’s racist bill

National Council reaffirms party’s program on separation of church and state, rebuffs QS leaders’ attempts at ‘compromise’

As it had threatened during last fall’s election campaign, the newly-elected Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government has introduced legislation to prohibit a wide range of persons “in authority,” including teachers, from wearing symbols of their religious beliefs while exercising their functions.

Those affected include judges, prosecutors, police, and jail guards, but also teachers, childcare providers, public transit operators, health and social service workers, municipal and administrative tribunal and board officials, etc.

Bill 21, “An Act respecting the laicity of the State,” also provides that those delivering or receiving government services may lose their jobs or be denied services if they refuse to uncover their face for identity or “security” reasons. Similar provisions, adopted under the previous Liberal government but suspended pending a legal appeal, will now be implemented pursuant to the CAQ’s decision to shield its legislation from civil liberties challenges using the constitutional “notwithstanding” clause.

Prime targets of the legislation are obviously Muslim women wearing headscarves or other clothing they associate with their religious beliefs. A “grandfather” clause exempting employees in their current jobs would effectively bar them from promotions or other public employment.

The government bill — with its racist connotations — comes in the wake of the murder of six worshippers in a Quebec City mosque in January 2017 and the recent massacre of 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand by right-wing racists, and is consistent with the pattern of reactionary scapegoating of minorities increasingly practiced by many government leaders in the major capitalist countries as they heighten austerity and restrict immigration.

Bill 21 is supported by the Parti Québécois, which had earlier, when in government, sponsored a widely-criticized “charter of values” with similar provisions that the PQ had hoped would win the support of Québécois apprehensive at the changing pluricultural face of Quebec society and fend off pressures to integrate ethnic minorities through more effective French language training and affirmative action in employment.

The bill is opposed by the opposition Liberals and by Québec solidaire, now the second party of opposition in the National Assembly following the defection of a PQ member.

Québec solidaire has a mixed history on these issues. It is now almost 10 years since the party adopted its position on laicity (or, as it is more commonly known in English, secularism). It made a clear distinction between the need for state neutrality toward religious belief or lack of belief, and the freedom of individuals “to express their own convictions in a context that favours exchange and dialogue.” It would allow “state agents” (employees or officials) to wear religious insignia such as a crucifix or hijab.

However, the program would also remove this right from those whose clothing was deemed to promote religion or interfere with their duties or safety standards. And in subsequent years QS leaders, drawing on these hypothetical caveats in the party’s program, began adapting to other parties’ attempts to impose dress codes not only on state employees but on citizens from minority ethnic communities. In a previous article, I cited several such instances involving QS members of the National Assembly. The relevant account is excerpted in an appendix following this article.

These positions were endorsed in 2010 by the QS National Coordination Committee (CCN), the party’s top executive body. They drew support from a Quebec government inquiry, chaired by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, that in 2008 had proposed a ban on the wearing of religious insignia by a limited number of state agents — prosecutors, cops, prison guards and the speaker and deputy speaker of the National Assembly — while exempting teachers and “other state agents.”[1]

(Taylor has since renounced his signature on this report, declaring after the Quebec City mosque attack that legislation along such lines had provoked an increase in hate speech and assaults especially against Muslim women.[2])

The party’s adaptations to state intolerance reflected as well a tendency of the same QS leaders to seek common ground with the Parti Québécois, also expressed in several attempts over the years to get the QS membership to agree to electoral alliances with the PQ — all of them rejected by party congresses.[3]

The CAQ bill has provoked a growing wave of public opposition from civil liberties groups, school boards, and some unions. Meanwhile, many Québec solidaire members had expressed unease with statements by newly elected QS members of the National Assembly indicating support for a “compromise” that would adopt the Bouchard-Taylor report’s position. The party opened a discussion on the issue, which was placed on the agenda of a National Council (NC) meeting held March 29-31.

Three positions emerged from this debate. A relatively small “laicity collective” called for a complete ban on religious signs by public employees at all levels. Because this proposal conflicted with the party’s program, it was ineligible for debate at the CN meeting, which was confined to “interpreting” the program and had no authority to pre-empt a position adopted in a duly constituted membership congress.

A second position — endorsed by several internal QS commissions and ad hoc collectives — rejected the MNAs’ compromise and supported a position of “open laicity” that generally rejected any prohibition on display of religious beliefs by public employees.

The party executive then moved to put two options before the NC members, both of which began with the same “whereas” clause: “that in all cases restrictions on the wearing of religious signs are possible when these contravene one of the four criteria set out in article 7.5.2 of the Québec solidaire program (proselytism, duty of discretion, exercise of the occupation or safety standard).” Option A would ban such signs for persons in authority exercising “a coercive power,” as supported by the MNAs, while Option B stated that “Whereas the discretionary duty applies to the actions and decisions of persons and not to their appearance, no particular rule concerning religious signs should apply to certain professions instead of others, including those that exercise a coercive power.”

The National Council meeting voted overwhelmingly in favour of Option B.

However, this was followed by a second vote, also proposed by the party executive, which asked NC members to choose between two options: one that would bar those dispensing or receiving government services from wearing clothing that conformed to any of the four exceptions allowed by the party program; and another that would allow such services to persons wearing clothing that covers the face, “except for considerations of identification or safety.” The latter option was adopted. This position, which in practice would affect the tiny minority of Muslim women who wear a niqab or burqa, moves QS uncomfortably close to the discriminatory positions of the CAQ, Liberals and PQ on this aspect.

So in the end the party program on “open laicity” as it is often called, was reaffirmed, albeit with its explicit limitations, while the MNAs’ attempts to find some compromise with opposing positions were largely rebuffed. However, it remains for a party congress to amend the QS program to remove the caveats that have served as a pretext for the slippages of principle that have characterized the party’s public positions over the past decade.

In other decisions the 330 NC members voted to continue making the party’s program on climate change its main campaign for the coming year. That program, which presents many progressive concepts but within the framework of a general “green capitalism” approach, should also be the subject of critical analysis along with the position on laicity as the party prepares for its next convention, to be held toward year-end, and where it plans to complete and review its program as a whole.

Appendix

Excerpted from “Québec solidaire prepares to confront a new government of austerity and social and ethnic polarization,” Life on the Left, October 20, 2018.

Quebec’s new premier, François Legault, threatens to implement as a priority the CAQ’s plans to prohibit the wearing of “religious signs” among state-employed persons in positions of “coercion” (cops, prosecutors, judges and jail guards) or “authority” (including elementary and secondary school teachers, and perhaps others).

Québec solidaire has waffled on this issue for many years. The party claims to adhere to the principle of separation of church and state. In 2009, the resolution adopted at the party’s first convention on program stated that the party distinguishes between the need for state neutrality toward religious belief or lack of belief, and the freedom of individuals “to express their own convictions in a context that favours exchange and dialogue.” As I reported at the time:

“Delegates voted in favour of allowing ‘state agents’ (employees and officials) to wear religious insignia (a crucifix, hijab, whatever), but added some caveats that leave much to subjective interpretation and enforcement by employers: ‘provided they are not used as instruments of proselytism’ and do not interfere with their droit de réserve (duty of discretion), or ‘impede the performance of the duties or contravene safety standards.’ Delegates rejected other resolutions that would impose no such restrictions or, alternatively, would impose secular dress codes on civil servants, and they rejected as well a proposal to refer the whole issue for further decision at a later convention.”[4]

While these caveats were problematic, QS leaders in subsequent years went further and began adapting to other parties’ attempts to impose dress codes not only on state employees but on citizens from minority ethnic communities.

In 2011, the sole QS member of the National Assembly, Amir Khadir, voted with the other parties for a PQ motion to ban Sikhs from entering the legislature because their ceremonial kirpans were to be deemed “weapons.” Ironically, the motion was prompted by an incident a month earlier when four members of the World Sikh Organization were turned back by security guards when they came to testify to a parliamentary committee in favour of the right of Muslim women to wear face coverings when receiving government services — which a Liberal government bill then under debate would have denied.

In 2013, when the National Assembly was again debating the PQ government’s now-infamous Charter of Values, QS leader Françoise David tabled a bill that if adopted would have enacted a “charter of secularism” that banned “state agents” from wearing signs indicative of personal religious belief. David described this as an “historic compromise.”

Although in 2017 the three QS MNAs voted against the Liberal government’s Bill 62 prohibiting citizens from wearing face coverings when receiving or dispensing public services, they called instead for adoption of a “genuine” charter of secularism. QS leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said their position was a “compromise” that takes a harder line than the Liberals in that it would bar people who wear overt religious symbols such as turbans and hijabs from working as judges, jail guards and cops.

These positions, which clearly violate the QS program adopted by the membership, have prompted a number of protests from defenders of civil liberties, including a very strong “Open Letter” addressed to the party by a number of QS members including prominent human rights lawyers.

Unfortunately, during their swearing-in on October 17, the new QS MNAs told reporters that they intend to support the “compromise” that would ban religious signs for persons in authority. But at least one — Catherine Dorion, representing Québec-Taschereau — said later she was not really sure what her position would be.

These issues should be on the agenda of the QS National Committee meeting, now scheduled to take place December 7-9. The party’s reaction to Legault’s forthcoming legislation will be an early test of the adherence to basic democratic principles of its new parliamentary deputation.

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[1] The report is no longer available on line. However, here is a summary of its key recommendations: http://tinyurl.com/y4gclrxy.

[2] Quoted by André Frappier, “La laïcité au Québec, un débat de société en évolution.”

[3] See, for example, “Québec solidaire: No to an electoral pact with the PQ, Yes to a united front against austerity, for energy transition and for independence.”

[4] “Quebec left debates strategy for independence,” https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2009/12/quebec-left-debates-strategy-for.html.

‘Je suis Charlie’? Not I. Here’s why…

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people are taking to the streets in France and elsewhere in Europe and North America to protest the brutal murderous attacks by Islamist extremists on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher supermarket in Paris.

At Charlie Hebdo, the death toll of 12 included the paper’s editor and some of its major cartoonists; a further 23 staff members were wounded. Several more were murdered at the Jewish grocery store.

The unifying slogan of these protests is “Je suis Charlie!” I am Charlie, the implication being that the targeted publication — notorious in France for its ridicule of minority religious beliefs, especially Islam — had merely been exercising its right to “freedom of expression.”

That is the theme being propagated by the establishment media and politicians. Many on the left have chimed in. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair says it was a “terrible attack against democracy and freedom of the press.” Québec solidaire leader Amir Khadir, speaking for the party, said it was a “black day for free speech.”

Free speech?

There is indeed a great tradition in France of caricature journalism famous for its acidic commentary on contemporary political issues. An early exemplary was Honoré Daumier. His 19^th century satire targeted “the foibles of the bourgeoisie, the corruption of the law and the incompetence of a blundering government. Garguanta, his caricature of the king [Louis Philippe] led to Daumier’s imprisonment for six months….” (Wikipedia) Daumier targeted the rich and powerful, and sympathized with the poor and oppressed.

So also the 20^th century revolutionary left employed cartoon satire with devastating effect. Here is one of my favourite posters from the early Soviet Union:

Lenin cleanses the earth of priests, potentates and plutocrats. No confusion there as to the appropriate targets.

Not so Charlie Hebdo. Although many classify it as on “the left,” it targeted Muslims, who make up almost 10% of France’s population but 60% of its prison inmates — about the same percentage of prisoners as that of Canada’s indigenous peoples. France’s “Muslims” — more accurately, immigrants from North and West Africa and their descendants for the most part, since many do not practice the Muslim religion — are among the most oppressed, packed in poor housing in the banlieue (suburbs) of Paris and other major cities. Many are unemployed; almost all suffer discrimination based on racial identity and religion.

And today a major far-right party, the National Front, polls 20% or more and has elected mayors in many towns and cities. The Front campaigns against French residents of immigrant origin; its militants are often involved in racist violence.

Freedom of expression? But there is content, and there are consequences. An excellent statement by the French Jewish Union for Peace[1] explains the context:

“To express the least indulgence or understanding for those who kill cartoonists or the murder of people because of their ideas is insane.

“But Charlie Hebdo conducted a political battle. And to hide or obscure the context in which it published its cartoons was a part of its political battle.

“Can we imagine cartoons in progressive newspapers criticizing the Jewish religion in the 1930s, during the rise of anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews? …

“How could the criticism of religions abstract from the relationship between the dominant and the dominated? This criticism of religions occurs in a context, at a political moment that is not at all neutral toward Muslims. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons and articles… have been part of the development of Islamophobia in France. The development of scorn and racism toward all Muslims, of the laws to protect ‘French-style secularism’ against them, of the mosques that are attacked, the physical assaults against people ‘who look Muslim.’ For years now they have been made the scapegoats for the economic and social crisis….”

Free speech as an abstraction is a liberal concept. Liberal public opinion claims its ideas are universal when in fact they are not, notes a commentator in The Islamic Monthly.

“The liberalism of Charlie Hebdo is absolutely contemptuous of the French Muslim underclass, the disenfranchised dark-skinned immigrants from Algeria, Morocco and other parts of North and West Africa who came to France to work for the most part because the native French population no longer reproduces at a positive rate. If this were America, Charlie Hebdo would be a newspaper publishing blackface cartoons that ridicule, denigrate and otherwise disparage the black underclass of the inner city for being violent, drug addicted criminals. The free speech defended by Charlie Hebdo is not the free speech of everyone, it is the free speech as defined and codified by liberal sensibilities rooted in the European enlightenment and espoused by an elite, largely white intellectual class. It is only free for those who believe in what liberalism defines as sacred. The rest of us must choose to either accept this paradigm and let go of our own sense of what is sacred, or be ostracized, ridiculed or worse for rejecting it….

And he adds:

“To be fair, not all liberals revel in the excess of Charlie Hebdo. But at liberalism’s core is a widely held belief that should anyone express a value in accord with liberal sensibilities, they are in fact adopting liberal values. This need not be the case, people can have values of kindness, compassion and mercy without coming in contact with European liberalism. When Malala Yousafzai advocates for girls education, it need not necessarily demonstrate her embrace of liberal values. It could indicate that her own traditions have led her to that thought, irrespective of whether Nick Kristof can trace her realization back to Locke or Rousseau.”

Imperialist war and its discontents

Organized public mourning like the “Je suis Charlie” actions has now become a standard response when a vast public, caught unawares by a tragic event the causes of which it does not fully understand, is easily manipulated on the basis of raw emotion. There was an early manifestation in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers. But why is the number identifying with this Islamophobic French journal so much greater — with the notable exception of the mass protests on the eve of Bush’s 2003 assault on Iraq — than the number of those who have demonstrated against imperialist war since the beginning of the War on Terror? Are we still so ignorant of the national and global roots of such atrocities?

In a remarkable article, Canadian Muslim Monia Mazigh explains that context. Herself of Tunisian origin, Dr. Mazigh (she has a PhD from McGill University) is well-known for her courageous battle to free her husband Maher Arar from the torture dungeons of Syria, which had jailed him on the basis of false claims by the RCMP that he was a “terrorist.” She writes:

“Without giving any reason or excuse for the use of violence against journalists — which is not acceptable under any circumstances — one should remember that France is at war in many Islamic countries: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Mali... Even if the human costs of these wars are not always clear to the French masses, as civilian casualties are not always reported in the headlines, there is a lot of resentment within the local population with regard to these policies. This resentment travels very well within the French Muslim community.

“Moreover, France has a heavy colonial, racist and violent past with Muslim countries like Algeria, for instance (one can only state here the assassination and torture campaign against Algerian dissidents). The large wounds of the Algerian war of liberation — a struggle that ended costing Algerians a million lives — never healed, even more than half a century later.”

Serious as they are, the crimes of the Parisian Islamist assassins pale in comparison with those of global imperialism, not just French but American, Canadian and all the others. Suffice it to mention the genocide of the American indigenous peoples, the wars of colonial conquest and occupation, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wars in Vietnam and Korea, the Holocaust and the bombing of Dresden. Or the millions of dead produced in the inter-imperialist World War I, the “war to end all war,” its centenary celebrated with such enthusiasm by the Canadian government.

Mazigh notes as well the hypocrisy in the official claims that Canada and its Western allies defend freedom of expression. “When Edward Snowden leaked classified NSA documents that implicated the United States and its allies in many scandals, the concept of ‘freedom of expression’ was completely rejected by these governments. Many journalists in the U.S., and even some in Canada, sided with their governments and were not sympathetic to his plight.”

A clash of civilizations?

After the deadly Paris attack, writes Monia Mazigh, “many cartoonists reduced the event to a confrontation between an armed, bearded jihadist and a pen. A simple representation, yet it is both powerful and misleading,” she notes.

“After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush and many like-minded politicians and media outlets confined the attacks to a fight between evil (the ‘Islamic terrorists’) and good (the United States and its allies), or between the free world (led by the United States) and oppression (led by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban).

“When Bush famously proclaimed ‘you are either with us or you're with the terrorists,’ he truly believed that he had received a divine message to liberate Muslim countries from oppression. He consequently built all of his political and war strategies around this sort of ‘prophecy.’

“Meanwhile, all the dissident voices that denounced this dangerous war were silenced, labelled anti-patriots, and accused of siding with the extremists (remember the ‘Taliban Jack’ label satirically attributed to the late Jack Layton by the Harper government).”

The jihadist-pen confrontation has been depicted by countless cartoonists in recent days. A particularly egregious example was a cartoon published in an Australian daily. Here it is:

 

Get it?, asks Corey Oakley in Red Flag, the newspaper of Socialist Alternative. “In the face of a medieval ideology that only understands the language of the gun, the West — the heroic, Enlightenment-inspired West — responds by reaffirming its commitment to resist barbarism with the weapons of ideas and freedom of expression.

“Reality could not be more at odds with this ludicrous narrative.

“For the last decade and a half the United States, backed to varying degrees by the governments of other Western countries, has rained violence and destruction on the Arab and Muslim world with a ferocity that has few parallels in the history of modern warfare.

“It was not pencils and pens – let alone ideas – that left Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands of human beings dead. Not twelve. Hundreds of thousands. All with stories, with lives, with families. Tens of millions who have lost friends, family, homes and watched their country be torn apart.

“To the victims of military occupation; to the people in the houses that bore the brunt of ‘shock and awe’ bombing in Iraq; to those whose bodies were disfigured by white phosphorous and depleted uranium; to the parents of children who disappeared into the torture cells of Abu Ghraib; to all of them – what but cruel mockery is the contention that Western ‘civilisation’ fights its wars with the pen and not the sword?”

Is religion the problem?

Again, I turn to Monia Mazigh for a point overlooked by many other commentators on the Paris events. At “the heart of the issue,” she writes, is “the powerful concept of secularism, used so well by many French politicians as a political tool to justify controversial policies.” She notes the alienation of many French Muslims as a result of government bans on the hijab or veil, or other clothing, worn by many Muslim women, girls attending public schools being a primary target.

Those who argue against such laws are “mocked as defending the oppression of women and obscurantism.”

This is in effect an attack on a particular expression of speech, the right to the public expression of an individual’s religious belief. The French prohibition is a legislated example of its “clash of civilizations,” a pretext for the marginalization of all Muslims. As a result, “freedom of expression, a noble concept, came to be perceived by many marginalized French Muslim youth as an empty slogan used by the powerful elite to justify the silencing of Muslims and to allow the right-wing to bash Muslims at will. This in turn created a feeling of victimhood among many disfranchised youth.”

Although Mazigh does not mention it, Canada has its own versions of this “clash of civilizations” mentality, in Quebec’s case a reflection in part of the influence of French republicanism and its particular concept of laïcité or secularism. The Charest Liberal government introduced a bill that would require Muslim women or others who wear face coverings to remove them if they want to work in the public sector or do business with government officials. The bill, had it been enacted, would have limited some women’s access to government programs such as medicare.

Although that legislation, Bill 94, was not adopted, the later Parti québécois government introduced a “Charter of Quebec Values” that reproduced the main provisions of Bill 94 and went considerably further. Although not adopted before the April 2014 election, the bill proved highly divisive and is generally considered to have played a major role in the PQ government’s defeat.

This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The repressive “war on terror” feeds on such exclusion and divisive approaches. Already, Harper is promising — no, threatening — further security laws that will restrict our freedoms in the name of… freedom of expression. In Europe the rise of the right-wing parties is fueled above all by anti-immigrant feeling, which often first takes the form of restrictions on freedom of religious expression.

Long ago a young Karl Marx, struggling to understand why so many conceived the world in religious terms, concluded that “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.” What did he mean by that?

For Marx, religion was “the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man,” of those who had not yet found their place in the world as members of society, recognized by the state. It was “an inverted consciousness of the world, … the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.” It was a struggle to restore humans to their essence as self-acting self-conscious makers of their destiny in harmony with nature.

Religion, said Marx, “is the opium of the people.” This is often misinterpreted as meaning that Marx thought religious belief was simply an illusion that could be dispelled through fighting religion itself. But that is to miss the meaning of the words that introduced that expression: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

The opium of the people…. We know that “the war on drugs” is exactly the wrong way to go about eliminating drug addiction. Instead, we advocate for social measures that can eliminate the poverty and oppression that produce such abuse, and we express our solidarity with its victims through social and medical programs that can help them navigate a way out of their predicament.

Can’t the same approach apply to the religion of the oppressed of our societies? Put aside our unease with the ideological representations that divide us and focus on the social measures, the solidaristic strategy that alone can create the material basis for overcoming religious illusion.

Above all, we must not allow ourselves to make the same mistake made by the Charlie Hebdo assassins — identifying the source of their oppression with its ideological representation, not its material, class basis. And allowing ourselves to be coopted into demonstrations of solidarity with their oppressers in the name of “freedom of expression” or other trite phrases stripped of their social context.

In 1968, when France was immersed in the largest general strike of its history, a government official dismissed Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the student movement that had sparked the strike, as “a German Jew.” The students responded by marching en masse through the streets of Paris shouting “We are all German Jews.” A valuable historical precedent, all too often forgotten today.

Je suis Charlie? No, today we are all Muslims.

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[1] Union Juive Française pour la Paix.

Quebec election: A seismic shift within the independence movement?

This blog has been relatively inactive for a long period owing largely to some pressing tasks, including needed repairs and renovations to my home in Ottawa as a result of water leakage incurred during my six-month absence in South America. However, with those problems now behind me, I want to make a few belated comments about the Quebec general election of April 7 and the new political context it established.

Specifically, I will offer some thoughts about the future of the Quebec movement for sovereignty and political independence, and comment on the election campaign of the left party Québec Solidaire and what I see as some of the major challenges now facing QS.

Thanks to the undemocratic first-past-the-post system, the Liberals with far less than a majority of votes won a majority of seats in the National Assembly, displacing the Parti Québécois government after only 18 months in office.

Quebec General Election 2014

Parties	Seats	% of popular vote	% in 2012 election
Liberals (PLQ)	70	41.5	31
Parti Québécois (PQ)	30	25.4	32
Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ)	22	23.1	27
Québec Solidaire (QS)	3	7.6	6
Others	-	2.4

Federalists rejoice

The election of a Liberal majority government has been widely interpreted, especially in English Canada, as a major victory for the federal regime and quite possibly the death knell of the fifty-year-old mass movement for Quebec independence.

It was certainly a crushing setback for the PQ. The party’s percentage of the popular vote was the lowest since its first election campaign in 1970. Seven of its 26 ministers lost their seats, including Premier Pauline Marois. Among the PQ’s defeated candidates were two leaders of the student upsurge of 2012, Léo Bureau-Blouin (elected in 2012) and Martine Desjardins.

But other pro-sovereignty parties were unable to capitalize on the PQ’s decline in support. Québec Solidaire made only modest gains, increasing its overall vote by about 60,000 and barely managing to elect a third member to the National Assembly. Option Nationale (ON), a right-wing split from the PQ in 2011, got less than 1 percent of the popular vote and again failed to elect any of its candidates.

The PQ defeat cannot in itself be attributed to its formal support for Quebec sovereignty. Many other factors were at play, not least the disappointment with the PQ’s short record in office among many environmental, trade union and student activists who have traditionally constituted the party’s social base. Véronique de Sève, the general secretary of the Montréal Council of the Confederation of National Trade Unions, spoke for many union militants:

“It is astonishing to see people like Martine Desjardins, the former student leader, embrace the PQ project when it gave birth to a mouse with its Summit on Higher Education and indexed university fees. Or to find comrade Pierre Céré [a leader of the unemployed] at the side of Pauline Marois; in 2007 he was denouncing the PQ’s “ethnic Nous” in its proposed Quebec citizenship bill. I would be surprised to hear him now on its Charter of Secularism.

“But the most recent star to enter the lists is of course Pierre Karl Péladeau…. Need we remind ourselves that this notorious anti-union boss of Québec Inc. has 14 lock-outs in his roster? Remember the one at the Journal de Montréal, the longest labour conflict in the history of Quebec media, in the winter of 2009….

“In 18 months of governance, the PQ failed to abolish the healthcare tax, it indexed university fees and approved the increase in electricity rates….”

In addition, it had failed to introduce new income tax brackets modifying the tax on some capital gains, and had removed from its platform its promise to strengthen anti-strikebreaker provisions in the Labour Code.

De Sève noted that her labour council had voted in favour of a political alternative “like that of Québec solidaire…. It advances feminist, ecologist and democratic values. It seeks a fair, green and free Quebec, an inclusive country…. It seems to me that the social agenda advanced by Québec solidaire is more like what [PQ founding leader] René Lévesque was proposing in 1976,” the year his party first took office.[1]

Although the national CSN, like the other labour centrales, urged its members to “vote strategically” among candidates in light of the CSN’s program, without endorsing any party, a special general assembly of the Montréal CSN voted that of all the parties Québec Solidaire was “the only one with values corresponding to those of the Central Council” of the CSN. This overall endorsement was a first for the new party, although in past elections the labour body had endorsed some individual QS candidates.

A charter of division

A cynical piece in the PQ’s election strategy was of course its proposed “Charter of Quebec Values,” with which it hoped to curry support among voters uneasy with the growing plural ethnic composition of Quebec. These xenophobic fears, fed by the mass media, are largely directed at symbolic targets — for example, the clothing favoured by those of minority religions and cultures such as the headscarf worn by many Muslim women. Among the Charter’s provisions was a ban on the wearing of religious insignia by employees of the state and state-funded institutions such as schools and childcare centres — a violation of the very principle of state secularism and neutrality, the purpose of which is precisely to protect freedom of religion and belief including the right of individuals to express their beliefs in public. During the election campaign, Marois admitted that the Charter would result in the dismissal of many workers; critics noted that the prohibition would affect women in particular, who are concentrated in the social services, and would constitute yet another obstacle to the integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities into Quebec society.

In practice, the few controversies over minority dress codes, dietary requirements, or other customs have been reasonably accommodated in public institutions through private negotiations among the parties. The Charter essentially offered a “solution” to a non-problem. Its apparent lack of appeal among the voters (both the PLQ and the CAQ, as well as QS, opposed these provisions) is an indication that social solidarity continues to play an important role in Quebec notwithstanding the economic and ideological ravages of neoliberalism.

The divisive nature of the Charter was underscored by the presence of some notorious Islamophobes among the PQ candidates. In addition to Djemila Benhabib, author of provocative books warning that “Islamic jihadists” threaten Quebec, there was Louise Mailloux, a columnist in the left PQ monthly L’aut’journal, who campaigns against the concept of “open and inclusive secularism” advanced by Québec Solidaire; she ran, unsuccessfully, in Montréal’s Gouin riding against its sitting member, QS leader Françoise David.

The ethnic nationalist Charter was emblematic of the PQ orientation in this campaign, which was aimed primarily at winning support to its right among “soft nationalists” of the CAQ, a party that originated in the 1990s in the Quebec Liberal party but now includes many dissident péquistes, including the CAQ’s leader François Legault. The PQ objective was to win enough votes from the CAQ’s constituency to give it majority government status in the National Assembly.

PQ loses momentum on sovereignty

The PQ’s recruitment of media tycoon Pierre Karl Péladeau (“PKP”) was designed to prove the party’s acceptability to big business notwithstanding its historic commitment to Quebec sovereignty. This new addition to the PQ leadership alienated the unions, a long-standing social base for the party. And the strategy backfired when PKP told his introductory press conference that he wanted to make Quebec “a country,” pumping his fist in the air to emphasize the point.

From that point on the PQ’s standing in opinion polls declined and a promising lead at the outset of the campaign melted away, to the benefit of the federalist Liberal party led by Philippe Couillard, a former cabinet minister.

The corporate media seized on Péladeau’s statement, and Marois’ explanations in support (for two days only), to make Quebec independence a key issue, stoking widespread fears among many voters (including many PQ supporters) that the party might attempt a third referendum on sovereignty that would in present conditions almost certainly result in a third No vote, yet another historic setback for Quebec independence.

Why do so many Québécois fear another referendum? Most Québécois are well aware by now that any move by Quebec toward independence faces ferocious opposition by the central government. And there is understandably little confidence in the PQ’s ability to counter that opposition and to win a convincing majority for the Yes in a referendum on sovereignty.

The decisive referendum defeat in 1980 and the narrow defeat in 1995 are still fresh in the collective memory. Each setback was followed by central government moves to isolate Quebec and curtail its right to national self-determination — in the 1980s through depriving it of a right of veto over constitutional change and engineering a new constitution that, among other provisions, eroded Quebec’s legislative power to protect the French language; and after the 1995 referendum defeat, through the federal parliament’s adoption of the Clarity Bill, which made Quebec independence following a referendum Yes vote contingent on acceptance by Ottawa and the other provinces.

In fact, since the 1995 referendum the PQ has stopped promoting sovereignty and chosen, when in government, simply to defend Quebec autonomy while hoping that at some point popular opposition to some provocation by Ottawa would create the “winning conditions” for a successful referendum Yes vote. This approach reflects the party’s enduring illusion that Quebec independence can be achieved in a “cold” process without mass mobilization for national liberation and without a “projet de société” or social program that offers a credible progressive alternative to the federal regime.

This was underscored by Marois’ initial response to the federalists’ anti-referendum campaign. A sovereign Quebec under PQ leadership, she insisted, would retain the Canadian currency and even seek a seat on the board of governors of the Bank of Canada! In other words, its economic policy would be essentially determined by that of Canada. Some “sovereignty” that would be! As Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne cynically noted, the PQ “offers a vision of independence that, more and more, looks an awful lot like dependence.”[2]

Requiem for a country?

Does the election result portend the end of the independence movement? That’s the almost universal view of commentators in English Canada. But some prominent péquistes have raised similar doubts. Typical was former PQ cabinet minister Louise Beaudoin:

“I was not anticipating the scope of this defeat. Was the idea of independence that of a single generation? Have we failed to transmit the desire for a country to the youth? … In a context of globalization, collective dreams are no longer present. …

“I think the identitarian project [of the Charter of Quebec Values] is fundamentally progressive, but today’s youth sanctify individual rights.”[3]

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a leader of the 2012 student upsurge, was quick to respond.

“To transfer responsibility for an election defeat to the youth when it is her party that is mobilizing around themes that do not attract them seems insane to me. It’s really special to say such a thing after our experience in the spring mobilization of 2012!”

It is not independence that is the culprit but “souverainisme,” the PQ’s concept of “sovereignty,” he told Le Devoir.[4]

“Since the beginning of the PQ, this idea is a failure. It says we will have a country after a referendum. Except that in the meantime, we will destroy it by developing petroleum, making any kind of decision without thinking about what we want to do later? …

“Social justice, the environment and culture were at the heart of the spring 2012 mobilization…. The PQ presented itself in the elections of September 2012 as the political relay for these ideas, but it did not embody them at all. It is not surprising that it now mobilizes so few youth….

“They tell us that they will achieve independence, but that nothing will really change…. But, on the contrary, we should have the courage to say that we are going to achieve it so that things change!”

Nadeau-Dubois’ reaction was shared by others interviewed by Le Devoir. Lamine Foura, an aeronautical engineer who hosts a radio program on Middle East issues, agreed that there is a generation gap within the independence movement:

“I think a certain conception of independence is outdated. Young people are no longer going to mobilize by talk about economic oppression. It’s not accidental that they have migrated from the PQ to Québec solidaire; the youth have ideals, they respond to values that go beyond the economic sphere alone. Sovereignty is not simply a matter of transferring powers from Ottawa to Quebec City!”

And here is Jérémie Bédard-Wien, another leader of the 2012 student strike:[5]

“It is ironic to see Ms. Beaudoin deplore our individualism two years after the rise of the greatest social movement of contemporary Quebec. From its general assemblies to its demands, the movement against the increase in university tuition fees was collective to the marrow. Although it did not directly address the national question, the strikers’ line of division was obvious: the border between Quebec and Ontario.

“For many of these youth, the Parti Québécois’ country has become toxic. Once a tool of social, cultural and economic emancipation, it is now the project of one of the worst bosses in Quebec…. It is now associated with a discriminatory charter that deregulates racist speech and stigmatizes the cultural communities….

“It is high time that we thought of sovereignty as indissociable from the other ‘collective dreams’ of Quebec youth, by making Quebec a country of the left, in which social values come before nationalist values; a country in which secularism is not a mere political manipulation.”

A harsh assessment of the PQ defeat came from veteran sovereigntist Jean Dorion, a former Bloc Québécois MP and former president of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society.[6] He told Le Devoir that it was the PQ’s re-election, more than its defeat, that would have definitively buried the dream of a country:

“This result is disturbing for many, but it is a lesser evil, for personally I think the idea of sovereignty would have suffered even more. If there is a possible salvation for the independentist movement, it is by adapting to pluralism, for the youth are more open to this diversity. We cannot become set in a uniformism that is outmoded and will be even more so in the years to come.”[7]

An incomplete nation

By harping on the question of identity, the Parti Québécois is reopening a wound that has largely healed in recent decades. By dint of hard-fought struggles, the Québécois have greatly enhanced the status of the French language; French is now, as the Charter of the French Language (Law 101) proclaims in its preamble, “the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business.” To a large degree, the historic sharp disparities in income and status between Francophones and Anglophones within Quebec that existed even within living memory have been reduced if not eliminated entirely. French predominance is of course under constant threat and attack from the courts, which have used the federal Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to overturn some provisions of Law 101. But that is a problem that will only be solved when Quebec becomes a sovereign country with unfettered jurisdiction over its distinctive language and culture.

And that is just the point. Quebec politics continues to evolve within a primarily national, Quebec framework. Since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Quebec has developed a deeply rooted identity as a Francophone nation that is quite distinct from the Canadian nationalism of the “Rest of Canada.” Most progressives in Quebec are pro-independence, as is the left alternative to the PQ, Québec solidaire. And although pro-sovereignty support waxes and wanes (while seldom falling below a 40% threshold), it takes very little to disrupt the present apparent calm around “national” issues, and for major crises to develop without warning, resulting in sharp increases in national and independentist fervour.

Underlying this reality is the fact that all the decisive powers of government — banking and finance, foreign affairs, the military, trade and commerce, criminal law and control of the senior courts and judiciary, etc. — are held by the federal state, which above all has the duty to protect the territorial and institutional integrity of the state and forestall any challenge by Quebec to that integrity. In view of this central contradiction, it is legitimate to ask for how long can Quebec remain “a province like the others”?

Much of the apparent quiescence on the national front is in fact due to the calming effect of winning reforms. Law 101 and the struggles associated with it, for example, have changed the terms of the language debate. And Ottawa has demonstrated many times its ability to accommodate some Quebec pressures for distinct treatment within the federal union. But this is an age of long-term austerity, neoliberalism and counter-reform. This can only mean — as a long-term trend, not all at once and on all issues — increased resistance in Quebec to further reforms by Ottawa and its attempts to reverse the previous gains. And that resistance will unfold within a primarily national, Québécois framework, although its ultimate success will require the assistance of powerful social allies in English Canada.[8]

The struggle for the direction of the national movement and to define its content is intensifying in the wake of the PQ’s election debacle. And Québec solidaire, as the only party that links independence with a progressive social project, will be an important player in this contest.

Québec Solidaire’s campaign

I was not personally involved in the Québec solidaire campaign. However, it is my impression that the eight-year-old party’s election effort was the most ambitious and the best organized to this date. Thanks to recruitment during the “printemps érable” upsurge of 2012, QS now boasts almost 15,000 members — three times its membership at its foundation in 2006. With two MNAs in the previous legislature it had more state funding, which it used for such things as a campaign bus for its leaders’ travel, more advertising, and a somewhat greater coverage in the mass media (although only Le Devoir assigned a reporter full-time to the QS campaign). The de facto QS leader, Françoise David, was able to debate the other party leaders in two television debates.

The QS election platform,[9] an expanded version of its platform in the 2012 election, featured many demands with an anti-neoliberal and potentially mobilizing content, among them:

• a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% of 1990 levels by 2020, and by 95% by 2050
• development of a strategy to abandon the use of fossil fuels by 2030
• a ban on additional exploration and production of fossil fuels and nuclear energy
• a ban on the transportation over Quebec territory of non-conventional oil and gas (shale oil and gas, tar sands oil), whether by train, pipeline, boats or trucks
• free education at all levels
• rejection of the free trade agreement with the European Union
• major expansion of childcare facilities
• elimination of the health tax, creation of a state drug purchasing agency Pharma-Québec, doubling of the budget for home care support
• free public urban transit within ten years
• complete or partial nationalization (with majority state participation) of firms in the energy, natural resources and transportation industries
• creation of a public bank
• a minimum wage pegged to the low income threshold (about $13 an hour in 2013 for a 35-hour week)
• a ban on lockouts and injunctions, multi-employer union certification, minimum three weeks paid vacation
• construction of 50,000 social housing units
• priority hiring of members of cultural communities and immigrants in the public service
• a constituent assembly with equal male-female representation, followed by a referendum to adopt it
• a detailed proposal for proportional representation in the National Assembly, right of recall, a municipal right of veto over mining projects
• abolition of laws and by-laws limiting the right to peaceful assembly, creation of an independent agency to investigate and oversee police activities
• extension of the Law 101 to firms with 10 or more employees
• achievement of food sovereignty, labelling of local and GMO products

The party published a number of attractive brochures addressed to important parts of the QS platform, among them a 23-page “Plan for eliminating petroleum 2015-2030.”[10]

Furthermore, the documentation available to members and candidates on the party’s intranet was much more extensive than in previous elections. A series of “election memos” included detailed explanations of the reasoning behind most of the demands in the platform with hyperlinked references to further documentation and the positions of the capitalist parties. Taken as a whole, these thematic memos — totalling well over 100 pages — constituted the most extensive internal educational effort undertaken by the party to date, and if they had been published on the public QS web site could have enhanced its usefulness. (These are largely conjunctural analyses; QS has yet to organize educational seminars and public forums exploring systemic critiques of capitalism.)

The QS critique of the Parti Québécois was on the whole sharper in its focus than in previous election efforts. The adherence of PKP to the PQ elicited the comment by QS leader Françoise David that an elected member of Quebec solidaire would “never sit beside Pierre Karl Péladeau” in Quebec's national assembly. His ascension appears to have put an end, at least for now, to the repeated efforts by David and co-leader Amir Khadir to re-open the QS membership’s rejection, in two separate conventions of the party, of any election alliance or agreement with the PQ.

Another notable feature of the campaign was a four-part debate in the pages of L’aut’journal,[11] the unofficial organ of the PQ left caucus SPQ Libre,[12] between QS candidate Alexandre Leduc and SPQ Libre leader Pierre Dubuc on such issues as how to achieve a sovereign Quebec, the PQ’s charter, the PKP candidacy and the QS environmental program. The constant attacks on Québec Solidaire in L’aut’journal throughout the campaign revealed the extreme discomfort of SPQ Libre with the PQ’s evolution and their concern at the potential threat QS posed to the PQ’s hegemony in the broader independence movement.

An important weakness of the QS campaign, in my view, was the support given by its leadership, especially Françoise David, to the enactment of a charter of secularism, albeit not the Charter of Quebec Values proposed by the PQ. The programmatic position of Québec Solidaire on secularism was hammered out at a convention of the party in November 2009; it does not advocate elaboration of a formal charter (nor did the party’s election platform) but situates the incidents cited in the media in the correct framework of efforts to accommodate the particular needs of religious and ethnic minorities as part of a strategy of integrating them as full members of the Quebec nation. However, David’s position of qualified support to a charter, particularly in the TV debates, contradicted what should have been a clear position in opposition to the PQ’s sectarian and divisive charter and reflected a disturbing trend on her part to improvise her own positions even when they do not reflect the program and policies democratically adopted by the QS membership.

As noted earlier, there are indications that the QS campaign, and the slippages of the Parti Québécois leadership, stimulated greater interest in Québec Solidaire among trade union militants. The challenge now is for the party to find ways to give some careful thought to organizing the intervention of its members in the unions and to engage them directly in the debate that is sure to open over the longstanding support to the PQ of most of the labour leadership. As it is, Québec Solidaire has only a marginal presence in the unions; of its 125 candidates, only 10 were listed by the party as trade union members; among them were a number of well-known militants including Claude Généreux, the former president of the Quebec section of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).

A party of the streets?

The QS leadership statements since the election have been primarily self-congratulatory and focused on the preparations of the party’s three MNAs for the forthcoming session of the National Assembly. But much of the post-election analysis among QS activists[13] has focused on the obvious need for the party to give much greater emphasis to its extra-parliamentary activity, the “streets” side of the QS self-description as “a party of the ballot boxes and the streets.” In this regard, the party would in my opinion benefit from reviving and debating a draft proposal on “Québec Solidaire and the social movements” that was submitted by the QS Policy Commission for discussion at a QS convention a few years ago; it was then withdrawn from the convention agenda ostensibly for later debate but since then shelved indefinitely. I append to this article my English translation of the document in question. I think it presents some valuable ideas on how the party might structure its intervention in the social movements, including the trade unions.

Another aspect of Québec Solidaire’s campaign that merits review, in my opinion, is its approach to Quebec independence. Although the party, in an attempt to attract disillusioned PQ and ON supporters, gave greater emphasis to its support for independence in this campaign than it has previously, it treats independence as just one of its demands instead of placing its program within the framework of the struggle for political sovereignty. This has a number of negative effects.

One is that QS tends to campaign as a provincial party, its proposals largely limited to what Quebec can do as a province within the existing federal framework — a sort of left version of the PQ’s concept of “sovereigntist governance” within the federal regime.

This limits the ability of QS to present a credible programmatic perspective of “another Quebec,” one in which a sovereign Quebec could implement radical anti-capitalist measures such as nationalization of banking and finance, demobilization of the military and creation of a popular militia for home defense and disaster relief, establishment of new relations of solidarity with progressive governments in Latin America and elsewhere (QS has yet to develop a program on international relations), and adoption of radical ecosocialist approaches to the environmental crisis.

A related problem, in my view, is the way in which the party presents its strategy for achieving independence. QS calls for the formation of a democratically elected Constituent Assembly (CA) that would hold an open-ended debate on Quebec’s constitutional future, much in the manner of the Bélanger-Campeau Commission that met in the wake of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in the early 1990s. The B-C Commission, composed primarily of Liberal and PQ supporters, was predictably unable to reach a consensus on constitutional reform. And although QS insists it would fight for sovereignty within the Assembly, what assurance is there that in the present political climate of retreat of the social movements the delegates would come up with a clear proposal for a sovereign Quebec constitution, to be put to citizens in a decisive referendum? Independence must be seen as more than simply an option for democratic decision-making. It should be a central framework in Québec Solidaire’s program and strategy.

It seems to me that the critique of the QS position by many independentists hits the mark when they point to the need for a massive educational and mobilizing effort in support of independence prior to a popular referendum verdict and a subsequent process to establish the constitution of an independent Quebec. It is worth recalling that the constituent assemblies that have recently met to reformulate the state structures in a number of Latin American countries, often cited by QS spokespeople as their precedent, all took place in countries that won their formal independence as states some 200 years ago. Quebec is one of the last national territories in the Western Hemisphere yet to declare its political independence, a prior step to the adoption of a new constitution.

However, as the post-election comments by a number of young independentists cited earlier in this article illustrate, this too is a debate that will no doubt develop within the coming months and years as the Québécois reflect on the seismic shifts in party alignments and perspectives revealed by the April 7 election.

Appendix

Québec Solidaire and the social movements – section 3.6 of the original proposal submitted by Policy Commission, now withdrawn for later debate.

3.6 Québec Solidaire’s relations with the social movements

This section poses the question of the concrete meaning that Québec Solidaire intends to give to the phrase “party of the ballot boxes, party of the street.” The contributions we received argue that Québec Solidaire should respect the organizational and political autonomy of the social movements and promote their break with the Parti Québécois and its social-liberalism, which has been a factor of retreat and demobilization. From this perspective, Québec Solidaire, as a party and as a government, should seek to strengthen the capacities of the social movements, encourage their unity in action and participate in them on the basis of a program of social transformation.

Indeed, only if it is part of a broad mobilization of the social movements could Québec Solidaire, when it takes power, confront the implacable pressure of Capital and its allies and thereby transform its program into durable achievements. Recent history demonstrates that without the active support of strong social movements, and their extra-parliamentary mobilization, the government of a party of the left has only two possibilities: to retreat from its program, or to be driven from office by legal and, if necessary illegal, means.

Therefore, Québec Solidaire cannot be content with simply welcoming social struggles or echoing them on the institutional and parliamentary terrain. It must offer an alternative left-wing project that lies at the very core of the popular resistance movements. How is this to be done? The proposals in this section attempt to offer some responses. But one thing is clear: if Québec Solidaire is to adopt such tasks, it is because it adopts the perspective that the workers will be the principal subjects of their own emancipation, and in no way does it claim, as a party, that the transformation of the living and working conditions of the vast majority of the population will be made from above without the persons directly involved being themselves the artisans of these transformations. The construction of a party of the left and the development of the social movements are, in this sense, inter-dependent processes.

Proposals for action in regard to the social movements

i. Use the electoral struggle to defend the demands of the workers, popular, ecologist and feminist movements; promote the expression of popular resistance movements in the very course of election campaigns.

ii. Defend the rights of the social movements and promote their influence.

iii. Defend the organization, political and ideological autonomy of the social movements.

iv. As a party of government, promote the reinforcement of the capacities for organization and action of the social movements.

v. Work to promote egalitarian relationships between the trade-union movement and the other social movements.

vi. Work on the development and establishment of a project for social transformation in a reciprocal relationship with the social movements.

vii. Defend the necessity of a social and political front of popular resistance and participate in its construction.

viii. Host meetings where QS and the social movements can share their experiences.

ix. Encourage networking within the party of the QS members who belong to the various social movements.

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[1] “Sortirons-nous enfin du cynisme?,” an editorial in Unité, the newspaper of the Montréal CSN, April 2014.

[2] National Post, 13 March 2014,

[3] “Requiem pour le projet de pays,” Le Devoir, 9 April 2014.

[4] “Indépendance, D’une génération à l’autre,” 12 April 2014.

[5] “Le pays est mort, vive le pays!,” Presse-toi à gauche, 22 April 2014.

[6] For an earlier critique of the PQ by Jean Dorion, see “Quebec nationalist leader critiques PQ’s anti-immigrant ‘charter of exclusion’,” Life on the Left, 24 September 2012.

[7] “Requiem pour le projet de pays,” op. cit., note 3.

[8] This discussion reflects the gist of email exchanges with comrades, including in particular Art Young.

[9] Available on the QS web site, along with an English translation.

[10] Plan de Sortie du Pétrole 2015-2030.

[11] Débat Leduc-Dubuc.

[12] Syndicalistes et Progressistes pour un Québec Libre.

[13] A prime source is Presse-toi à gauche, the on-line journal associated with the QS collective Gauche socialiste and the new Réseau Écosocialiste (Ecosocialist Network).