Foundations of an ecosocialist strategy

Introduction
The following article by a leading European ecosocialist, Daniel Tanuro, was written especially for the latest issue of the Montréal-based journal Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme (NCS), which features a number of articles on what is commonly referred to as the ecological crisis (not yet on-line). Tanuro is the author of an important book-length Marxist critique of “Green Capitalism,” L’impossible capitalisme vert, soon to be published in English. Other articles by Daniel Tanuro, in both French and English, may be found at Europe solidaire sans frontières. I have translated below the French text of this article as published by NCS.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Foundations of an ecosocialist strategy

by Daniel Tanuro

Contrary to the false but extremely popular Easter Island metaphor advanced by Jared Diamond,[1] the environmental deterioration we are now observing is not at all comparable to the damage that may have occurred in previous historical periods. The differences are not only quantitative (the seriousness and global scale of ecological problems) but also and above all qualitative. While all the environmental crises of the past stemmed from social tendencies to chronic under-production, hence the fear of shortages, the current problems originate in the converse tendency to over-production and over-consumption, which is specific to generalized commodity production.
Consequently, the expression “ecological crisis” is inappropriate. It is not nature that is in crisis, but the historically determined relationship between humanity and its environment. This crisis is not due to the intrinsic characteristics of the human species but to the mode of production that became dominant about two centuries ago — capitalism — and the modes of consumption and mobility that it entails. The serious damages to ecosystems (climate change, chemical pollution, swift decline in biodiversity, soil degradation, destruction of the tropical forest, etc.) constitute one dimension of the global systemic crisis. Together, they express the incompatibility between capitalism and respect for natural limits.

Productivism without limits
The fundamental reason for this incompatibility is straightforward. Under the whip of competition, every owner of capital is permanently seeking to replace living labour by dead labour, that is, to replace workers with more productive machines, since the latter procure surplus profit in addition to the average profit. Needless to say, this operation would be meaningless for the capitalist if it were not accompanied by an attempt to eliminate his weaker competitors through the increase in the mass of commodities placed on the market at low prices. The innovation, in this mode of production, lies not in the reduction in the volume of labour but in the never-ending accumulation of capital.
Accordingly, the capitalist’s constant search for new fields of added value leads him to produce a never-ending quantity of useless and harmful commodities which, to produce surplus value, must constantly create increasingly artificial outlets and needs. “Productivism” — producing in order to produce — necessarily implies “consuming in order to consume” and is part of the genetic code of this mode of production, just like commodity fetishism. Capitalism, said Schumpeter, “not only never is but never can be stationary.”[2] Indeed, if capitalism were to be stationary, it would be necessary to abolish competition between the numerous capitals that make up Capital, which is obviously absurd.
But, it may be objected, if efficiency in the use of resources were to increase more rapidly than the mass of commodities produced, the expanded reproduction of capital would not be accompanied by an increased depletion of natural resources. Capitalism would then be ecologically sustainable. Indeed. That is the thesis of the decoupling between GDP growth and the ecological footprint. It is illustrated by the so-called Kuznets bell curve, according to which the environmental impact of a given society will increase to a peak, then decline with the increase in its wealth and therefore the development of its productive forces.
True, of all the modes of production that have existed in history, capitalism is the one that has most spectacularly increased the productivity of labour and thus efficiency in the use of resources. That is because the quest for surplus profit that prompts mechanization simultaneously favours increased savings in the use of natural resources. However, this observation does not challenge the ecocidal nature of the system, and the Kuznets curve is false. On the one hand, the increase in efficiency is necessarily asymptotic, not a linear function of the increase in fixed capital — otherwise one would have to conclude that perpetual movement is possible since, if carried to an extreme, labour could be performed without loss of energy. (This glaring error was committed by the experts who assessed the share of European electricity consumption that could be covered by the Desertec solar power project in the Sahara.[3]) On the other hand, empirical observation shows that increasing the volume of production does more than offset the increase in efficiency, which is only relative. A striking example is the case of the automobile: the efficiency of the engines increases, but the global needs for hydrocarbon fuels and the greenhouse gas emissions explode as a result of the never-ending increase in the number of vehicles. Growth-obsessed capitalism inevitably implies a growing consumption of resources, which is irreconcilable with their finite nature and their rates of renewal.
The alarming increase in serious ecological problems poses the question of the theoretical limits to capitalist growth and consequently capitalist degradation of the environment. To answer this, we must clearly grasp that capital is not a thing, it is a social relation of exploitation, the development of which was historically made possible by the prior appropriation of natural resources (land, water, forests, etc.) by the ruling classes on behalf of profit. This appropriation then entailed that of the labour force, transformed into a waged commodity. The pillage of resources and exploitation of labor — when it is considered from the social standpoint — are therefore the two sides of the same coin.
However, leaving aside its social component (cooperation and its forms), human labour power can also be considered from the thermodynamic angle, as one among other natural resources (the human body is a converter of energy). In this case, pillage and exploitation are in fact but one and the same process of destruction, and surplus labour can be described as a quantity of energy monopolized by the employer.
Once this is recognized, it is possible to answer the question about the theoretical limits of capital. On the one hand, the expropriation of the direct producers, their alienation from the nourishing earth, has created a social class whose only means of subsistence is the sale of its labour power in return for a wage. On the other hand, the worker who is hired as an employee finds ready-made, placed at his or her disposal by the employer, the necessary ingredients for his or her productive activity — tools, buildings and energy — that are directly or indirectly derived from resources taken from nature through labour or transformed by it.
In this context, and taking into account the fact that the increase in efficiency is only relative, it goes without saying that the incessant quest for surplus profits through capitalist productivism weighs on both the variable and constant fractions of capital, so that it must inevitably consume an ever-greater absolute quantity of labour power and natural resources even though it favours their relative economy. Seen in this light, Marx’s enigmatic formula that capital has no limit other than capital itself simply means that this mode of production will stop on its own terms only after it has exhausted the only two sources of “all wealth: the land and the labourer.”[4]
This conclusion leaves so little room for optimism that some people desperately cling to the idea that some endogenous mechanism not yet identified might block the system before it has reached this theoretical limit. However, we must resign ourselves to noting that there is nothing of the kind, nor can there be. The reason, once again, is straightforward and has to do with the fundamental laws of capitalism: this mode based exclusively on the law of labour value has as its sole purpose the production of exchange values, not use values. Since value is determined by the labour time socially necessary for production, it is obvious that capital does not have any means that would enable it to account spontaneously for the resources that nature gratuitously puts at the disposal of humanity. The money form — the symbol and essence of value — by its very abstraction and the complete reversal of perspective that it engenders (money seems to give value to commodities, although it is commodities that give money its value) creates the illusion that unlimited material accumulation is possible.
It should be explained that capital, although it counts and measures everything, is incapable of taking natural resources into account both qualitatively and quantitatively, as is shown by the irresponsible insouciance with which it irreversibly destroys the stocks of numerous resources despite warnings of all kinds. This madness has even found its theoreticians in the person of ultraliberals who — in the face of all the evidence — defend the absurd thesis of the complete substitutability of natural resources by products of human activity.

A political answer?
Of course, SOME capital is invested massively in the green sector of the economy, for the profits there are attractive, thanks especially to public subsidies. But “green capitalism” as such is an oxymoron. The only meaningful issue is to what degree the ecological blindness of the commodity mode of production might be offset by policy measures exogenous to the strictly economic sphere. In view of what was said earlier, the answer is obvious: the efficiency of ecological policies depends entirely on the determination with which those who advocate them dare to challenge the freedom of capital, and to construct the necessary relationship of forces to impose them (which in turn involves linking the solution of the ecological question to the struggles of the exploited: the fight against unemployment, poverty, social inequality, discrimination and deterioration of working conditions).
And this is where the shoe pinches. Tim Jackson, for example, is probably one of the non-Marxist authors who best understands the productivist logic of capitalism as the fundamental cause of environmental degradation. In Prosperity Without Growth, rejecting superficial explanations, he writes perceptively that “the throw-away society is not so much a consequence of consumer greed as a structural prerequisite for survival,” for the system needs to “sell more goods, to innovate continually.”[5] But Jackson sidesteps the conclusion to be drawn from his own analysis: instead of challenging the mode of production, he veers toward questioning a “desire for novelty and consumption” that in his view is part of human nature. As a result, the mountain gives forth a mouse:

[Translation]
On the ecological side, Prosperity Without Growth pleads for government to set harsh limits on the use of resources subject only to environmental constraints. And that is what should be done.... However, one cannot pretend to ignore, as Jackson does, that the business class successfully opposes all drastic environmental regulation, even in those cases where the need for it is questioned the least;
On the social side, Jackson has the merit of arguing for a reduction in labour time, but he subordinates this measure to the maintenance of corporate competitiveness, so no figure is assigned to it. In his view, the reduction in labour time is in fact a form of flexibility, not an immediate collective response to unemployment or a tool for redistributing the wealth produced (without reduction in wages). He envisages it only as a last resort, whenever the conversion of economists to a new “macro-economic model” would not suffice to simply displace the focal point of economic activity from the value producing sector to dematerialized services.[6]

Generally, all of the proposals advanced to politically remedy the ecosuicidal nature of capital trip over the same obstacles: the logic of profit and the class nature of the institutions.[7]

Mirage of internalization
Einstein is reputed to have said “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” This theorem is perfectly applicable to the idea that capitalism could embark on the path of sustainability if some political authorities assigned a price to natural resources. Since the ecological crisis is a consequence of generalized commodity production, the destruction of the environment cannot be stopped by “commodifying” water, air, carbon, genes or any other natural resource. Not only does this “internalization of externalities” not bring us any closer to a solution, it takes us in the opposite direction. Needless to say, the transformation of natural resources into commodities implies their appropriation by capital. Accordingly, the matter is settled because capital, by subjecting them to the law of labour-value, thereby tends to remove them from any governing principle other than profit.
In any case, independently of these considerations, and even more fundamentally, attempts to assign a price to natural resources come up against an insurmountable theoretical difficulty: how to evaluate in monetary terms properties whose production is not measurable in hours of labour, and which therefore have no value, and whose destruction is, moreover, deferred in time? Liberal economists attempting to answer this puzzle squabble over the current conversion rate and question to what degree consumers are willing to pay for the environment or to accept its degradation. The price of natural resources varies, then, according to whether the persons who are questioned are wealthy or poverty-stricken. Pushed to the limit, this method clearly reveals its absurdity: what commodity value should be given to sunlight, knowing that life on Earth depends on it?
The impasse of commodity calculation appears clearly in the proposal for a carbon tax to make fossil energies more expensive than renewables and consequently reduce carbon gas emissions. As we know, to have a reasonable chance of not overly exceeding a 2^oC increase in temperature from the pre-industrial era, these emissions must decrease by 80 to 95% by 2050 in the developed capitalist countries, and by 50 to 85% world-wide, with the inflection point being reached by no later than 2015.[8] These ranges — and it would be prudent to aim for the higher figures — mean abandoning fossil fuels within two generations, although these energy sources account for 80% of our present energy needs (and petroleum is the raw material of the petrochemical industry).
In fact, the scope of the reductions to be achieved, given the urgency and the size of the difference in cost between fossils and renewables, is such that even a tax of $600 a ton would not suffice (it would simply allow a reduction in global emissions by one-half by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.[9] Since the combustion of a thousand litres of fuel oil produces 2.7 tons of CO₂, it is understandable that such a measure would be socially inapplicable in reality: employers could accept this only if it were wholly transferred to the ultimate consumers, while the majority of the population, infuriated by the austerity that has prevailed for 30 years, will obviously oppose any such deterioration in its conditions of existence.
That is why, in practice, and notwithstanding all the sophisticated theories of ecological economics, the policy proposals for internalization of the costs of pollution are both ecologically insufficient and socially unsustainable. Supposing that the theoretical and practical obstacles can be lifted, the effectiveness of internalization would remain unpredictable because price is a purely quantitative indicator, incapable of capturing the qualitative differences between tons of CO₂ avoided by methods as different as the insulation of a home, installation of photovoltaic panels, a tree plantation, or the suppression of a Formula One Grand Prix. Quantitatively, there is nothing to distinguish one ton of CO₂ from another. But the qualitative differences are decisive in developing adequate ecological strategies in which the means implemented are consistent with the end — the passage without social destruction to an energy sparing and decentralized system based solely on renewable sources.

Rational management of the metabolism and class struggle
The ecosuicidal nature of capital has been a reality since the beginning of this mode of production. In the 19^th century the founder of soil chemistry, Liebig, was already sounding the alarm: as a result of capitalist urbanization, human excrements no longer returned to the field, and this break in the nutrient cycle threatened to cause serious impoverishment of the soil. In the course of his work, Marx raised the issue to the conceptual plane by posing the general need “to govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way.”[10] Then, armed with this ecological concept (before the term existed), he returned to the issue of soils in order to advance a radical programmatic perspective: abolition of the separation between town and country, the indispensable complement in his view to the gradual disappearance of the separation between manual and intellectual labour.
It must be stressed here that the expression “rational” management should not give rise to confusion. Nature, for Marx, is “the inorganic body of man.” The correct metabolism of the whole is not achieved by a bureaucracy of green technocrats but by the suppression of social classes. Indeed, the division of society renders impossible any conscious and organized mastery of exchange of matter with the environment. Not only because the drive for profit impels the bosses to pillage natural resources but also because their capitalist appropriation means that the resources are arrayed against the exploited as hostile forces from which the latter are alienated. Added to that is the competition between workers and the fear of unemployment, which encourages each, individually, to desire the profitable operation of “his” or “her” company, and thus to collaborate involuntarily in productivism. Finally, based on a certain level of development of capital, commodity consumption gives the workers a certain number of meager compensations for their alienation from production. None of these mechanisms can be broken except by the development of class solidarity on an ever-broader scale. That is why, for Marx, the rational regulation of the social metabolism can be realized only by the “associated producers.” And Marx explained that it is this alone that provides “the only possible freedom.”
Although Lenin referred to it in some positions he took on the agrarian question,[11] and Bukharin made an intelligent presentation of it in his handbook on Historical Materialism,[12] the Marxist concept of rational regulation of material exchanges subsequently sank into oblivion. No Marxist thinker assigned it the importance it deserves, and in fact none of them saw its relevance when the ecological question became a social issue in the 1960s. This is not the place to inquire into the reasons for this discontinuity in revolutionary Marxism.[13] Suffice it to warn the reader against simplistic interpretations: Stalinism is not the sole culprit, although in this field as well it did signify a terrible theoretical regression.[14] Rather, we will emphasize the fact that there is an urgent need to assign “Marx’s ecology” a central place in the theoretical thinking and programmatic development of the Marxists.[15]
The problem of global warming illustrates this need. The saturation of the atmosphere in CO₂, mainly due to the combustion of fossil fuels — that is, a short-circuit in the long cycle of carbon — is a flagrant case of irrational management of material exchanges, and this irrationality confronts humanity with a terrible dilemma:

• On the one hand, three billion people live in disgraceful conditions. Their legitimate needs can only be met by increasing material production, and thus processing resources removed from the environment. This means consuming energy, 80% of which is of fossil origin today, a source of greenhouse gas;
• On the other hand, the climate system is on the verge of a heart attack. If we are to avoid irreversible catastrophes (the major victims of which will be among the three billion people aspiring to a dignified existence), greenhouse gas emissions must be radically reduced. This means reducing the consumption of the fossil energies now needed for the processing of the resources taken from the environment, and reducing material production.

Within the short period of 40 years now left to us, according to the IPCC — and absent an extraordinary scientific revolution in energy — there is simply no acceptable capitalist solution to these simultaneous equations. A system based on competition for profit is quite simply incapable of satisfying non-solvable human needs on a mass scale while sustainably reducing the consumption of energy and material production. Attaining either of these objectives separately is already incompatible with the logic of capital, so how can they be achieved in conjunction? That this is not possible is clear from an examination of the climate scenarios proposed by governments and international institutions. The Blue Map scenario of the International Energy Agency, for example, aims at a reduction in global emissions of 50% by 2050.[16] It is more than probable that this objective is insufficient; in any case, it could be achieved only by massive recourse to nuclear energy, agrofuels and so-called “clean coal” (not to mention shale gas and oil sands). Blue Map would involve the construction each year, for more than forty years, of 32 nuclear power plants with a 1,000 MW capacity, and 45 new “clean” coal-fueled plants with a 500 MW capacity. There is no point in going further: the terrible catastrophe of Fukushima, Japan, is enough to show the aberration in such projects.
The strategic choice is therefore the following:

• either we leave capitalism behind by radically restricting the sphere and volume of capitalist production and transportation, and it is possible to limit to the maximum the damages of global warming while guaranteeing a quality human development based exclusively on renewable energies within the perspective of a society based on some other economy of time;
• or we remain within the capitalist accumulation logic, and climate deregulation radically limits the right to existence of hundreds of millions of human beings, while future generations are condemned to cope with the problems originating in the project creep of some dangerous technologies.

Obviously, we will opt for the first solution, but it must be emphasized that strict environmental constraints will subject the transition to socialism to some previously unforeseen conditions. There is no over-estimating the scope of the challenge. In the European Union, for example, reducing emissions by 60% (they should be reduced by 95%!) without resort to nuclear power would necessitate a reduction of about 40% in final energy demand.[17] It is not easy to gauge the cascading implications on material production and transportation, but it seems obvious that the objective will not be achieved simply by eliminating unnecessary and harmful production (weapons, advertising, luxury yachts and private planes, etc.), fighting the planned obsolescence of products, or reducing the ostentatious consumption of the wealthiest layers of the ruling class. More radical measures will be needed, and these will have some effects on the population as a whole, at least in the developed capitalist countries. In other words, the transition to socialism must be made in conditions very different from those of the 20^th century.
One indication is provided by the estimate of the share of agribusiness in total greenhouse gas emissions. According to the campaign “Ne mange pas le monde,” from 44 to 57% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to the present model of production, distribution and consumption of farm and forest products. This figure is obtained by adding together emissions due to strictly agricultural activities (11 to 15%), deforestation (15 to 18%), and the handling, transportation and storing of foods (15 to 20%) and organic residues (3 to 4%).[18]
The fight for the optimum possible climate stabilization cannot be limited, therefore, to the expropriation of the expropriators-polluters-squanderers. The change in property relations is only the necessary — but not sufficient — condition for an extremely profound social change involving a substantial modification in social modes of consumption and mobility. These modifications — travel otherwise, eat less meat and consume seasonal vegetables, for example — must be placed in perspective now, for they are urgently needed and they have immediate implications. This is possible, for they apply cultural and ideological mechanisms that have a certain autonomy in relation to the productive base of society. Although they themselves do not involve any structural change, they must be considered an integral part of the anticapitalist alternative. To the degree that they lead to collective practices, they can promote increased consciousness and organization.

A new period
The Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky in 1938 begins with the statement that “The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism.” It concludes that “The objective prerequisites... have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.”
The founder of the Red Army refers firstly, of course, to the historical context: the victory of fascism and Nazism, the crushing of the Spanish revolution, and the imminent world war. His judgment on the putrefaction of the objective conditions, however, seems to have broader historical implications. This theme reappears, moreover, in Ernest Mandel’s writing: “Growing productive forces with growing commodity-money relationships can in fact move a society farther from the socialist goal instead of bringing it closer.”[19]
A remarkable quotation, the strategic implications of which deserve to be explored. For this is, in fact, the unprecedented situation with which we are confronted: in the developed countries, capitalism has gone too far in the growth of the material productive forces, such that a worthy socialist alternative implies no longer an advance, but a form of retreat. (We are speaking of the material forces, and not questioning the need for developing knowledge and cooperation among producers, of course.) It is this new historical conjuncture that is expressed in the pressing need to produce and transport less, in order to consume much less energy and totally eliminate fossil CO₂ emissions by the end of this century.
The fact that the development of the material productive forces has begun to move us objectively further from a socialist alternative is the major fact on which the new concept of ecosocialism is founded and justified. Far from being only a new label on the bottle, this concept introduces at least five novel aspects, which I have outlined in my book L’impossible capitalisme vert, and which I will briefly recall here:[20]
1. The notion of “human mastery of nature” must be abandoned. The complexity, the unknowns and the evolving nature of the biosphere involve an irreducible degree of uncertainty. The systemic social and environmental interrelationship must be conceived as a process in constant movement, as a production of nature.
2. The classic definition of socialism must be completed. The only possible socialism now is one that satisfies actual human needs (freed from commodity alienation), democratically determined by the interested parties themselves within the limits of the resources and by carefully questioning the environmental impact of these needs and the way in which they are satisfied.
3. It is necessary to go beyond the compartmentalized, utilitarian and linear vision of nature as the physical platform on which humanity operates, as the store from which it draws the necessary resources in the production of its social existence, and as the dump in which it unloads its garbage. Nature is at once the platform, the store, the waste receptacle and the set of living processes which, thanks to the contribution of solar energy, circulate material between these poles while constantly reorganizing it. Wastes and their mode of deposit must therefore be compatible in quantity and quality with the capacities and rhythms of recycling by the ecosystems. In other words, the proper functioning of the whole depends on biodiversity, which must be protected.
4. Energy sources and the methods of conversion that are used are not socially neutral. Socialism, consquently, cannot be defined, as Lenin did, as “soviets plus electricity.” The capitalist energy system is centralized, anarchic, wasteful, inefficient, dead-labour intensive, based on non-renewable sources and oriented toward accumulation. A socialist transformation worthy of the name necessitates its gradual replacement by a decentralized, planned, thrifty, efficient, living-labour intensive system, based exclusively on renewable sources and oriented toward the production of durable, recyclable and reusable use-values. This concerns not only the production of energy in the narrow sense but the entire industrial apparatus, agriculture, transportation, recreation, and land development and planning. This extremely profound transformation can only be achieved on a world scale.
5. Going beyond the threshold from which the growth in the material forces of production complicates the passage to socialism involves a critical attitude toward increasing the productivity of labour. In a number of fields the implementation of an anticapitalist alternative respectful of ecological balances necessitates the replacement of dead labour by living labour. This is clearly the case in agriculture, where the ultra-mechanized agribusiness system, a huge consumer of inputs and fossil energy, will have to give way to another mode of operation that is more intensive in human labour. This applies as well to the energy sector, for decentralized production based on renewables will necessitate a lot of work, particularly in maintenance. Generally speaking, the quantity of living labour must increase radically in all fields directly linked to the environment. A parallel can be drawn with personal care, education and other sectors in which the left considers the development of public employment as a given: human intelligence and emotion, combined in a culture of “care-taking,” are in fact necessary in matters directly pertaining to interaction with the biosphere.
Some dogmatic minds will fear that these thoughts open the door to a revision of revolutionary Marxism in the form of concessions to the austerity offensive against the working class in the developed countries. There is no truth to this. It is not a question of yielding the least parcel of terrain to the guilt-tripping discourses that use the ecological crisis to try to disarm the labour movement and its representatives. One line of demarcation between ecosocialism, on the one hand, and the political ecology of degrowth, on the other, is the attitude toward the class struggle. We remain firmly convinced that the exploited learn through the experience of collective struggles, which begin with the defense of wages, jobs, and working conditions. Every struggle of the workers, even the most immediate, must be supported and considered as an opportunity to increase consciousness and orient it toward a socialist perspective.
Within this strategic framework, the observation that the socialist transition must now operate under environmental constraint does not weaken anticapitalist convictions; on the contrary, it reinforces them. However, only the truth is revolutionary. We cannot hide the fact that the socialist transformation will very probably involve renouncing certain goods, services and habits that profoundly influence the daily life of broad layers of the population, at least in the developed capitalist countries. The task, then, is to advocate objectives capable of compensating this loss by a substantial advance in the quality of life. In our view, the priority should be given to the pursuit of two such objectives: (1) gratuity of basic goods (water, energy, mobility) up to an average social volume (which implies the extension of the public sector); (2) a radical reduction (50%) in working time, without loss of salary, with proportional hiring and a decrease in the pace of work.
In the last instance, said Marx, all economics comes down to economy of time. To affirm the necessity of producing and consuming less is to demand the time to live, and to live better. It is to open a fundamental debate on the mastery of social time, on what is necessary and to whom, why, and in what quantities. It is to awaken the collective desire for a world without wars, in which we work less and otherwise, in which we pollute less, in which we develop social relations, in which we substantially improve welfare, public health, education and democratic participation. A world in which the associated producers re-learn how to “dialogue” collectively with nature. That world will not be less rich than the present world (as the Right says), nor “as rich for the great majority of the population” (as a certain Left says). It will be infinitely less futile, less stressed, less hurried — in a word, richer.

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[1] Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London: Penguin Books, 2005). Among the criticisms of Diamond’s thesis, see Benny Peiser, “From ecocide to genocide: The rape of Rapa Nui,” Energy and Environment, Vol. 16, No. 3-4 (2005); Terry L. Hunt, “Rethinking Easter Island’s ecological catastrophe,” Journal of Archaeological Science, No. 34, pp. 485-502 (2007); and Daniel Tanuro, “Catastrophes écologiques d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: la fausse métaphore de l’île de Pâques,” Critique Communiste, No. 185 (December 2007).
[2] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3^rd ed. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008).
[3] L. Possoz and H. Jeanmart, “Comments on the electricity demand scenario in two studies from the DLR: MED-CSP & TRANS-CSP,” ORMEE & MITEC engineering consultancy, Belgium, on-line at http://tinyurl.com/65fzvqs.
[4] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Section 10.
[5] Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan, 2009).
[6] Daniel Tanuro, “Prospérité sans croissance”: un ouvrage sous tension.
[7] This applies, in particular, to the proposal for alternative or complementary indicators of GDP. Clearly, GDP does not measure the quality of the environment; that is not its purpose, nor the purpose of capitalism. GDP measures the accumulation of capital. It is therefore perfectly adapted to capitalism. To claim that altering the measurement tool would suffice to change the logic of the system is evidence of naiveté if not intellectual fraud.
[8] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report, 2007.
[9] IEA, Energy Technology Perspectives 2008- Scenarios & Strategies to 2050.
[10] Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 959.
[11] V.I. Lenin, The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx”, chapter IV.
[12] Nicholae Bukharin, Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology (New York, 1965).
[13] Daniel Tanuro, “Marxism, energy and ecology: The moment of truth,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, December 2010, pp. 89-101.
[14] Daniel Tanuro, “Le lourd héritage de Léon Trotsky”.
[15] See J.B. Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, 2000).
[16] IEA, op. cit.
[17] Wolfram Krevitt, Uwe Klann, Stefan Kronshage, Energy Revolution. A Sustainable Pathway to a Clean Energy Future for Europe (Stuttgart: Institute of Technical Thermodynamics & Greenpeace, September 2005).
[18] Reported by Esther Vivas, “‘Ne mange pas le monde’: Une autre agriculture pour un autre climat,” French translation of an article published in the Catalan daily Publico.
[19] Ernest Mandel, “Ten Theses on the Social and Economic Laws Governing the Society Transitional Between Capitalism and Socialism.”
[20] Daniel Tanuro, L’impossible capitalisme vert (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

Québec Solidaire: A Québécois Approach to Building a Broad Left Party (Part II)

In Part I, I outlined how this party originated. In this, the concluding part, I describe how it functions and explore some major challenges it faces and how it is confronting them.

A work in progress

Québec Solidaire celebrated its fifth anniversary in February 2011. How has it fared? The balance sheet is uneven.

During its first year, Québec Solidaire’s membership rose from 3,000 to just over 5,000, about 50% of them women, but since then has remained fairly stable. The party has just over 70 local associations organized on the basis of their respective electoral ridings as well as some university campus sections. About one third of these associations are considered “very active,” another one third less so, while the remainder function only minimally.[1] In the last election, in 2008, the party nominated candidates in almost all of Quebec’s 125 electoral counties, or ridings.

Québec Solidaire strives for male-female parity in its structures and representation at all levels, and is headed by two “co-spokespersons”: Françoise David, the party president, and Amir Khadir, currently its sole member of the Quebec legislature, the National Assembly. The party has an office with a small full-time staff, a web site and members’ intranet, and makes ample use of modern communications media such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and videos. However, it has no newspaper, although this deficiency is partially compensated by various independent alternative media published by members and sympathizers of the party.[2] The party lacks an internal discussion bulletin or email list, so there is little horizontal communication at the general membership level apart from organized pre-convention discussions, which are held in general assemblies in areas of greater membership density such as Montréal and Quebec City.

A national (i.e. Quebec-wide) Policy Commission is composed of a dozen or so theme committees, responsible for drafting papers and proposals for program development. A national Women’s Commission is composed of delegates from the various regions of Quebec, and is charged with ensuring adherence by the party to the values of feminism.

In the December 2008 general election, Québec Solidaire scored a major breakthrough. Despite an undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system, it managed to elect a member to the National Assembly. The election of Amir Khadir in Mercier riding brought welcome media attention to the party. His effective interventions in the National Assembly have given the party considerable media exposure, and he has been able to speak out on many issues not previously associated with the left.[3] However, his high media profile and popularity — opinion polls recently rated him the “most popular” MNA in Quebec! — have not translated into corresponding support for the party as a whole. Although some recent polls have attributed 8-10% or more support to QS among the electorate, the overall score of its candidates in the two general elections since its founding (2007 and 2008) has been just under 4%. A handful of individual candidates, including David, have won electoral scores of between 10% and 30%, however; in each such case they are well-known activists in trade unions or other social movements.

Although it styles itself “a party of the ballot-box and the streets” — a party of mass action as well as elections — this has not been an easy balance to establish or maintain. The political context, at least until Khadir’s election, has been a difficult one in which to find opportunities to establish a visible presence in Quebec’s political landscape.

As in other parts of North America, Quebec experienced a general downturn in extra-parliamentary mobilizations after 9-11, with the notable exception of the massive antiwar actions prior to the Iraq war. Added to this was the political demoralization of many militants following almost a decade of neoliberal austerity under a Parti Québécois government that for many discredited the very idea of Quebec “sovereignty” as envisaged by the PQ. The trade union movement has suffered major defeats in the face of an antilabour offensive orchestrated since 2003 by the Liberal government. The student movement has been relatively quiescent since a successful mobilization against tuition fee increases in 2005. Although antiwar sentiment remains high, mass actions are fewer and smaller. Thus, Québec Solidaire has had to build itself in a period of general retreat for the very movements that generated its existence.

In addition, Québec Solidaire has found its attention, energy and finances absorbed by election organizing, often to the detriment of extra-parliamentary mobilization. In its first three years the party faced two general elections and more than a half-dozen by-elections. Besides meeting the demanding legal requirements of a registered party, it had to find and train candidates, raise funds, and hold successive delegated conventions to cobble together interim election platforms.

The 2007 election platform,[4] was limited to modest reforms that (as the party admitted) could be implemented within the “neoliberal and provincial framework.” It featured proposals for modest social reforms, free education, a publicly-owned pharmacare (prescription drugs insurance) agency, repeal of antilabour legislation, electoral reform through institution of proportional representation, tax reform, nationalization of wind power and expansion of public transit. However, this platform did not even reflect the minimal basis of agreement between the party’s founding components. For example, it called for a constituent assembly to determine Quebec’s political and constitutional future, but did not call for sovereignty or independence.

The 2008 platform[5] was much more elaborate. It called for “making Quebec a country by way of popular sovereignty,” and included detailed proposals on language rights, intercultural secularism and international solidarity (for example, replacing free trade agreements with “new international treaties based on individual and collective rights, respect for the environment and a widening of democracy (such as the ALBA[6]).” But it also contained some notable omissions; for example, it opposed “Canadian imperialist intervention” in the war in Afghanistan but did not mention NATO or Canada’s other military alliances.

In the 2008 election, more than half of Québec Solidaire’s 122 candidates were women — a first for a party in Quebec and possibly in Canada. The party was endorsed by the Montréal Council of the CSN, and some candidates were endorsed by other unions.

Adopting a program

In 2009 the party launched a lengthy process aimed at producing a formal program setting out Québec Solidaire’s proposals for a “democratic transformation of the whole of society over the medium and long term.” The program is distinguished from an election platform, which applies to a single government mandate, or an emergency program, a plan of action addressed to a specific context or issue.[7]

Over a three-year period, culminating before the next Quebec election, a series of delegated conventions are being held, each to debate and adopt sections of the program organized according to subject matter. The first convention, in November 2009, adopted resolutions on the national question, electoral reform, immigration policy and secularism. A second convention, held in March 2011, was addressed to the economy, the environment, and labour. Other topics — health and social services, education, social and formal justice, culture, agriculture, and international solidarity and altermondialisation — will be addressed in subsequent conventions.

Under the complex procedure the party has chosen for conducting its program debates, initial written submissions by the members (or by “citizens’ circles” composed of both members and non-members) must not exceed 800 words in length. The policy commission then compiles a “perspectives booklet” presenting concise demands based on what it considers the “principal orientations” in these submissions. These are discussed and amended or added to by QS local associations and general assemblies, following which the policy commission produces a “synthesis booklet” that arranges the revised demands by topic and, where appropriate, lists differing resolutions addressed to a particular issue as “options” (a half-dozen or so, in some cases) for debate and decision at the convention — first in topic workshops, then in plenary session, where delegates are limited to two or three minute interventions from the floor.[8]

At each stage the draft documents are published on the members’ intranet. (In the lead-up to the first convention, written contributions to the debate by individual members or groups of members were published on the QS web site; however, it appears this practice is no longer being implemented.)

Whatever the democratic merits of this procedure – and there are some, to be sure – it effectively precludes lengthier written contributions within the party structures that could outline a general strategic or programmatic framework on the given subjects and allow a broader debate among opposing approaches. As noted earlier, the party has no public or internal discussion bulletin or even an email discussion list that would allow such debates.

The main topics for debate at the first program convention, in November 2009, were the national question and reform or creation of “democratic institutions.” The three hundred delegates agreed, by large majorities:[9]

• that the Quebec “nation” includes all residents of Quebec, and is based not on ethnic origin but on voluntary membership in the political community, with French as the common language of public communication; this nation being composed historically by the successive integration of people originating from other communities, including the Anglophone community. QS also acknowledges the sovereignty of “the ten Amerindian peoples and the Inuit people who also inhabit Quebec territory,” and their fundamental right to national self-determination, however they choose to exercise that right.
• that “Canadian federalism is basically unreformable. It is impossible for Quebec to obtain all the powers it wants and needs for the profound changes proposed by Québec Solidaire.” A new relationship with the rest of Canada can only be negotiated once the Québécois have clearly established their intent and ability to form an independent state.
• that independence should be achieved through a process of participatory and representative democracy, through election of a Constituent Assembly composed equally of women and men, with “proportional representation of tendencies and the various socio-economic milieus within Quebec society.” The Assembly would conduct an extensive consultation of opinion and, following its debates, its conclusions — in effect, a draft Constitution — would then be put to a popular vote in a referendum.

These positions mark a major advance in the party’s understanding of the national question, when compared with the minimal agreement on this question at its founding. And they clearly delimit it from the PQ’s sovereignty-association and ethnic nationalism, as well as its referendum strategy which limits popular input to a vote on a question negotiated between the parties in the National Assembly.

The convention also addressed another of Québec Solidaire’s founding “values” — laïcité, or secularism — basically, separation of church and state. This is a hot-button issue in Quebec, where right-wing ideologues, narrow nationalists, and some leftists and feminists have campaigned in recent years against “reasonable accommodation” of ethnic minority practices. Those particularly targeted include Muslim women wearing “ostentatious symbols” of their religious faith such as the hijab, or scarf, which are deemed threats to national identity or challenges to women’s rights. The QS delegates ratified the party leadership’s concept of “open” and “intercultural” secularism and opposed proposals for state-enforced dress codes that would effectively outlaw the wearing of symbols of religious belief. Debate continues in the party on some related issues such as the growing demand by many nationalists and feminists that the government adopt a “Charte de laïcité,” a charter to control more generally the expression of religious beliefs in the public sphere.

The convention also adopted progressive proposals on measures to integrate immigrants into Quebec society and on democratic reform of electoral institutions. In regard to the latter topic, QS advocates a system of proportional representation that would elect 60% of MNAs as individual riding representatives, the other 40% of the seats being allocated to the various parties in proportion to their respective shares of the popular vote.

The second program convention, held in March 2011, focused on environmental, economic and labour issues.[10]

Environment. The 350 delegates voted for a major turn to “green energy,” including:

• A reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, and by 95% by 2050. Abandonment of fossil fuels by 2030.
• Opposition to carbon taxes, carbon trading and storage schemes, biofuels, and geo-engineering.
• “Public control” over energy firms, defined as majority participation of the state up to and including 100% nationalization as needed.
• Prohibition of any new hydro-electric development. Production of renewable energies: solar, geothermal, wind, to limit to the maximum any supplementary resort to hydro-electricity.
• An end to all exploration and development of fossil fuels, such as petroleum in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Old Harry), shale gas, and LNG ports. Elimination of Quebec’s nuclear reactor system, and an end to the exploration and development of uranium mines.
• Development of electrified transportation to ensure the accessibility, universality “or even gratuity” of public transit.
• Support for a new, legally binding international agreement, and participation in the world movement linking climate and social justice. It was noted that this movement is inspired by the alternative peoples’ summit on the environment held at Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010.

Natural resources. The convention voted by large majorities that the mining and forestry industries should be placed under “public control,” with up to 100% nationalization “as needed.” In addition:

• All resource industries to be subject to strict environmental regulations, and no project to be approved without meaningful public consultation in the communities concerned and a veto by local or regional authorities over development plans. Mining royalties to be increased and shared equitably between the resource region and the government.
• In the forest industry, elimination of laws allowing clear cutting and cutting in the boreal forest north of the 49^th parallel. A reduction in disparities between natural and managed forests, and a need for prior agreements with the indigenous people in all regions under aboriginal treaties or land claims.
• Fresh water, whether surface or underground, to be considered a “non-commodified common good accessible to all but the property of no one,” with the state as guardian. Water used by industry and businesses to be considered a “loaned” public property subject to royalties and post-treatment controls.

Trade union and labour rights. Among the programmatic demands adopted by the convention — usually by large majorities, in some cases unanimously — are the following:

• Constitutional protection of the right to join unions, bargain and strike, including the right to political and solidarity strikes (strikes for political objectives and in solidarity with striking workers and students).
• Prohibition of lockouts, and strict controls on layoffs and shutdowns — including mandatory justification before a government agency, protection of company pensions, compulsory retraining and re-employment in similar jobs, etc. State assistance to employees wishing to form local worker coops when companies relocate.
• Union rights for farmworkers and self-employed workers, and the right to multi-employer certifications.
• Right of full employment in safe, stable, socially useful, ecologically sound work free of discrimination, with social protection in case of loss of employment, incapacity and ageing. Affirmative action for women, disabled, visible minorities and indigenous.
• Immediate reduction in the workweek to 35 hours, and “gradual” transition to 32 hours with no loss of pay, compensatory hiring and no speed-up in workload or pace. Legal restrictions on the use of overtime work.
• An immediate increase in the minimum wage to the low-income (poverty) threshold for a person working full time, with a “gradual” increase to 50% over this threshold, indexed to the cost of living. This would mean a gradual increase from $10.66 to $15.99 per hour.
• Expanded public employment in social services, construction, infrastructures maintenance and environmental clean-up.
• Accessible programs for job retraining, free and funded by employers and government.

Virtually all of these demands have been raised by the unions and social movements; Québec Solidaire sees itself as their political and electoral representative.

Beyond capitalism?

Introducing the preconvention debates, the policy commission asked QS members to consider a question that goes to the very heart of the party’s conception of its overall objective:

“As we work on our program, we should spell out the nature and limits of the system, and ask ourselves the following question: isn’t the capitalist system, based as it is on maximizing profit and irresponsible exploitation of nature, the main obstacle to social progress and a healthy relationship to the environment? We need a serious debate on the question so we can determine whether our social problems can be corrected by reforms that respect the logic of the system or if we need to adopt the perspective of going beyond the system.”[11]

This was also the question put by the Québec Solidaire leadership in a Manifesto issued for May Day 2009, entitled “To emerge from the crisis, should we go beyond capitalism?”[12] The Manifesto’s anticapitalist rhetoric met with a very favourable response in QS ranks.

This defining issue was debated briefly during the preconvention period, although not in official party publications. Some members argued that QS should remain a “rainbow coalition,” fighting “for immediate changes realizable within the framework of the present capitalist state and system.” Others, however, argued for a more radical perspective: “ecosocialism,” and an explicit attention to “the class interests of the workers’ movement.”[13]

Judging from the debates at the March convention, these questions remain open for “serious debate” in Québec Solidaire. In the plenary session on “general orientations,” delegates voted by a large majority for a statement declaring that “QS ultimately intends to go beyond capitalism,” and calling for a “plural economy” and “an eventual socialization of economic activities, based on a strengthened public economy (state-owned companies and nationalization of major enterprises in some strategic sectors), a greater role of the social economy (cooperatives, community-owned firms), and a controlled private sector, with much greater emphasis on promoting small and medium enterprises (SMEs).”

No relative weight was assigned to any of these sectors. A number of delegates objected that many SMEs are low-wage sweatshops, the proprietors being bitter opponents of trade unions. Their alternative motions were outvoted after brief debate.

Delegates voted as well that:

• Nationalized enterprises are to be operated in a framework of national and democratic planning, with decentralized management including representatives of employees, the community, and First Nations where applicable. Forms of self-management are to be promoted in place of bureaucratic oversight.
• Economic growth must cease to be considered an objective in itself. A QS government will take immediate legal, regulatory, fiscal or other measures to discourage over-production, over-indebtedness, and over-consumption.

The emphasis on the “social economy” is not surprising, perhaps, given the traditional prominence within Quebec society of farming co-operatives, the caisses populaires (originally, parish-based credit unions), and similar service-based not-for-profit organizations, with self-defined “social missions” and relatively democratic decision-making structures.[14] The attention to the “domestic economy” reflects as well the traditions and roots of many QS members in the feminist movement and its recognition that many important economic functions of society go unpaid or underpaid relative to other economic sectors.

However, many of these undertakings operate in low-wage ghettos, and they often serve to legitimize the privatization of public services. And although some sectors, as in the childcare industry, have managed to unionize, some major proponents of Quebec’s “social economy” are heavily implicated in collaborating with the trade union-sponsored investment funds such as the FTQ’s Solidarity Fund or the CSN’s Fondaction, which have served as a major economic and ideological bulwark for the conservative union bureaucracy.[15] The “social economy,” as it actually functions in Quebec society, is an integral part of its capitalist economy. And some of its components, such as the massive Desjardins Movement, a dominant player in retail banking and insurance in the province, are major institutions of “Québec Inc.,” the new Francophone corporate elite.

A packed agenda did not allow time for debate on important resolutions on banking and the financial industry — where some draft proposals called for complete expropriation — and taxation, where proposals included, inter alia, rejection of consumption taxes and radically shifting the tax burden from individuals to corporations. These topics were left for future debate and decision.

A party of the ballot boxes... and the streets?

Aware that “politics” is conventionally viewed as electoral and parliamentary activity, Québec Solidaire has established itself as an officially recognized party under Quebec law. Since its founding, and particularly since Khadir’s election in 2008, the focus has been increasingly on a strategy of building the party through the ballot box, to the neglect of extra-parliamentary action “in the streets.” A “development plan” adopted at a National Council meeting, in June 2010, summarized the objectives for the next two years as “advancing our ideas in the population, gaining a greater presence in public debates, electing more MNAs and appreciably increasing our percentage of the vote in the next general elections.”

A draft resolution of the QS policy commission, still to be debated and adopted in a future convention, addresses “the relations between Québec Solidaire, the trade-union movement and the social movements in general.” The draft text outlines a strategy by which QS, “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.” It proposes that QS members who belong to the various social movements be encouraged to “network” within the party — that is, coordinate their activities within the unions and other movements around a strategy of reciprocal reinforcement of the movements and the party while respecting “the organizational and political autonomy of the social movements.” This draft text addresses an important lacuna in Québec Solidaire’s activities.

Québec Solidaire works alongside the unions and some social movements in a number of coalitions, such as the pro-independence Conseil de la Souveraineté. But its modest campaign in relation to the public-sector unions’ negotiations with the Quebec government last year, labelled “Courage politique,” failed to mount a clear defense of the unions’ demands and was largely confined to arguments in support of existing social programs and opposition to privatization. The party has no organized presence as such in the unions.

As the policy commission puts it, the conquest of political power requires “a structured political organization whose program integrates the demands of the social movements and an overall projet de société [program for society].” And thus it is important to think in particular about the party’s relation with “the trade-union movement, which occupies a central place within Quebec’s social movements.”

The undemocratic first-past-the-post system in Quebec (as in every other jurisdiction in Canada) poses some formidable obstacles to a new party with radical ideas facing a hostile mass media in a multiparty environment. Québec Solidaire promotes a detailed proposal for a system of proportional representation, but recognizes that there is no early prospect of its adoption. With this in mind, the party leadership asked delegates to the March convention to consider whether QS should seek electoral agreements with other parties under which each party would agree not to contest certain ridings in which the other stood a better chance of electing its candidate. Two options were on the table: (a) a possible tactical agreement with the Parti Québécois and/or the Verts (a small Green party); or (b) a possible tactical agreement with the Verts alone, a “strategic alliance” with that party being deemed conceivable if based on the Global Greens Charter, but ruled out for “practical reasons pertaining to internal decisions of the Verts in Quebec.”

After an intense debate, the delegates rejected any such alliances, despite appeals from both Amir Khadir and Françoise David, among others, in support of either option. Opponents noted that such alliances would blur Québec Solidaire’s programmatic differences from the other parties, particularly the PQ, and in any case were impractical — the PQ is apprehensive of the growing popularity of QS among many of its traditional supporters, and PQ governments have always resisted implementing any form of proportional representation. The vote also reaffirmed the members’ determination to build Québec Solidaire as an independent left-wing political alternative to the Parti Québécois.

A ‘country of projects’

The unexpected surge in support for the New Democratic Party in the May 2 federal election, and the sharp decline in the Bloc Québécois vote,[16] have underscored the volatility of the Quebec electorate and stimulated hopes in Québec Solidaire, which does not run for federal office, for major gains in the next provincial election. It has also given a powerful boost to the party’s campaign “for a country of projects,” launched in mid-April of 2011 pursuant to a resolution adopted at its November 2009 convention.[17] The campaign web site sets out the party’s vision of sovereignty and the approach it favours for achieving it. It also outlines the party’s approach to strengthening the status of the French language, especially in Montréal. As the web site explains:

“Some of these projects can be achieved here and now, without affecting Quebec’s constitutional status. However, the people’s ambition to realize many other projects will soon be hobbled by the total or partial absence of any latitude for Quebec in areas as fundamental as the environment, foreign policy, foreign trade and even language. The full mastery of our destiny is therefore indispensable for achieving all of the projects of our dreams.”

Associated materials (all on-line) include a historical survey that dates a Québécois quest for sovereignty back to the 18^th century, a critique of Canadian federalism and the failure of past efforts to reform the system, and a critique of “the impasse of the PQ and its referendum strategy,” to which it counterposes Québec Solidaire’s proposed grassroots campaign to build support for sovereignty and, eventually, the election of a democratic non-partisan Constituent Assembly to adopt a constitution for an independent Quebec. Associated articles describe parallel “inspiring experiences” in Bolivia, Ecuador and, most recently, in Tunisia.

In the fall of 2011, the campaign will feature a tour of Quebec by QS president Françoise David and public meetings “on themes chosen by local party associations.”

This campaign has the potential to boost Québec Solidaire’s profile as the left wing of the independence movement, with a “project for society” and a “country of projects” that points toward an anticapitalist alternative vision that breaks sharply with the PQ-Bloc strategy for independence — a strategy “based on alienation from Canada,” and “fuelled by resentment,” as Amir Khadir described it in a recent analysis of the federal election results.[18]

21^st century socialism?

The rightward evolution of the traditional sovereigntist parties, the PQ and BQ, has left a very broad space to their left, one that Québec Solidaire aspires to fill. The party has managed to cast a wide net, encompassing leading activists from the women’s movement and community social action groups, veterans of previous but unsuccessful attempts to found viable parties of socialism and a Marxist left, and some trade unionists.

It cannot (yet) be classified as anti-capitalist, or a party of 21^st century socialism as that concept has generally been conceived. But it is clearly much more than a Québécois version of the federalist NDP, notwithstanding hopes expressed by QS leaders that the NDP will some day prove a valuable Canadian interlocutor for Quebec as it moves to independence.

Québec Solidaire’s support of Quebec independence means that its strategic framework is not limited to the existing form of the state; it opens the party’s imagination and perspectives to conceiving another, very different Quebec based on the “values” or principles upheld by the party. This is not a line of march that facilitates accommodation with the Canadian bourgeoisie or its Quebec component. This independentism is one of Québec Solidaire’s strongest programmatic assets, offering it the potential to build a party that encompasses and represents the driving forces for progressive social transformation within the Quebec social formation.

There are other important features of the party, however, that underscore its sui generis nature in the Quebec, and indeed Canadian, political landscape and that offer hope for its evolution and development into a mass socialist party with deep roots among Quebec working people.

The party’s strong commitment to feminist principles has given it a compass in navigating through the shoals of the public debate over Quebec identity and “reasonable accommodation.” Despite some backsliding by the party leadership,[19] QS has generally stood firm behind its support of “open secularism” in the face of harsh criticism from some on the left. The near parity of women with men in the party’s membership and structures is unique in Quebec, and in Canada.

Québec Solidaire’s internationalism has been given limited expression in its opposition to capitalist trade and investment deals, its opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and in its sympathy toward progressive governments in Latin America. The party has been harshly attacked in the mainstream media for its participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israeli apartheid, which the delegates to its November 2009 convention voted unanimously to endorse — a position that demarks Québec Solidaire from the NDP’s strong support of the Zionist state.[20]

The party’s commitment to defence of the environment, if adhered to consistently, points it toward anti-capitalist solutions and the formulation of a radical ecosocialism that can link up with the worldwide movement developing in the wake of Bolivia’s Cochabamba conference of 2010.

Last but not least, the pluralism of Québec Solidaire, its desire to include within its ranks all those in Quebec who wish to fight for another, better world, opens space for revolutionary socialists and Marxists to join the party and to fight for their perspectives within the party as organized “collectives” democratically recognized by the party’s statutes although not represented as such in its leadership bodies. Although they have maintained a rather low profile so far, some of these collectives could play a leading role in helping to bring theoretical understanding and clarity to the evolving debates on the party’s program and its activities. Perhaps more importantly, they could help to overcome a glaring deficiency in the party: its lack of any coherent organized educational effort among its members and the larger left constituency.

This paper has described in considerable detail the process of formation of Québec Solidaire because it has features that can serve as guides for other processes in other settings.

The left groups that initiated the process recognized a shift in the objective situation — in this case the growing disillusionment with the PQ, the new vibrancy of the women’s movement, and the appearance of a new altermondialiste movement mobilizing young people in opposition to capitalist oppression and injustice. They laid down a minimal set of principles for regroupment and consolidation:

• a strategic framework of striving for the independence of Quebec;
• feminism, both programmatically and organizationally (as in male-female parity in party structures);
• pluralism, inclusion of all who agreed to support and work to implement the party’s “values” and general orientations, and respect for minority opinions including the right of members with particular perspectives to organize within the party in support of their views;
• internationalism — placing anti-imperialism, solidarity and global justice at the core of the new party’s politics.

And throughout, they were willing to let the process follow its own rhythm. As Pierre Dostie said, in describing the UFP’s approach to fusion with Option citoyenne, the latter “had to comply with its own process, [so] we sought areas of convergence and we entered into a dialogue.” (note 15, supra)

The goal is to build a party that encompasses and represents the leading militants in all those movements that are, in various ways, engaged in struggles against capital.

The future of Québec Solidaire is closely linked to its ability to become more integrated in Quebec’s broad labour-radical subculture, and to develop the “reciprocal relationship” with the trade union and popular movements that is outlined in the policy commission proposal.

To the degree that it does this, the social and ethnic composition of the party will change. QS is still a “white” party, for example. Neither its membership nor its leading bodies reflect the diverse ethnic and immigrant composition of Quebec. It is no accident that its major achievements so far, the election of Amir Khadir, an Iranian-Québécois with deep roots in the independence movement, was scored in one of Montréal's most ethnically diverse constituencies.

Québec Solidaire cannot yet be characterized as an anticapitalist party. But it is fair to say that it is much more than a Québécois version of, say, the federal NDP. Some important features of the party underscore its sui generis nature and offer hope for its evolution and development into a mass socialist party with deep roots among Quebec working people.

________________

This article is scheduled for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Alternate Routes. It is an expanded and updated version of a presentation to the third annual conference of the Critical Social Research Collaborative, held March 5, 2011 at Carleton University, Ottawa, on the theme “Varieties of Socialism, Varieties of Approaches.” I thank John Riddell and David Mandel for their critical comments on an earlier draft. The usual caveats apply. Published with the permission of Alternate Routes. – Richard Fidler

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[1] Information provided at the party’s Fifth Convention, November 2009.

[2] Presse-toi-à gauche (on-line webzine), À Bâbord ! (bimonthly magazine), and Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme (semi-annual journal, which also hosts a webzine).

[3] To see Khadir’s interventions in the Assembly (there are hundreds of them since his election), click on http://www.assnat.qc.ca/fr/deputes/khadir-amir-25/interventions.html.

[4] Engagements Électoraux De Québec Solidaire. Summarized in “Québec Solidaire Adopts a Program for Government,” Socialist Voice No. 103.

[5] Engagements 2008 de Québec Solidaire (in English). Discussed in “Québec Solidaire scores major breakthrough in Quebec election.”

[6] Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), a progressive economic and social alliance for fair trade and mutual assistance initiated by Venezuela and Cuba, which now comprises eight countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

[7] See Québec Solidaire, “Définition du programme politique,” http://programme.quebecsolidaire.net/definition.

[8] In the most recent discussion, prior to the Sixth Convention held in March 2011, the policy commission received about 150 submissions. Following publication of the perspectives booklet, members submitted about 600 amendments and new proposals or comments from about 40 local associations or committees entitled to representation at the convention. (Introduction to the Cahier Synthèse – Programme) This suggests that most of the internal preconvention discussion was on the basis of the perspectives document, with its succinct specific demands.

[9] For a full report, see “Quebec left debates independence strategy,” Socialist Voice, December 3, 2009.

[10] See “Beyond capitalism? Québec Solidaire launches debate on its program for social transformation,” http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/491.php.

[11] Québec Solidaire, “Pour une société solidaire et écologique...”, Cahier de participation au programme, Enjeu 2, June 2010, p. 5.

[12] “Pour Sortir de la Crise: Dépasser le Capitalisme? Manifeste de Québec Solidaire,” May 1, 2009.

[13] For excerpts, see “Beyond capitalism? ...,” note 28.

[14] In Quebec as a whole, the “social economy” comprises more than 7,000 “collective enterprises (cooperatives and non-profits)” employing 125,000 workers and accounting for 8% of the province’s GDP. See Chantier de l’économie sociale, Définition. A recent study of the “social economy” in Montréal alone lists close to 4,000 establishments with $2 billion in revenues and employing more than 65,000 salaried workers (women occupying about 59% of full-time and 66% of part-time jobs). They encompass a wide variety of undertakings: housing cooperatives, child-care centres, caterers, domestic care agencies, as well as some major operations in the retail, finance and insurance sectors. See “Portrait statistique de l'économie sociale de la région administrative de Montréal,” available at http://www.chaire.ecosoc.uqam.ca/.

[15] See, for example, “Integration with trade unions is key to the success of Social/Solidarity Economy initiatives,” an interview with Nancy Neamtam, available at http://www.chantier.qc.ca/?module=document&action=get&uid=1059.

[16] The NDP took 43% of the popular vote in Quebec, electing 59 of the province’s 75 MPs. In 2008 it had polled only 12.2%, electing one MP. The Bloc vote fell from close to 40% in 2008 to less than 24%, and it elected only 4 MPs, although it had elected a majority of Quebec’s MPs since 1993. See The federal NDP’s electoral breakthrough in Quebec: A challenge to progressives in Canada, and More on that election. The Bloc’s collapse has touched off a profound crisis within the Parti Québécois and traditional pro-sovereignty movement: see Behind those resignations from the Parti Québécois.

[17] See “Quebec left debates strategy for independence,” http://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2009/12/quebec-left-debates-strategy-for.html. The interactive campaign web site may be accessed at www.paysdeprojets.org.

[18] “Après les élections fédérales – Le Québec qui nous attend,” Le Devoir, May 14, 2011. Translated in More on that election.

[19] QS has given critical support to the Charest government’s Bill 94, which would deny government-funded health care, education and child care services to all whose clothing prevents disclosure of their face, and would bar them from government and public-service employment. The bill patently targets a tiny number of Muslim women who wear niqabs or burqas. And when some Sikhs sought to appear before a parliamentary committee to express their opposition to Bill 94, Amir Khadir added his vote on a PQ motion, supported by the other parties, to exclude them from the National Assembly because they were wearing their ceremonial dagger, the kirpan. This action is arguably inconsistent with the resolutions on laïcité adopted a year ago, mentioned in this paper.

[20] Québec Solidaire was a strong supporter of the recent “Boat to Gaza” solidarity project, delegating a QS leader, Manon Massé, to participate personally on the party’s behalf in the international attempt to breach the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian statelet.

Québec Solidaire: A Québécois Approach to Building a Broad Left Party (Part I)

The following article is scheduled for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Alternate Routes. It is an expanded and updated version of a presentation to the third annual conference of the Critical Social Research Collaborative, held March 5, 2011 at Carleton University, Ottawa, on the theme “Varieties of Socialism, Varieties of Approaches.” Part II will discuss the evolution of Québec Solidaire since its founding.

 

Québec Solidaire: A Québécois Approach

to Building a Broad Left Party

By Richard Fidler

A number of attempts have been made in recent years to launch new parties and processes, addressing a broad left or popular constituency, that are programmatically anti-neoliberal if not anti-capitalist, some of them self-identifying as part of an international effort to create a “socialism of the 21^st century.” They vary widely in origins, size, social composition, and influence.

The process has gone furthest in a number of Latin American countries; among the best known are the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), led by Hugo Chávez, and the Bolivian Movement Towards Socialism–Political Instrument of the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP), led by Evo Morales.

Efforts in Western Europe, such as Italy’s Refoundation Party, Germany’s Die Linke, or France’s Parti de Gauche originated in part in splits in the traditional parties of “20^th century socialism,” in avowed rejection of both Stalinism and Social Democracy. Many of these parties include members who in the past were associated with one or another of the Marxist currents identified historically with Trotsky’s anti-Stalinist legacy. In France, the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste (NPA) was initiated under their aegis.

Parallel developments have not yet occurred in the United States or Canada, where anticapitalist ideas and movements have less presence in the political landscape today than they had a century ago. However, as it does in so many respects, Quebec constitutes something of an exception. A new left party, Québec Solidaire, created during the past decade, is attracting considerable interest and growing support as an anti-neoliberal alternative to Quebec’s three capitalist parties. While not explicitly anti-capitalist or socialist, it defines itself as a party “resolutely of the left, feminist, ecologist, altermondialiste,[1] pacifist, democratic and sovereigntist.”

This paper will outline how this party originated, describe how it functions, and explore some major challenges it faces and how it is confronting them.

The Quebec exception

Quebec’s political evolution has always followed a distinct trajectory within the Canadian social formation. A crucial determinant has been the province’s character as the homeland of a distinct nation, with its own territory, language, culture, historical tradition and a well-defined national consciousness as a minority people within Canada and North America. Until well past the mid-20^th century, French-Canadian nationalism was essentially defensive, focused on protecting the autonomy of Quebec, the last major enclave of the Francophone presence in Canada, against involvement in imperialist wars and the increasing encroachment on the province’s constitutional jurisdiction by the federal state with its expanding economic and social functions. Industrialization and the concomitant urbanization and growth of trade unions aggravated these tensions, disrupting the social and political culture of a Francophone population long dependent on church and parish for the provision of basic social and community services.

In the 1960s a new, more assertive nationalist dynamic gained force as Quebec rapidly moved to modernize its industrial infrastructure, nationalized hydro-electric power resources and expanded and secularized its education, health and social welfare systems. A large provincial state bureaucracy developed, increasingly directed to stimulating the expansion of a skilled labour force and the growth of a Francophone bourgeoisie through the provision of financial and other assistance. Quebec pushed increasingly — but unsuccessfully — for constitutional changes that would give it greater autonomy within the federation, especially in areas crucial to its national identity and development. Union membership expanded exponentially. A veritable cultural revolution occurred with the appearance of many new radical publications and other media, many of them raising the demand for Quebec autonomy, political sovereignty or independence. On the left, pro-independence movements sprouted, their members inspired by the post-war Afro-Asian decolonization and, closer to home, the socialist ideology of the Cuban revolutionists.

National consciousness and class consciousness have maintained a close and reciprocal relationship in Quebec in recent decades. But this social ferment, both a product and promoter of rising Québécois national consciousness, largely bypassed the parties of the existing “20^th century” Canadian left. Their historical failure to sink mass roots in Quebec was directly related to their programmatic orientation toward strengthening the Canadian state and their indifference to Quebec’s national oppression and/or hostility to Québécois nationalist sentiment. The Regina Manifesto, the founding document of Canadian social-democracy, omitted any reference to the Quebec national question.[2] The Communist party expelled Québécois members who developed a pro-autonomy interpretation of the party’s formal support of Quebec’s right to self-determination.[3]

The labour-based New Democratic Party, founded in 1961, has been unwilling to embrace any fundamental alteration to Canada’s existing institutional structure that would reflect Quebec’s national character, or even to develop a coherent approach that differed significantly from the constitutional priorities of the federal government of the day.[4] Soon after its founding, its Quebec section voted to form a distinct Parti Socialiste du Québec (PSQ). The PSQ advocated that Quebec and Canada be constitutionally recognized as “associated states.” If such an agreement proved impossible, it said, “Quebec should declare its independence.”[5] But the PSQ was upstaged on its nationalist flank by the pro-independence Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance Nationale (RIN), while the Quebec trade unions were still unprepared to drop their longstanding support of the Quebec Liberals in favour of independent labour political action. The PSQ dissolved in the late 1960s.

In the absence of a viable left-wing alternative sympathetic to Québécois national aspirations, this consciousness was politically channeled into support for the pro-sovereignty Parti Québécois. Founded in the late 1960s, the PQ came to hegemonize the national movement as its political expression. Moreover, its increasing attraction for the leaderships of Quebec’s three big union centrals — which gradually shifted to seeing the PQ, and not the Liberals, as their preferred vehicle for political influence and reform — tended to eclipse early attempts by some union militants to found independent and anticapitalist political formations. A notable effort, the Front d’action politique (FRAP), a radical municipal party initiated in part by the Montréal section of the CSN, foundered in the wake of the October 1970 crisis and repression. An upsurge in mass nationalist and pro-sovereignty sentiment fueled a radicalization in the labour movement that in the early 1970s saw all three labour centrals[6] issue and debate anticapitalist manifestos. But the capitalist PQ was the primary political beneficiary, although a nationalist left within the party that included some prominent union officials often had a problematic relationship to the party hierarchy.

The PQ project was, and remains, to achieve a bourgeois-nationalist form of state sovereignty associated — the political context permitting — with Canada outside Quebec, or if necessary functioning as a fully independent (but thoroughly capitalist) Quebec state. The PQ’s popular support derived from its advocacy of sovereignty, its strong defense of the French language, culture and national identity and, initially at least, its promise of social reforms.

During its first term in office, the PQ enacted some important reforms, particularly in the area of French-language rights, although its legislation in this regard has been subject to constant challenges and adverse court rulings over the years. But after a total of 18 years in government (1976-1985, 1994-2003), the party no longer inspires the hopes for change that it once did. PQ governments have on occasion viciously attacked unions, as in 1982 when the Lévesque government legislated a 20% reduction in the salaries of government workers. The PQ has consistently supported anti-worker “free trade” and investment agreements and its governments have imposed harsh austerity programs.

Although opinion polls have registered high and remarkably consistent support for Quebec independence,[7] the PQ has failed to win its two sovereignty referendums. Equally important, ongoing developments in bourgeois politics — such as the 1982 unilateral patriation of Canada’s constitution without Quebec’s consent; the 1990 defeat of the Meech Lake Accord; or the federal Parliament’s enactment of the Clarity Act in the wake of the narrow 1995 referendum defeat — have signalled the lack of sympathy in Canada’s ruling circles not only for Quebec sovereignty but for any meaningful constitutional recognition of Quebec’s national identity, let alone unfettered provincial autonomy in jurisdictions essential to that identity.

The new Francophone bourgeoisie that has developed since the Sixties, with state support (both provincial and federal), functions largely as a subset of the Canadian bourgeoisie and no major component favours Quebec sovereignty. Today the Parti Québécois has less appetite for independence, although the goal of “sovereignty” is still article one in its program. Doubts are growing about the party’s ability to capture enough popular support for its program to create the “winning conditions” for a successful referendum vote on sovereignty.

The PQ’s commitment to working within the neoliberal order, which has often brought it into sharp conflict with the unions, has fueled disenchantment with the party among the very social layers that are the driving force of the national movement.

However, a credible left alternative to the Parti Québécois was slow to emerge within the broad Québécois nationalist and left milieu. Until the early 1980s, when they unceremoniously collapsed, the Mao-Stalinist currents that largely dominated the far left for a decade opposed Quebec sovereignty, which they regarded as a purely bourgeois objective dividing the “Canadian” working class. And although they opposed the PQ, they also opposed proposals within the trade unions in favour of establishing an independent working-class party, advocating instead, in true sectarian fashion, the constitution of their own “proletarian party.”[8] Like the CCF and pro-Moscow CP before them, this “far left” was ideologically defined around international events and alliances that had little or no resonance in the conditions of Quebec, where the class struggle tends to unfold within a nationalist framework of opposition to linguistic and cultural oppression.

There was always, of course, a smaller left that favoured independence and rejected the PQ and its capitalist program. Sporadic attempts were made in the 1980s to build new parties of the left, but without lasting success. The trade unions remained resistant to proposals to engage in political action independent of the PQ. And during the 1980s and 1990s, the major labour centrals initiated — with political support and generous tax breaks from both levels of government — investment funds that have enmeshed the unions in the financial industry, company management structures and other strategic “partnerships” with capital.

During the late 1990s, however, some cracks began to appear in the edifice of bourgeois sovereigntist hegemony in the left. Feminists, the one broadly-based social movement that had largely survived the neoliberal onslaught of the 1980s — waging a successful defense of abortion rights, for example — organized a mass “march for bread and roses” that directly challenged Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government and its “zero deficit” austerity program. They followed up with further demonstrations and, in 2000, sponsored a World March of Women that mobilized tens of thousands in Quebec and elsewhere. When the government rejected their modest demands for an increase in the minimum wage, women’s federation leader Françoise David publicly mused on the need to create a “feminist left-wing political alternative” to the Parti Québécois.

Then, in 2001, tens of thousands mobilized at the Quebec Summit in opposition to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. Opponents of neoliberal globalization — “altermondialistes” as they are known in Quebec — were soon joined by hundreds of thousands more in massive demonstrations in the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the largest antiwar mobilization in Quebec history. For the first time in decades, there was now a realistic potential for a new configuration of progressive forces.

Regroupment and fusion

The initiative was taken — first separately, then in combination — by three far-left groups:[9]

• The Parti de la démocratie socialiste (PDS) originated as the Quebec section of the federal NDP. In 1995 it broke definitively from the NDP; adopted its new name; defined itself as “anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, feminist, internationalist and independentist”; and campaigned for a Yes to sovereignty in the referendum. The PDS was joined by some independent left-wing nationalists who had left the PQ. Members of Gauche socialiste, a section of the Trotskyist Fourth International, were prominent in the PDS leadership.
• The Rassemblement pour une alternative politique (RAP) was founded in 1998, in response to a public appeal for a “political alternative” issued in November 1997 by prominent left-wing personalities including former PSQ leader and union militant Michel Chartrand; Pierre Dubuc (editor of the popular independentist monthly L’aut’journal); and Paul Cliche, a journalist who in 1970 had led the left-wing municipal party FRAP in Montréal. The RAP later (in November 2000) voted to change its name to Rassemblement pour l’alternative progressiste.
• The Parti communiste du Québec (PCQ), the Quebec section of the Canadian CP, now led by individuals who had once been prominently associated with Quebec’s Mao-Stalinist parties.[10]

In the 1998 general election, the RAP ran seven candidates while the PDS contested 97 ridings; their overall vote was small (36,000), although in Jonquière the RAP candidate Michel Chartrand took 15% of the popular vote against the PQ’s Premier Lucien Bouchard.

In 2000, a joint public meeting in Montréal organized by the PDS, RAP and PCQ attracted some 650 persons to discuss “unity of the political left and progressive forces.” A liaison committee was set up by the three groups along with the Bloc Pot (a marijuana legalization group) and the Quebec section of the Green Party of Canada, with the objective of establishing common positions and actions. In April 2001, just days before the huge protest demonstrations at the pro-free trade Québec Summit of the Americas, independent candidate Paul Cliche won 24% of the popular vote in a by-election in Montréal’s Mercier riding. His campaign, supported by the liaison committee, some trade unions and community organizations, indicated the positive potential of left unity. The liaison committee then became the coalition of the Union des forces progressistes (UFP). In December 2001 the RAP voted by a narrow majority at its congress to join the UFP.[11]

At a convention in June 2002 the UFP was founded as “a federated party that seeks to become a mass alternative to the parties of neoliberalism.” Those attending included a large number of independent activists in addition to members of the PDS, RAP and PCQ.[12] At a subsequent policy convention in February 2003 the new party adopted a radical platform opposing free-trade agreements and calling for international solidarity (Palestine, Cuba, Iraq), cancellation of third-world foreign debts, defence of the environment, extensive social and educational reforms, electoral reform, labour rights, First Nations self-determination, and a constituent assembly to draft a constitution for a “progressive, republican, secular and democratic Quebec.”[13]

The UFP adopted a pluralist structure recognizing the right of organized tendencies (“political entities”) to “promote specific orientations compatible with the platform and statutes of the UFP.” The PDS was now a political entity called Démocratie socialiste (later Québec socialiste), although it soon dissolved as such. The RAP, for its part, simply dissolved into the UFP, while the PCQ became a recognized political entity within the new party.

In the April 2003 general election the UFP, now registered as an official party, ran 73 candidates (26% were women) and obtained just over 40,000 votes — barely attaining the 1% of the popular vote required to qualify for partial rebate of expenses under the Elections Act. The highest vote was Amir Khadir’s 18% in Mercier riding. This campaign was considered a success; some UFP candidates were endorsed by unions, and a post-election report noted that a considerable number of students had been recruited. The party now claimed a membership of some 1,800 members, almost double its membership in 2002.

At a June 2003 meeting, the UFP Council adopted an ambitious agenda of social movement participation, antiwar mobilizing, unification talks with the Parti Vert (a resuscitated Green party), and fighting for an electoral regime of proportional representation to help overcome Quebec’s “democratic deficit.” The members voted to investigate possible participation in municipal elections and creation of a “youth organization... both independent of and in solidarity with the UFP.”

Meanwhile, during the fall and winter of 2002-03, D’abord solidaires, a “non-partisan collective” of activists from the women’s and other social movements, had been formed independently of the UFP to mount a public campaign against a rise in right-wing politics that was aimed primarily against Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a party that split from the provincial Liberals in the early 1990s on a pro-autonomy program and at one point in the months before the 2003 election was registering 40 percent support in public opinion polls on a platform centered on “family values” and “old-stock” Québécois identity issues. D’abord solidaires was officially indifferent between the governing PQ and the opposition Liberals, not opposing a vote for either as a “lesser evil” to the ADQ. As it turned out, the ADQ polled just 18%, the PQ was defeated — its vote dropped by 10 percentage points from its previous result — and the Liberals led by Jean Charest formed the government.[14]

In May 2004, one of the three component collectives in D’abord solidaires, led by feminist leader Françoise David and social housing activist François Saillant, founded Option citoyenne (OC – citizens’ choice). It favoured political action to the left of the PQ but initially rejected an invitation to join the UFP.[15] David toured Quebec promoting her book Bien commun recherché (“seeking the common good”) and probing support for a new left party. David encountered much support for uniting the political forces to the left of the PQ, and considerable openness to the idea of joining with the UFP in a new party — notwithstanding the reservations of many of her supporters, and David herself,[16] about the UFP’s strong commitment to Quebec independence.

In December 2004 Option citoyenne began negotiations with the UFP to explore the possibility of forming “a single progressive, ecologist and feminist party.”

The year-long fusion process posed some major challenges to both groups. Each had its distinct constituency or corporate culture. The UFP’s membership included young people from the global justice movement — internationalist and strong supporters of Quebec independence, which they saw as essential to their anti-capitalist politics — along with an older layer of members, many with long experience in left and far-left politics. OC members, on the other hand, were primarily active within feminist and community organizations (60% were women) and in local grass-roots organizing around tenants’ rights, food and housing co-ops and the like, a milieu in which the politics of consensus and accommodation of conflicting views and interests are valued. OC members tended to radicalize around anti-poverty concerns, and were less likely to be concerned with Quebec’s national question. But the UFP was adamant that the new party must advocate Quebec independence.

Over a year, beginning in November 2004, Option citoyenne held three “national [Quebec] meetings” of its membership to develop a programmatic basis for negotiations with the UFP. Draft position papers were circulated and resolutions adopted on feminism, democracy, pluralism and economic questions.[17] A typical resolution declared that “a party of the common good, inspired by feminism” should be oriented around “values of social justice, equality, peace, solidarity, respect for the integrity of individuals and the environment, while recognizing the importance of struggles against forms of exclusion, racism, discrimination and violence, including those that continue to be exercised against women in the private and public sphere.”

A resolution on economic issues, adopted unanimously, proposed that the “private-public” economic model be replaced by a “plural model” based on “the domestic economy” of family and gratuitous or volunteer services, the “social economy” of non-profit community or cooperative agencies, in addition to “private undertakings... that agree to function in accordance with collective (social, environmental, etc.) rules,” and a “public, state and parastate” sector providing equal and accessible services to the entire population. These positions differed substantially from the explicit anti-capitalism of the UFP’s program.

The most contentious issue among OC members was the national question, and it was not resolved until the last OC national meeting in October 2005, when the 300 delegates voted overwhelmingly in favour of Quebec sovereignty, thus fulfilling a key condition for UFP consent to a merger. The coordinating committee’s position paper justified its position largely on the basis that there was no credible or workable perspective for a renewed federalism that would allow Quebec the additional powers it needed in order to resolve its social problems, but insisted that the defining characteristic of the new party should be its “social agenda” (projet social) and not its position on the national question. The delegates then voted unanimously to join with the UFP to form a new pro-sovereignty party.

Just three days earlier, on October 19, a right-wing manifesto had been published by former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard, some other prominent péquistes, and equally prominent Liberals. Entitled Pour un Québec lucide (For a clear-eyed vision of Quebec), it castigated “big unions” and called for lifting the freeze on university tuition fees, raising electricity rates and consumption taxes, focusing on debt reduction, opening the doors further to private sector investment in public infrastructures and ending the “unhealthy suspicion of private business that has developed in some sectors.” The important challenges facing Quebecers, it proclaimed, were declining demographics and increasing global competition from Asia — not sovereignty. The manifesto reflected a strong rightward drift of both the neoliberal PQ and its federal counterpart the Bloc Québécois.[18]

Thus, while the traditional pro-sovereignty parties were shifting further to the right and some prominent péquistes like Bouchard were retreating from their previous commitment to a sovereigntist perspective, there was a perceptible trend developing in the opposite direction on the left, which now tended overwhelmingly to see a sovereign Quebec as the framework for its social agenda.

During 2005 Option citoyenne and the UFP participated in some common actions and published joint briefs on sustainable development and electoral reform. And in response to the lucides’ manifesto, they initiated a counter-manifesto, Pour un Québec Solidaire, that garnered more than 2,500 signatures.

A special convention of the UFP in November 2005 voted unanimously in favour of a fusion with Option citoyenne, and in February 2006 the two organizations held a joint congress to establish the new party, Québec Solidaire. The founding declaration of principles defined it as a party “resolutely of the left, feminist, ecologist, altermondialiste, pacifist, democratic and sovereigntist.”

It was an impressive achievement — uniting leading activists in the women’s movement, some prominent trade-union militants, grassroots community organizers and long-standing leftists around a project to build a new Québécois political movement based on popular and national sovereignty grounded in general principles of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited.  (To be continued)

____________________

I thank John Riddell and David Mandel for their critical comments on an earlier draft. The usual caveats apply. Published with the permission of Alternate Routes. – Richard Fidler

---

[1] In French, those who advocate “another world” of global justice and solidarity.

[2] http://www.saskndp.ca/assets/File/history/manifest.pdf. The Manifesto was adopted by the first “national” convention of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), in 1933.

[3] Henri Gagnon, Les Militants socialistes du Québec.

[4] For a summary of NDP positions in this regard, see Murray Cooke, “Constitutional Confusion on the Left: The NDP’s Position in Canada’s Constitutional Debates”, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2004/Cooke.pdf. For a critique of the NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration, its most complete and recent statement on the Quebec national question, see “The federal NDP’s electoral breakthrough in Quebec: A challenge to progressives in Canada,” http://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2011/05/federal-ndps-electoral-breakthrough-in.html. See also “Layton chooses Supreme Court, Clarity Act over NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration,” http://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2011/05/layton-chooses-supreme-court-clarity.html.

[5] Parti Socialiste du Québec, Programme 66 (Longueil: Les Presses Sociales, 1966).

[6] The three centrals were the Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ), the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN) and the teachers’ union, the CEQ (now the Centrale des syndicats du Québec, or CSQ).

[7] Opinion polls indicate that even today more than 40% of Québécois support independence (more than those who declare support for the PQ), and a substantial majority favour greater autonomy for Quebec.

[8] For a critical analysis of this experience, see François Moreau, “Balance Sheet of the Quebec Far Left”, http://www.socialisthistory.com/Docs/History/Bilan-Moreau-English.htm. For a more extended analysis, see Pierre Dubuc, L’autre histoire de l’indépendance (Éditions Trois-Pistoles, Éditions du Renouveau québécois, 2003), especially chapters 3 and 4.

[9] The following chronology borrows in part from Pierre Dostie et al., Quelques repères dans l’histoire de la gauche politique québécoise (website of the Union des forces progressistes, January 2006, no longer available). See also Josiane Lavallée, “Du parti de la démocratie socialiste à Québec Solidaire,” in La gauche au Québec depuis 1945 (Bulletin d’histoire politique, Vol. 19, No. 2, Winter 2011), at pp. 202-14.

[10] The PCQ separated from the Canadian CP in 2005 when a majority of its members voted to support Quebec independence. Some members of the reconstituted Quebec section of the Canadian CP are members today of Québec Solidaire, but they do not constitute a recognized “collective” within QS.

[11] RAP founder Pierre Dubuc, in the minority, abandoned the project of building a political alternative to the PQ. In June 2005, he joined with some trade union leaders and “left” PQ members (péquistes) to found Syndicalistes et Progressistes pour un Québec Libre (SPQ-Libre), which for a time was officially recognized as a “club” within the PQ.

[12] According to an internal UFP study cited by Amir Khadir, 56% of the members were under the age of 35 and 29% were under 29; 50% of them were first-time party members; there was a minor yet real presence of Anglophone activists as well as several members of Montreal’s cultural communities (Amir Khadir, interview by Pascale Dufour, March 2006), cited in Dufour, “From Protest to Partisan Politics: When and How Collective Actors Cross the Line. Sociological Perspectives on Québec Solidaire”, Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 34(1) 2009 p55.

[13] See Richard Fidler, “Quebec’s new united left party,” Green Left Weekly, December 10, 2003. http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/28531.

[14] In the 2007 election the ADQ managed to displace the PQ as Official Opposition until the following year’s election, when it was reduced to 7 seats.

[15] UFP leader Pierre Dostie later explained that his party would have preferred that OC simply join the UFP. “But reality is very often more complex than we imagine. Once we found that this political movement, given its composition and what it represented, had to comply with its own process, we sought areas of convergence and we entered into a dialogue.” (“Négociations UFP-Option Citoyenne: Go! Go! Gauche!” À Bâbord !, February-March 2005.

[16] David was once a member of En Lutte, a Mao-Stalinist group that opposed Quebec independence.

[17] These can be consulted at http://www.lagauche.com/lagauche/spip.php?article1078.

[18] At its convention in October 2005, the Bloc voted to support NATO membership, an EU free-trade (and investment) agreement, and the development of a Quebec army and air force that would participate actively in international “peacekeeping”, as in Canada’s occupation of Haiti. At about the same time, Pierre Dubuc, the left-wing SPQ-Libre candidate, received barely 1% support in his campaign for the PQ leadership.

Some Québécois reactions to the Turmel affair

“L’affaire Turmel”[1] continues to make waves, and not just in English Canada. But unfortunately, the NDP has so far failed to mount a defense of its interim federal leader Nycole Turmel.

The disclosure that Turmel had until very recently held memberships in two parties (Bloc Québécois and Québec Solidaire) that support Quebec sovereignty at first attracted little attention in Quebec. After all, as columnist Michael Taube, a former speech-writer for Stephen Harper, notes in today’s Ottawa Citizen, “Many Quebecers have freely shifted their votes from the BQ to NDP because of the two parties’ similar social democratic values and likeminded policy proposals.”

But Canadian politicians were quick to echo the media attacks on Turmel. Taube’s old boss, the Prime Minister: “It’s very disappointing.... I think Canadians expect that any political party that wants to govern the country be unequivocally committed to this country.” Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, himself an ex-New Democrat: “According to her own admission, she’s still in agreement with the Bloc’s policies. Someone has some explaining to do.”

Not to be outdone, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion — author of the infamous Clarity Bill (which says the federal Parliament alone has the right to determine the legitimacy of any Quebec decision on secession), asks in an op-ed piece in today’s Le Devoir: “How many NDP members of parliament were, or still are, members of sovereigntist parties? Will they be staying? How many would vote for independence if a referendum was held?” Dion is quick to add, of course, that he is not — oh no, heaven forbid! — contributing to any witch-hunt.

Other commentators in Quebec, noting the virulent reactions in English Canada, have now turned to the issue.

To the surprise of many, former Parti Québécois premier Bernard Landry is now calling for Turmel’s resignation as interim NDP leader. “It is seldom that I am in harmony with English Canada,” he told Le Devoir, “but I think they are right.” Referring to Turmel’s former membership in the Bloc Québécois and Québec Solidaire, Landry opines: “To have totally opposite convictions in two independentist parties, to be active in a federalist party and then become leader of the official opposition in Canada, there is something not quite right. This is a very bad example for the youth.”

Landry, understandably, does not want the NDP to offer even the image of sympathy for Quebec’s national aspirations. That might help to make it a serious long-term contender for the votes of Québécois looking for a progressive alternative to the neoliberal BQ and PQ. Those parties prefer an NDP that is resolutely and unequivocally federalist, the same party whose MPs voted in 2000 to support the Clarity Bill. Nycole Turmel — and how many other newly-elected NDP MPs from Quebec? — don’t quite fit that profile, they fear.

A very different reaction, however, comes from Pierre Beaudet and François Cyr, writing in the webzine Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme.[2] Both are members of Québec Solidaire (Cyr was president of the QS predecessor, the Union des forces progressistes), although QS itself has made no public statement on the Turmel affair.

Beaudet and Cyr begin by noting that the attacks on Nycole Turmel are a continuing manifestation of the hostility with which the “Canadian elites” have always viewed Quebec nationalism. They express dismay at the NDP’s vacillation in the face of these attacks: “Some ‘deny’ having ‘really’ been sovereigntists. Others conceal their past.” But “in reality, many newly-elected NDP members have been associated with the sovereigntist cause, as members of various independentist parties, or in the context of their involvement in the social movement (trade unions, popular or student movement, etc.).

“This defensive or shame-faced attitude is probably not the best way to handle things,” they write with studied understatement, “even if the NDP leadership is busy demanding these denials out of fear of being accused in the English-Canadian media of being a “traitor to the (Canadian) nation.” And they continue with some insightful explanations that deserve translation:

But the reality is quite simple in Quebec. The cause of social justice has almost always been associated with that of national emancipation. The majority of left-wing supporters has been and remains sovereigntist, whether as members of sovereigntist parties or as activists in most of the left parties that have populated the political landscape in Quebec for 50 years.

The NDP in Quebec was itself on two occasions ‘converted’ to the cause of national emancipation, and this earned it ostracization by the federalist Anglo-Canadian leadership.[3] The other left parties (other than the Canadian Communist Party and various so-called Marxist-Leninists in the 1970s) linked the struggle for social transformation to that of popular and progressive independence.

The reasons for this reality have nothing to do with a “deviation” or a nationalist ‘obsession.’ The Canadian state, a product of the ruling classes, was built on the oppression of the Quebec nation as well as that of the aboriginal nations. The exploitation of the popular classes has been based on and expressed in the domination of these nations. Until the development of Québécois nationalism in the 1960s, the peoples of Quebec were, as Pierre Vallières put it, the ‘White niggers of America.’ The struggle against that exploitation could not help but be interlinked with the struggle for national emancipation.

Eventually, Quebec nationalism soared through a vast social alliance dominated by a developing Québécois elite but including the majority of the urban and rural popular classes. For most of the left at the time (including NDP members in Quebec), the creation of an independent Quebec state would facilitate a genuine overturn to the benefit of the popular classes. After its election in 1976, the PQ for some time responded concretely to their expectations by working within a generally social-democratic perspective. The fact that this project failed in the face of the stubborn resistance of the Canadian elites, and that it led to the PQ’s rightward turn after [the defeat of the referendum in] 1980 did not alter this situation, overall.

During the last decade the popular movement in Quebec has continued its struggles both nationally and socially. The demarcation with the PQ has sharpened in the wake of the party’s alignment with an aggressive neoliberalism imposed by the Canadian and Quebec elites via their tools and mechanisms, which advocate submission to the established ‘order,’ that is, to unfettered capitalism and the federal state. From these hard-fought battles new political projects are emerging — including Québec Solidaire.

Thus national emancipation is part of a social agenda [un projet de société], and is explicitly integrated within a program for refounding the state, the society and the economy. In this context, it is completely normal and legitimate that many left militants, including within the NDP, have enrolled in this project and have even viewed their political action at both the federal and provincial levels as complementary to it.

Apart from the hatred expressed by the Canadian elites, this ‘affair’ reveals other major divisions. The federal leadership of the NDP, the various provincial sections of the NDP, generally speaking the dominant sectors of this social-democratic party, have always been hostile to the Québécois national project, hence their repeated difficulties with their own supporters in Quebec. This hostility reflects a capitulationist posture in relation to the Canadian elites, and a profound lack of understanding of the popular struggles in Quebec within the social-democratic formations.

Notwithstanding some recent statements, the NDP has not crossed the ‘red line.’ It has not spoken out clearly for the right of self-determination of the Quebec people. It has not seriously fought the threats of the Canadian elite against the Quebec nation (as we saw a few years ago when the NDP supported the so-called ‘Clarity’ Act to hobble the sovereigntist process in Quebec).

In reality, this attitude reflects some ambiguities and weaknesses. The NDP need not carry the ‘banner’ of the Canadian state as historically constituted. It need not defend the interests of the elites on the pretext of some bogus ‘patriotism.’ It need not barter positions of principle for a short-sighted electoralism. It must, resolutely and systematically, fight for social justice — which includes fighting for the rights of the Québécois and indigenous peoples, even if it means working hard to convince voters in the popular classes of certain regions of Canada that have been contaminated by the hostility to Quebec that sometimes borders on racism.

Beaudet and Cyr conclude with an appeal specifically addressed to the NDP’s Quebec caucus:

Nycole Turmel, Alexandre Boulerice and many other NDP MPs who come from the Quebec social movement (obviously, we are not speaking about Thomas Mulcair and a hard-core federalist minority) should say it clearly and proudly. Fighting to alter the federal state is not contradictory with involvement in the Québécois social and national movement, on the contrary. Progressive parties like the NDP, the Bloc and Québec Solidaire have an interest in working together, including in an uncompromising struggle for the fundamental rights of the Quebec people....

This is a call that should resonate within the trade unions, the social movements and the NDP in English Canada. However, the reactions to date are not encouraging. This attack on the NDP, and Quebec itself, has been met with silence in the unions and other mass organizations. Ominously, the NDP leadership have been less than forthright in their own defense. A Google search turns up only a couple of newspaper reports quoting members of the federal NDP caucus: two MPs from Windsor, Ontario, and a brief comment from Libby Davies, a Vancouver MP and a deputy leader of the party. (To my knowledge, the other deputy leader, Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair, is keeping mum.)

Davies is quoted as saying “To me it’s just a blip.” Like the Windsor MPs, she simply reiterates Turmel’s tortured explanations of her ambivalent positions and emphasizes her professions of federalist commitment. But this won’t do. The NDP can no longer evade the long overdue debate on the Quebec national question and the party’s relation to it. It may run, but it can’t hide. The capitalist media and politicians are already making that perfectly clear. The only way to counter their attacks is to develop a strong democratic defense of Quebec’s rights, including its right to self-determination — and an understanding of what this means for progressives in Canada.

The party leadership should open up a discussion within the membership — and why not the much broader ranks of its supporters, as well? — on how to relate to progressive opinion in Quebec. A sharp change in course is imperative, if the party is to hope for any credibility on these questions.

Richard Fidler, August 5, 2011.

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[1] See “Nycole Turmel’s induction in the federalists’ wonderland.” Also available at Canadian Dimension and Socialist Project.

[2] The article is also published as an op-ed piece in today’s Le Devoir.

[3] The authors are presumably referring to (1) the support for Quebec autonomy among the initial NDP forces in Quebec, in 1962-63, and the resulting split in the party that led to the formation of the Parti Socialiste du Québec; and (2) the support for Quebec’s right to self-determination by the Quebec NDP in the early 1970s. As well, the Quebec NDP under the leadership of Jean-Paul Harney was sympathetic to Quebec sovereignty during the late 1980s, but was rebuffed by the Broadbent leadership of the federal party and largely collapsed in the early ’90s.