GEOPOLITICS OF THE AMAZON – Part I

Bolivian leader replies to critics of the Morales government’s development strategy

Introduction

Álvaro García Linera is one of Latin America’s leading Marxist intellectuals. He is also the Vice-President of Bolivia — the “co-pilot,” as he says, to President Evo Morales, and an articulate exponent of the government’s policies and strategic orientation.

In a recent book-length essay, Geopolitics of the Amazon: Patrimonial-Hacendado Power and Capitalist Accumulation, published in September 2012, García Linera discusses a controversial issue of central importance to the development process in Latin America, and explains how Bolivia is attempting to address the intersection between economic development and environmental protection.

The issues he addresses are of great importance not only in Bolivia but throughout Latin America, and in fact in most of the countries of the imperialist periphery. They are especially important to understand in the “First World,” where there is an increasing campaign in parts of the left to turn against the progressive and anticapitalist governments in Latin America on the ground of their alleged “extractivism.”

García Linera examines the classic Marxist criteria on the forms of appropriation of nature by humanity. “Extractivism,” he shows, is not synonymous with underdevelopment. Rather, it is necessary to use the resources gained from primary or export activity controlled by the state to generate the surpluses that can satisfy the minimal conditions of life of Bolivians and to guarantee an intercultural and scientific education that generates a critical mass capable of assuming and leading the emerging processes of industrialization and economic development.

A major theme of the book is to refute the allegations in the opposition media that the TIPNIS highway between Cochabamba and Beni is intended for the export of Brazilian products to the Pacific via Bolivian territory. The book clearly demonstrates that the route is intended as part of the national unification of the country.

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted wide attention throughout Latin America. In a recent review, the eminent Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader says “it refutes each and every one of the allegations of the opposition in his country and their international spokespersons.” He describes it as “an essential book, without which it is not possible to understand the present phase of the Bolivian process and the root of the conflicts affecting it.”

The book has sparked fierce debate in Bolivia itself, including a lengthy response by Raúl Prada Alcoreza, a former comrade of García Linera in the Comuna collective.

There is an extensive literature on these issues now being produced in Latin America. Another example is a book, El desarrollo en cuestión: reflexiones desde América Latina. It includes articles by some of the authors cited in the debate between García Linera and Prada.

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted commentary in Quebec, including a favourable review by André Maltais in the widely-read L’aut’journal. A compendium of articles by the legendary Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui recently published in Quebec also includes writings by Álvaro García Linera. More of his texts may be found on-line (Spanish only) on his web site.

Starting in today’s post, I am publishing my translation of the full text of Geopolitics of the Amazon. Because of its length (more than 25,000 words), I will publish it in five consecutive posts in coming days. To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here.

García Linera’s footnotes are included as well as a few of my own, the latter signed “Tr.” I have substituted English-language references, where available, for texts cited in the notes.

Muchas gracias to Federico Fuentes and Cristina Rojas for their diligent and critical reviews of my draft translation. I am of course solely responsible for the final text, published here.

– Richard Fidler

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Geopolitics of the Amazon

Patrimonial-Hacendado power and capitalist accumulation

The whole course of the ... revolution ... strikingly confirmed one of Marx’s profound propositions: revolution progresses by giving rise to a strong and united counter-revolution, i.e., it compels the enemy to resort to more and more extreme measures of defence and in this way devises ever more powerful means of attack.

V.I. Lenin[1]

I want to welcome the initiative taken by Ana Esther Ceceña, and all the comrades who have commented on her article,[2] in opening the debate around the present political situation in Bolivia. The thoughts of each of the participants not only demonstrate the interest and greater or lesser revolutionary engagement with the events, but also help to shed light on the complexity of the political processes and possible ways to advance them.

Revolution and counterrevolution

It was Lenin who pointed out that any real revolutionary process will generate an even greater counterrevolution. This means that any revolution must advance in order to consolidate itself, but in doing so it arouses forces opposed to its advance that block the revolution, which in turn, in order to defend and consolidate itself, will have to advance further, arousing even greater reactions from the conservative forces, and so on indefinitely. In Bolivia, in the last 12 years, we have experienced an ascending revolutionary process which, emerging from organized civil society as a social movement, has affected and traversed the state structure itself, modifying the very nature of civil society.

This is a revolution that is political, cultural and economic. Political, because it has revolutionized the social nature of the state, having enshrined the rights of the indigenous peoples and given concrete expression to those rights through the actual occupation by the indigenous peoples of the state administration. We are talking about an act of social sovereignty that has made possible the conversion of the indigenous demographic majority into a state political majority; a modification of the social and class nature of control and hegemony in the state. This is in fact the most important and significant transformation in the country since its birth, a country characterized until very recently by the exclusion of the indigenous citizenry from absolutely all of the decision-making structures of the state. But it is also a radical political and cultural revolution, because this indigenous imprint on public decision-making as a state power has been the work of social movements and organizational methods derived from the trade-union, communal and plebeian nature of the indigenous-popular world. That is, the presence of the indigenous-popular world in the conduct of the state since 2006 has been concretely expressed not as a mere individual occupation by indigenous and popular representatives within the state but as an organic transformation of the state institutionality itself through the presence of organizational structures of the indigenous-popular community in the decision-making and deliberative structures of the state. Whereas during the last 100 years the masses built the citizenship of rights through their trade unions (and thus we used to speak of a trade-union citizenship),[3] now the takeover of state power by the social movements is a takeover of the state power by the union. And that is why the election today of authorities of the executive, legislative or judicial organs in fact proceeds fundamentally through processes of deliberation and the assembly-like structures of the agrarian unions, the rural communities and guild, popular and neighbourhood organizations of the society.

And we say economic revolution, because within a short historical period the structure of ownership of social resources and of their uses has been radically modified. Until seven years ago, Brazil, along with three oil companies, controlled 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbons and 30% of the GDP, while the state controlled only 16%.[4] But today, the Bolivian state controls 34%[5] of the GDP and 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbons throughout the chain of production. More than 10 million hectares in the hands of latifundistas, politicians and foreigners have been recovered by the state and handed over to indigenous peoples and peasant communities, putting an end to the latifundist nature of the lowlands agrarian system. Now that the hydrocarbon, electrical, telecommunications and in part the mining and metallurgical industries have been nationalized, the economic surplus, previously concentrated in a handful of foreign and private firms, goes directly to society through rents, cash transfers, services and productive state investment. In 2011, 1.2% of the GDP[6] was transferred directly to the most vulnerable sectors of the country (children, seniors and pregnant women) through this system of social protection. While in 2005 only 629 million dollars annually were invested because the economic surplus went abroad, today the state governed by the social movements invests just over 5 billion dollars, and with that we have beaten illiteracy;[7] in the rural diaspora, the difference between rich and poor has been reduced by exactly one half,[8] while the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 38.2% (2005) to 24.3% (2011).[9]

But, you will say, “obviously the structure of ownership of the means of production and public assets has changed, and the distributional structure of the economic surplus has been transformed, but the mode of production has not been altered.” And of course, fundamentally it has not been altered. How can we expect that a small country that defends itself day after day from the counterrevolution, organizes the unification of a profoundly fragmented and corporate-dominated society, carries out the most important political revolution in its history, alters the structure of ownership and economic distribution, all within six years — yes, within six years — can, in isolation, change a mode of production that took more than 500 years to establish itself and continues to expand even today? Isn’t it intellectually nonsensical to demand this, in this space of time? And does it not demonstrate a mistake of basic historical location? Isn’t it more sensible to discuss what type of tendencies are being driven forward in Bolivia to promote a transformation in the mode of production, in tune with the changes that each of us is making in other countries with the same objective? We will return to this question at the end.

Each of the political and economic changes that have been achieved within the country’s revolutionary process has directly affected the foreign governments and corporations, capitalists, business people, elites and privileged social classes that have been monopolizing the material assets of the society, the political resources of the state, and the symbolic assets of social power. The dismantling of racial whiteness as capital, as a material component (or “asset”) of the class structure and class domination (so characteristic of all colonial societies) has smashed not only a centuries-old racialized imaginary of command over the indigenous peoples, but has also eroded a property, an “asset” that for centuries allowed a small caste to acquire power and legitimacy in the systems of political-cultural command and economic ownership.[10] This classist decolonization of society, anchored in the deeper habitus of all social classes, has radically modified the structure of political power and has unambiguously displaced the constituent dominant classes of the old state. This has led to the enraged reaction of the old ruling elites seeking to weaken and overthrow the government of President Evo Morales by every means: economic (freeze on bank deposits, 2006; sabotage of production, 2007-09, food boycott, 2007-08), political (sabotage in the Constituent Assembly, 2006-08; referendums in the autonomous regions, 2008; presidential recall vote, 2008), and armed (attempted coup, 2008; separatism, 2009).

There has not been any governmental measure in favour of equality, national sovereignty or redistribution of wealth that has not had a counter-action from the conservative forces. And in this inevitable reaction to the revolutionary measures it is possible to single out two forms:

First, the one in which the forces displaced from economic and political power act as an organized class body with its own spokesmen, slogans and organizational forms. Examples are the energy and food boycotts launched by factions of the foreign and national business community, acting as an organized political force through its federations or confederations, in opposition to the government measures. In this case it is relatively easy for the social movements to figure out the difference between popular and anti-popular objectives and to polarize the conflict; accordingly the key to confronting the counterrevolution lies in the reaffirmation of popular unity against their class enemies and the use of democratic and revolutionary methods to achieve victory.

Secondly, there is the type of measures in which the reactionary forces act in a diffused way, indirectly, and through popular or middle-class social sectors. In this case, the contradiction does not assume a polarity between popular and anti-popular forces but is contained within the popular movement itself, that is, it occurs “among the people” as Mao Tse-tung would say,[11] and the counterrevolutionary forces are in control, complicating the correct handling of the contradictions.

In that case, the reactionary action does not have a conservative class subject, but it channels its expectations and needs, taking advantage of the mobilization of the segment of the popular camp itself that, in its attachment to corporatist or individualistic perspectives — often without realizing it — serves the interests of its own enemies who by and large will end up turning against them. To some extent it is a strategy of colonial mobilization and domination: using the contradictions within the popular bloc to set two factions of the popular forces against each other from within and materially and symbolically establish the domination of the “dominant third party” upon the exhaustion and defeat of one or both of them. This is what happened in the colonial invasion of the continent. That is how colonial domination was consolidated, and how the republican peace was imposed on the emerging neocolonial states. A less euphemistic variant of this logic of intra-popular confrontation is the one used by the news media, portraying conflicts with great drama and media hysteria in order to mobilize “public opinion” against popular governments.

The tragic course of history so unfolds that the counterrevolution can come hand in hand with a faction of its own builders which, without necessarily advocating it, may as a consequence of the exacerbation of its corporatist, regional or sectoral particularism, and without taking into account the general configuration of overall social forces nationally and internationally, end up defending the interests of the conservative forces of the right and undermining its own revolutionary process. That is precisely what came to happen with the so-called “TIPNIS march.”

The Amazon and patrimonial despotic power

When one observes Bolivia’s geography, four regions can be clearly distinguished: the altiplanicie [high plateau], which comprises the departments of La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí; the valleys, in Cochabamba, Tarija, and Chuquisaca; the Chaco, south of Santa Cruz and east of Tarija and Chuquisaca; and the immense Amazon, which includes the departments of Pando, Beni, the north of La Paz and Santa Cruz.

One third of Bolivia is Amazon, and it is by far the most isolated region of the country. Whether through wars or unjust treaties, Bolivia has lost some 750,000 km² of its Amazon,[12] an area equivalent to more than three times that of the department of Beni (213,564 km²). The highest number of indigenous nations in Bolivia live in the Amazon region, but the population density is low; according to the latest Population and Housing Census (2001), less then 4% of the total indigenous population of Bolivia lives in the lowlands, and in particular in the Amazon.

The heirs of great hydraulic cultures, the indigenous nations of this region were not central to the organization of domination during the Colonial period, and can be said to be part of the vague colonial frontier; thus the institutions of colonial domination of both lands and labour force, which transformed the economy and society in the lowlands and the altiplano, had only a marginal presence in the Amazon, which was considered a “frontier.” However, the institution that did take on the job of recruitment and elusive discontinuous domination over the Amazon indigenous nations was the Catholic Church, through the “reducciones” [confined reservations] of the Jesuits and later the Recollets and Franciscans.[13] The Jesuits managed to capture peoples throughout Chiquitanía (Chiquitanos), Moxos (Moxeños, Trinitarios, Yuracarés, etc.), and also in the Chaco, but intermittently between what is now Bolivia and Paraguay. In 1767, the Spanish Crown expelled the Jesuit missions; by 1830 they were partially replaced by the Franciscans in their presence on the Amazon frontier. The reservations were authentic artisanal fortresses built to assemble the indigenous population who were hunted down in the jungles, “tied up and then taken to the missions, often to Concepción or Santiago de Chuiquitos,”[14] and it was there that the indigenous souls were moulded and their productive habits modified. While the missions were unable to control the Amazon territory, its natural resources or social organization, they did manage to permanently alter the political, spiritual and economic organization of a great many nomadic indigenous nations. The missions were precisely the point of departure for the annulment of the traditional religious authorities, the institution of the cabildo, and the gradual transition to a sedentary lifestyle of the Amazon peoples. For example, the Jesuit production schemes favoured approaches that were almost ascetically capitalist (they incorporated accounting, registries, reinvestment, dimensions, schedules, days, proportions, in various industries such as agriculture, tile and brick making, ceramics, weaving, cattle raising, etc.). Nor should we forget that the Jesuit reservations were to a large degree self-sufficient and sold their surpluses.

After the abandonment of the Jesuit missions and the decline of the other missions in the 19^th century, the republican state presence in the Amazon was weak. For example, it was not until the early 20^th century that the Sirionó were permanently contacted; the Ayoreos continued to be nomads to a large degree until the Seventies; and it was not until the battle of Kuruyuki (1892) that the colonial-republican state finally managed to “defeat” the Guarani, notwithstanding that relations with them date back to very early in the Colony. Even after the founding of the Republic, the Brazilians were crossing the border to capture Indians as slaves, without the state being able to prevent this activity.

In reality, it was at the end of the 19^th century, in the republican stage (when, through the institution of the hacienda, enclave economies were established for the harvesting of rubber, quinine, chestnuts and wood), that a generalized offensive was launched against the indigenous peoples of the Amazon through the expropriation of their territories, their forced recruitment as labourers and the definitive subjugation of their political and cultural structures. It is estimated that in the case of rubber alone — in the first peak period (1870-1917), the second (1940-47) and the third (1960-70) — some 6,000 persons with their families[15] were employed in rubber tapping. In the course of all those years, about 80,000 persons were displaced throughout the Amazon region, from Santa Cruz to Beni and Pando especially.

In the early 20^th century, rubber accounted for up to 15% of state income.[16] All of this wealth generated through the harvesting of rubber was the product of the rubber tappers, the majority of them indigenous peoples who were forcibly recruited and trafficked by dozens of businessmen — both Bolivians and others of German, Portuguese, English and Japanese origin:

“It is common knowledge that the indigenous peoples were forced to work for meagre pay which in many cases simply went to the sustenance of the rubber tapper but not his family if he had one. Especially given the exorbitant prices of the products they received in return. In other cases, as frequently happens , they were baited with alcohol to take other advances and articles from the company store, false pretences being used to bind them to a lifetime of exploitation. With the rising debts, the lying pretences would stretch like bubble gum.... And even worse, when the rubber tapper died, his debts were passed on to his wife or children as an abusive inheritance imposed by the bosses and contractors under the applicable Debt Law.... In 1914, the newspaper La Voz del Pueblo, commenting on this malicious pettifogging, reported: ‘There have been cases in which indigenous peoples have left for the rubber regions and when one died the boss went back to the deceased’s home village to present the widow with the imaginary debt, violently taking away the sons of majority age and, if there was no family, throwing her out of her miserable hovel in payment of what she was alleged to owe.’...”[17]

From the second half of the 19^th century to 1938, there was a kind of political trial of strength between the ranchers, rubber producers and government authorities, on the one hand, and the Franciscans on the other, to get the latter to “lend” indigenous peoples for production (of rubber in the north, and for harvest and seeding in the south) and to work in public works. Finally, in 1939 the missions were secularized, supposedly because of the death of an engineer at the hands of the Siriono. The description of this people in Holmberg’s classic book[18] dates from the second decade of the 20^th century, when they were still nomadic. The Ayoreos engaged in major migrations during the Chaco War, fleeing to the north as a result of the pressures on them in the war.

While the huge territorial expanses subject to the semi-nomadic wanderings of some of the Amazon indigenous nations allowed the existence of family systems of production and autonomous authority, they could not prevent the consolidation of the territorial power of the landowners, ranchers and private resource extraction firms which over the last century became established as a real power in the Amazon. The consolidation of this estate-based land ownership in the Amazon regional power structure occurred at a time when the governing mining and latifundista elites of the highlands were founding — so to speak — the extractivist latifundist, and later Amazon ranching, enclaves along with the state structure. The republican state thereby became a latifundist state and the private latifundio became a regional power of the state, giving rise to the hereditary nature of the state power in the lowlands. Strictly speaking, the state abdicated its class “autonomy” and became an extension of the family legacy of the businessmen and latifundistas. Thus, through ranching and the extraction of rubber and quinine, now chestnuts, lumber, or simple possession of lands, big landowners and businessmen have over the last 150 years consolidated a landholding and hereditary territorial power structure over all the urban and rural inhabitants of the region. The state would delegate regional political power to the landowners, for whom the ownership of political life would be yet another of “the assets” of the estate or company; and the state would receive a portion of the rent of the land from the extractivist activity in the Amazon. In the early 20^th century, this rent accounted for 5 to 15% of the state income.

The agrarian structure of Santa Cruz prior to 1952, described by Nicolás Laguna,[19] is a mould that with slight variations recurs in the Amazon regions of Beni and Pando, including since 1952:

“The big landowners (between 20 and 50,000 hectares or more, only small portions of which were cultivated and on which they generally had no title) were the hacendados, who preferred to call themselves finqueros. Their haciendas were not commercial plantations but instead nearly autonomous and self-sufficient productive units, relatively isolated, in which the use of machinery and improvement of the land were almost non-existent. The hacendado and his family lived on them with their workers who remained there throughout the year. The self-sufficiency of the finca enabled the finquero to live well and obtain whatever he did not produce with the small income he got in exchange for selling his surpluses in the local market. Those living and working in the finca were the jornaleros [labourers] who, in exchange for a house and meals, and in some cases a wage, were to cultivate the employer’s lands; in addition, they might work small parcels (no more than a hectare) for themselves. There were also pequeños propietarios [small proprietors] (no more than 20 hectares, generally 8 to 10, of which no more than 5 were cultivated), who were few in number and cultivated the land with their families, seeking self-sufficiency and independence, although normally they performed odd jobs during harvest and seeding. The inquilinos [tenants] rented lands (one to three hectares) from the finqueros in exchange for 10 to 20% of their production, cultivating lands that the finquero was not using in order to bring in some extra income without too much effort or loss. The tolerados [“tolerated ones,” or colonizers], the true pioneers of the east according to Heath, occupied lands in the unoccupied strips of the fincas and cultivated them until they were evicted. The finqueros allowed these occupations for a time since the tolerados cleared the forest, planted fruit trees, improved the area and were hired as jornaleros at harvest and seeding times. Conditions had hardly changed since the time of the prospectors of El Dorado or Gran Paitití; the security and prestige of the finqueros, whose wealth counted for little in any other part of the country, based themselves on ownership of the land and servitude, spending practically their entire income to maintain the traditional form of life to which they were accustomed. The land had no value in commercial terms (which is why no one took the trouble to acquire legal title) and was non-negotiable in terms of status, security and self-sufficiency.”

In the Amazon, until fairly recently, the employer or hacendado was the lord of everything within his purview, using the violence of paramilitary forces to occupy lands and impose his law over the surrounding peons, indigenous peoples and poor peasants.[20] To the degree that power was structured around the land and its violent occupation, a conservative employer logic — the most conservative in the country — prevailed in the Amazon region. And consistent with this the hacendados, lumbermen, landlords and their intermediaries had established, since the beginning of the republican state, a sort of pact with the rulers to exercise, through their family and local networks, a limited state presence in the area; lands, state resources and impunity had become to a large degree the hereditary form of the state in the Amazon. As such the state appeared as an extension of the family influences of a small hacendado, rubber, rancher and lumber elite, wielding state violence to legitimize and impose their ownership as employers over the population.

This patrimonial-hacendado power in the Amazon is even now the most conservative and reactionary form of regional domination existing in the country as a whole. In a certain form, the figure of the landlord personifies the most despotic powers in existence: not only is he the owner of the land, he is also the one who hires workers and purchases wood from the forest, the provider of market goods to the remote populations, and the influential politician whose family monopolizes public responsibilities and as such is the provider of public lands and public favours to a population that is lacking in everything: lands, property, public authority and the state. So the landlord is not infrequently as well the axis of popular rituals such as the celebration of festivals and weddings or the one who determines whether and where your children will be educated. The entire warp and woof of hereditary colonial power converges in the figure of the hacendado and his ubiquitous and paternal command. And while the dispersed indigenous organization has maintained its local autonomy at the level of its small towns, councils, union centrals and subcentrals, it has not managed to convert itself into a leading force at the local or regional level, much less challenge the hereditary-landowner authority and command structure.

In fact, faced with the ongoing hacendado-corporate encroachment, the indigenous communities, in order to be able to preserve some part of their territorial occupation, have had to come to terms with the structure of dominant landowner power in a subordinate and vertical manner, as do the other popular classes. Hence the very discourse of legitimation and regional identification has been until recently that issuing from the nucleus of the regional employers’ power.

In the Amazon, then, it is not the indigenous peoples who have taken control of the territorial power, as occurred years ago in the highlands and valleys, where the peasant unions and communities have performed the role of indigenous micro-states with a territorial presence, and in reality were the material foundation for the construction of the present Plurinational State. In the Amazon region, things occurred in a very different way. The despotic landowner order predominates and neither the indigenous organizations nor the peasants or the workers of recent creation have managed to create an organizational or discursive counter-power that begins to crack this hereditary-landowner system.

A partial modification of this system of despotic landowner domination has been produced by the NGOs, which have managed to create a clientelist relationship with the indigenous leadership, promoting levels of interregional organization like the Regionales Indígenas or the CIDOB itself.[21] But to the extent that those levels of organization, with little contact with the Amazon indigenous bases, function exclusively with external (NGO) funding, which pays the salaries of the leaders, in reality they actually develop as NGOs, reproducing mechanisms of clientelist cooptation and ideological and political subordination to the funding agencies, most of them European and North American, as in the case of USAID.[22]

While in the first world countries NGOs exist as part of civil society — in most cases funded by transnational enterprises — in the third world, as in the case of Bolivia, various NGOs are not really NON Governmental Organizations but Organizations of Other Governments on Bolivian territory; they are a replacement for the state in the areas in which the neoliberalism of the past initiated its exit, encompassing such sectors as education (through the attempts at privatization or through the convent colleges) and health (for example, Prosalud of USAID). The NGO, as an organization of another government and possessor of financial resources, defines the subject matter, the focus, the line of funding, etc. based on the priorities of this other government, constituting itself as a foreign power within the national territory. It could be said that the neoliberal system in the periphery has been shaped between a state that is reduced in its capacities and its power of economic and cultural intervention (through privatization and downsizing), NGOs that have replaced it in specific areas (social, cultural, struggle against poverty, indigenous peoples, environment, etc.) and a private foreign economic sector that has been appropriating public resources.[23]

In fact, some NGOs in the country have been the vehicle for introducing a type of colonial environmentalism that relegates the indigenous peoples to the role of caretakers of the Amazon jungle (considered extraterritorial property of foreign governments and corporations[24]), creating de facto a new relationship of privatization and alienation of the national parks and Communitarian Lands (TCOs) over which the state itself has lost custody and control.[25] In this form, whether by means of the hard power of the property-owning despotism that controls the processes of intermediation and semi-industrialization of Amazon products (lumber, alligators, chestnuts, rubber, etc.) or through the soft power of the NGOs, the indigenous nations of the Amazon are being economically dispossessed of the territory and politically subordinated to external discourses and powers. In short, economic and political power in the Amazon is not in the hands of the indigenous peoples or the state. Power in the Amazon is in the hands, in part, of a landowner-business elite, and in part, of foreign businesses and governments that negotiate the care of the Amazon jungles in exchange for a reduction in taxes and control of biodiversity through their biotechnology.

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[1] “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Complete Works, Volume 11, p. 172. [Note by editor: “Lenin cites the proposition put forward by Marx in his Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 139).”] – Tr.

[2] “Debates que tejen emancipaciones,” by Ana Esther Ceceña, published in Rebelión (26/05/2012). Available at: www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=150260.

[3] “For the workers, mainly miners and industrial workers, for at least 50 years (1940-1990) the union was the organizing network of class identity and accumulation of experience as a class... the assimilation of class experience came exclusively through the union, and that, in the last analysis, was all the workers had with which to confront life, repression and death. The union was the sole enduring place in which to experience the ups and downs of collective existence; it was the sole ongoing network of support, friendship and solidarity, and the authentic place in which to assert themselves as a collective body. What the workers did in history from 1940 to 1990 was done as trade unionists; the union was the instrument of their struggle, in which they made a revolution (and that is no small thing), they won rights, they won healthcare and housing, they protected their families, they buried their dead. Hence its durability and pre-eminence in the construction of working-class memory....” – Álvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad. Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia,” in Tiempos de rebelión, Comuna y Muela del Diablo, La Paz, 2001.

[4] Public enterprises 1% and Public administration 15%. (UDAPE)

[5] Public enterprises 19% and Public administration 15%. (UDAPE)

[6] UDAPE, Informe 2011.

[7] In 2006, 823,256 of the country’s inhabitants were illiterate, but by 2008, thanks to the “Yo, sí puedo” Literacy Program, 824,101 people had been taught to read and write, and Bolivia was that year named a “Territory Free of Illiteracy.” In 2009 it started up the National Post-Literacy Program.

[8] In 2005, the richest 10% of the population earned 30 times more than the poorest 10%, while in 2009, the richest 10% earned only 15 times more than the poorest 10%. (UDAPE and INE)

[9] UDAPE, Informe 2011.

[10] On the concept of ethnicity, in this case “racial whiteness” as a form of capital and of the material components of the class structure in colonial societies, see Álvaro García Linera, “Espacio social y estructuras simbólicas. Clase, etnicidad y estructuras simbólicas en la obra de P. Bourdieu,” in Bourdieu Leído desde el Sur, Alianza Francesa/Instituto Goethe/Universidad de la Cordillera/Plural editores, La Paz, 2000.

[11] “Two types of social contradictions — those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves — confront us. The two are totally different in their nature.... In the conditions prevailing in China today, the contradictions among the people comprise the contradictions within the working class, the contradictions within the peasantry, the contradictions within the intelligentsia, the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry, the contradictions between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the intellectuals on the other, the contradictions between the working class and other sections of the working people on the one hand and the national bourgeoisie on the other, the contradictions within the national bourgeoisie, and so on.... The contradictions between the enemy and us are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic...” On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, Speech delivered by Mao Tse-tung, February 27, 1957.

[12] To Brazil, by treaties (1867) and by the Acre War (1903), 490,430 km²; and to Peru, by diplomatic treaties (1909), 250,000 km².

[13] The purpose of the missions was to shield the indigenous peoples from “the dangers of turning into beasts” and to “improve them, that is, to humanize them through education as a first step toward their Christianization”: José de Acosta, “De procuranda indorum salute I”, quoted in Fran Helm, La Misión Católica durante los siglos XVI-XVII: contexto y texto; UCB/Verbo Divino/Editorial Guadalupe, Bolivia, 2002. In the case of the Jesuit missions, the objective of having control of the spiritual authority was combined with guaranteeing a stable economic base that would secure the maintenance of the catechumen [religious pupils] and avoid their dispersion. See F. Armas Asin, Editor; La invención del Catolicismo en América. Los procesos de evangelización, siglos XVI-XVIII, Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, Perú, 2009. Also, Jonathan Wright, Los jesuitas.Una historia de los soldados de Dios, Debate, España, 2005. On the presence of the Jesuits in Chiquitos and Moxos, see Javier Baptista, “Las Misiones de los Jesuitas en Bolivia: Mojos y Chiquitos,” in Manuel Marzal and Luis Bacigalupo Editores, Los Jesuitas y la Modernidad en Iberoamérica. 1549-1773, IFEA/Universidad del Pacífico/Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru, 2007. On the Franciscans, see Padre Fray Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas, 12 volumes, 1619-1921, Lima, 1922.

[14] Alcide D’Orbigny, “Viaje a la América Meridional”, Volume IV, PLURAL/IFEA/IRD/Embassy of France in Bolivia, La Paz, 2002.

[15] Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Caucho Ignorado, Premio Nacional “Serrano” 2009 de Investigación en Historia, Editorial El País, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 2010.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., p. 112.

[18] Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads Of The Long Bow: The Siriono Of Eastern Bolivia, American Museum, 1969.

[19] “La burguesía cruceña. Concentración y centralización de capital y organización corporativa empresarial en el departamento de Santa Cruz (1988-2005)”. Draft thesis of Nicolás Laguna, Sociology, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA), pp. 47-48.

[20] The borders of the haciendas were often defined in gunfights using hired thugs.

[21] CIDOB since its birth has depended on direct funding from international cooperation through NGOs. Thus the NGO APCOB (Apoyo para el Campesino Indígena del Oriente Boliviano) received money from USAID and the Ford Foundation through the NGO Culture Survival in the 1980s for the creation of the CIDOB, as did other indigenous organizations in Peru and Ecuador: Cultural Survival, Final Report, “Strengthening pluralism: a combined human rights/grass roots development program for Indians of Latin America and the Caribbean Basin,” 1987. In the 1990s, the director of IBIS-DINAMARCA said they supported the creation of CONAMAQ under the ethnic model of the CIDOB because they needed an organization of that type in order to be able to work cooperatively. Likewise, the CSUTCB was identified as a class organization with a discourse from the Seventies, with which they could not work. And in an OXFAM document we can read: “The ayllu is a form of Andean organisation [that maintains] principles... opposed to the peasant unions, which are organisational forms imposed on the ayllus [...].” Quoted in Andolina, Robert; Radcliffe, Sarah; Laurie, Nina, Development and culture: Transnational identity making in Bolivia, Political Geography 24 (2005) 678, at p. 695.

[22] The process of delimitation of TCOs and “social control” of the subsequent saneamiento process after 1996 was for the most part financed by the Danish bilateral cooperation organization DANIDA. From 2005 to 2009 this agency invested more than $13.36 million, of which $2.4 million was assigned to a technical project of the CIDOB, the Centro de Planificación Territorial Indígena (CPTI). In the highlands, the same scheme was applied with the NGO ISALP, which received $700,000 during the same period. Other NGOs like CEJIS and AVSF receive similar funding in the framework of other components of European assistance. U.S. funding did not participate directly in supporting the TCO but did in many wooded areas in the context of the BOLFOR project and the individualized pruning in areas of coca leaf cultivation, in collaboration with the European Union. (Source: Ministry of Foreign Relations, DANIDA 2004, Component 2: Saneamiento y titulación de tierras comunitarias de origen, Document Ref. No. 104, Bol.808.200, DANIDA).

[23] That is the project promoted for the poorest countries of the world by the World Bank and the IMF, supported by the United States and the European Union. It ensures that dependency is sustained, sovereignty is minimized or nullified and the transnationals appropriate the wealth of the world.

[24] This relationship between some environmental NGOs, the protection of parks, and the mechanisms of transnationalized capitalist accumulation, we will see a bit later.

[25] The process of saneamiento performed by the INRA was financed almost exclusively with foreign funds until 2008. The European cooperation agencies (of Denmark, Holland and the EU) undertook to pay 36% and USAID 23% of the costs in the planned areas (2008). The rest was distributed among agencies of the UN, multilateral funds, private interests and the Bolivian state. These proportions began to change in 2009, with the access of the applicants in communitarian lands to the resources of the IDH and an increase of funding from the TGN beginning in 2008, which among other things allowed the securitization of various applications by highland TCOs that had been rejected by external funding sources notwithstanding a formal application. (Sources: SIG database of the Deputy Ministry of Lands concerning INRA planning, 2008. Unidad de Planificación del INRA, 2011.)

Pipeline politics — Can popular protest stop the tar sands leviathan?

Petroleum giant Enbridge Inc. has taken huge strides in recent weeks to complete its plan to transport tar sands oil to eastern Canada and from there to foreign markets.

Already assured of support from the Harper government, the company is rapidly lining up further backing from provincial politicians and industry players, including a key trade union. And it is fast-tracking the regulatory approval process.

Enbridge’s project entails reversing the flow of an existing pipeline circuit across southern Ontario to Montréal, Quebec and from there through New England states to Portland, Maine. At present imported oil is carried from Portland to Sarnia, Ontario, where existing refineries already process dirty tar sands oil piped from Alberta. Enbridge also plans to increase the pipeline’s capacity from 240,000 barrels per day to 300,000 bpd.

The Enbridge project is of vital importance for Big Oil and its major clients. Imported oil now costs $20 to $30 per barrel more at the world price than Canadian-produced oil. And with massive investments in tar sands operations, the petroleum giants urgently need to gain access to new markets. They face the prospect of declining demand and prices in the United States, the current destination for almost 100 percent of Canada’s oil exports. And plans to build new pipelines to the west coast, from where the oil would be shipped through hazardous coastal waters to Asia, have encountered powerful opposition from communities throughout British Columbia, led by First Nations communities directly in the path of the pipelines.

Enbridge’s eastern pipeline reversal project, originally called “Trailblazer,” aroused widespread opposition from environmental groups in both the U.S. and Canada when it was initiated in 2008. It was officially abandoned in 2009, the company citing “a lack of commercial support.” However, Enbridge then broke Trailblazer into phases, and on July 27 of this year, the National Energy Board of Canada approved Enbridge’s Phase I application to reverse the flow of its Line 9 pipeline between Sarnia and Westover, Ontario, near Toronto. A separate application is being prepared for the Montréal-Portland phase. And on November 29, Enbridge filed for approval of the Westover-Montréal Phase II. Like the successful application for Phase I, Phase II will no doubt be approved under section 58 of the National Energy Board Act, which exempts the company from the more rigorous environmental and infrastructure standards for new pipelines.

The Line 9 Reversal Phase I hearings established the probable pattern for any subsequent consultations of affected communities on the other phases. As Dave Vasey reported in rabble.ca, September 11, “To date, First Nation communities have not been properly consulted and community meetings by Enbridge have not been held on reservations.

“Enbridge claims Line 9 has 'no significant impact to Aboriginal communities' in its internal assessment, though Line 9 [runs] literally across the street from Amjiwnaang First Nation and runs directly through the Haldimand Tract. Indeed, the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, Aamijiwnaang First Nation and Onieda Nation all submitted concerns to Enbridge and the National Energy Board (NEB) about the project.”

They were ignored by the Board. At a recent Toronto teach-in, First Nations leaders from these and other communities related their concerns about the devastation already suffered by their communities from existing refineries and pipelines. A video of their reports can be viewed here.

The NEB’s July 27 approval of the Phase I reversal came “almost two years to the date after the infamous Enbridge Kalamazoo spill of 20,000 barrels of tar sands dilbit [diluted bitumen] in Michigan,” Dave Vasey notes. “Forebodingly, Enbridge spilled 1000 barrels in Wisconsin the same day as Line 9’s approval. Between 1999 and 2010 Enbridge had 804 spills that dumped 161,000 barrels of oil onto lands and into water.”

Enbridge is not the only company threatening to pipe tar sands oil to Eastern Canada. Enbridge competitor TransCanada Pipeline, which built the existing base Keystone system that delivers Alberta oil to Illinois and Oklahoma, has announced that it is considering conversion of part of its cross-Canada natural gas mainline to carrying the dirty tar sands oil.

These projects give the green light to more and more tar sands expansion, and greater reliance on fossil fuel exploitation. Canada already ranks seventh in the world in oil production. The Harper government’s commitment to tar sands exploitation is notorious; it hopes production levels will double over the next decade. And it has been busy removing any potential obstacles to these plans. A key step was taken earlier this year with the adoption of Bill C-38, a massive budget implementation bill that included 150 pages of changes in environmental regulations, all designed to weaken environmental protections and limit public participation in environmental reviews.

None of the federal parties calls for phasing out tar sands operations. The Greens, with one MP, party leader Elizabeth May, have produced a useful “Comprehensive Guide to the Alberta Oil Sands,” but the party calls only for a moratorium on further expansion. The official opposition NDP has a similar position, on paper, but also calls for massive expansion in refining and petrochemical manufacturing in Canada. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair attracted much attention this year when he noted the effect of Canada’s energy exports in boosting the value of the Canadian dollar and undermining manufacturing exports (the so-called “Dutch disease”). But Mulcair has signed on to proposals for piping Alberta oil to eastern Canada; in a speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto in September, he said shipping western oil to eastern Canada is a “pro-business, common sense solution” that will create jobs and boost the country’s energy security. And he later told reporters he would not speak against tar sands expansion.

The Ontario Liberal government is onside as well. The province’s Finance minister, Dwight Duncan, told a Calgary business audience September 27 that his government unequivocally backed the oil sands industry. Not surprising, given the alliance of eastern finance with Alberta oil that has replaced the Montréal-Toronto axis with the Toronto-Calgary axis as the business backbone of the country.

In fact, shipping Alberta tar sands products to Eastern Canada is now being posed as a major “national unity” project. This was evident at the meeting of provincial and territorial first ministers in Halifax in late November. Quebec premier Pauline Marois (who had reversed her previous opposition to attending such meetings) met with Alberta premier Alison Redford and announced that her Parti Québécois government will establish a joint working group with the Alberta government to study the possible use of Quebec refineries receiving crude oil from the tar sands. This involves not just Alberta and Quebec alone, said Manitoba’s NDP premier Greg Selinger. “It’s part of a national strategy.”

Only a week earlier, the PQ government’s Environment minister, Daniel Breton, had publicly questioned the role of the federal NEB in authorizing the Enbridge pipeline reversal project: “What the Albertans want to do with their oil, bring it onto our territory without our consent... we’ll have to look at that.” Within days, the Montréal daily La Presse and the Quebec Liberal party opposition were attacking Breton, in unison, among other things for a series of alleged misdemeanours they had dug up from his past, such as a speeding offense, unpaid rents, cheating on unemployment insurance, etc. — some going back 25 years or more! Also riling his critics was a statement by Breton, just days after the September 4 election, praising “the political will of Russia and Venezuela in regard to the nationalization of key sectors of economic development.”

La Presse is owned by Groupe Gesca, a subsidiary of Power Corporation. The latter is also a major shareholder in the French oil company Total, which has invested billions of dollars in the Alberta tar sands. On November 29 — the same day Enbridge filed its Phase II application with the NEB — Breton was forced out of the Quebec cabinet. “Pure coincidence,” said an Enbridge spokesman.

Marois’ agreement with Redford has dismayed environmentalists who had been encouraged by her government’s earlier announcement of a moratorium on shale gas exploration in the St. Lawrence valley, and its decision to close Quebec’s sole nuclear power plant and end asbestos mining in the province. A typical statement was that of Marie-Claude Lemieux, Quebec director of the World Wildlife Fund: “In the absence of a pan-Canadian energy policy that would reduce our dependence on fossil energies, we ask the Quebec government to demonstrate extreme prudence in regard to pipeline projects on our territory. These projects will lock us even further into an economy based on petroleum, and run counter to Quebec’s greenhouse gas reduction objectives and the climate reality of our planet.”

A common demand is that the government implement a PQ election pledge to have Quebec’s environmental review agency, the BAPE,[1] conduct a full study of the province’s oil and gas industry. During his short mandate as environment minister, Daniel Breton had fired the top officials in the BAPE, known for their Liberal sympathies, and replaced them with more environment-friendly individuals. (In fact, the media campaign against Breton began when he visited the BAPE offices and warned them he would be keeping a close watch on their proceedings.[2])

Despite its initial shale gas decision, the PQ government has since reaffirmed the party’s support for hydrocarbon exploration and development in Quebec. It is currently involved in tripartite negotiations with Ottawa and Newfoundland seeking jurisdiction over drilling rights in the extensive Gulf of St. Lawrence hydrocarbon deposits. It has left the door open to continued shale gas exploration on Anticosti Island and in the Gaspé Peninsula.

In fact, some former leaders of the PQ have a very cosy relationship with Big Oil. Former Premier Lucien Bouchard is the chief lobbyist for the shale gas interests in Quebec. André Boisclair, former Quebec environment minister and PQ leader from 2005 to 2007, is a strategic consultant with clients that include Calgary natural gas producer Questerre Energy. He has just been appointed the Quebec government’s delegate-general in New York City.

It is not hard to explain Marois’ interest in obtaining crude oil from Western Canada. At present, Montréal has only one functioning oil refinery. Two years ago Shell stopped refining crude petroleum at its east-end refinery, which is now being dismantled. Five hundred workers lost their jobs, and Montréal lost $3 million in property tax revenues. The remaining refinery is owned by Suncor, a Calgary-based company that bought Petro-Canada in 2009 for $17 billion. Both Shell and Suncor have complained loudly that Eastern dependence on relatively expensive foreign oil does not produce sufficient profits.

On December 3, Suncor announced plans to spend $55 million to “prepare the Montréal refinery to receive Western crude.” Local politicians greeted the announcement, as did the union representing Suncor’s organized workers, a local of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP). The CEP also represents many workers in the Alberta tar sands. As I have reported earlier, the CEP advocates a Canadian nationalist strategy of fighting to keep oil industry jobs in Canada and promoting “Canadian energy security.” It calls for increasing bitumen upgrading and refining capacity in Canada. All of which is consistent with support of the Enbridge project, notwithstanding the union’s professed concern with “environmental sustainability.”

December 8, 2012

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[1] Bureau d’audiences publiques en environnement (BAPE).

[2] The BAPE is not a quasi-judicial tribunal with decision-making powers. It is purely investigative and consultative, and simply advises the minister.

Campaign launched for a radical vision of Scottish independence

I am indebted to Links, international journal of socialist renewal, for drawing attention to this important Radical Independence Conference which met in Glasgow on November 24. Below are two reports on the conference and the text of a Declaration for radical independence issued at the conference, all reproduced by Links. I have added a contribution by Benoit Renaud of Québec solidaire’s co-ordinating committee, who was scheduled to speak at the Glasgow conference.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Scotland: Radical Independence Conference unites left

November 25, 2012 -- Counterfire -- More than 800 delegates gathered in central Glasgow, Scotland on November 24 to attend the Radical Independence Conference and launched a campaign for a radical vision of Scottish independence. Speakers from a broad range of campaigns and struggles provided strategies for winning voters to independence whilet calling for a progressive social, economic and environmental transformation of the country in the interests of ordinary people.

A rejection of neoliberalism in a post-independence Scotland was a recurring theme throughout the event, which skilfully mixed packed rallies with wide-ranging breakaway workshops on topics such as “women and independence”, “wealth of the commons: a Green economy for a progressive Scotland” and “organising the 99%”.

A mass movement

In the opening plenary Peter McColl, rector of Edinburgh University, called for a mass movement against neoliberalism, saying that independence was part of a better future for Scotland. Trade union activist Cat Boyd told how she became radicalised by taking part in the anti-war movement which exposed “the true nature” of the “war obsessed machine” that is the British state.

In a tacit recognition of the significance of conference, in what was by all accounts the biggest leftwing political meeting in the country in recent years, Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond welcomed the campaign in a radio statement.

“We welcome voices to the left of the SNP’s social democratic position speaking up in favour of independence”, he told Northsound radio. The “radical indy” campaign has a strong anti-Trident [nuclear submarine] and anti-NATO focus while also rejecting the monarchy and neoliberal economics. Nonetheless Salmond’s statement was welcomed by the conference which aims to build a united independence movement without losing sight of the wider social and political issues affecting the Scottish people.

Ethical foreign policy

The ethical foreign policy workshop had a strong focus on the campaign against trident and the recent attack on Gaza. Speakers from campaigns including Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War and the Faslane Peace Camp opened the session in which a wide range of approaches and attitudes towards key issues and strategy became apparent. There was a strong sense that different left organisations and non-aligned activists were making initial steps towards coordinated action for perhaps the first time. The workshop called for a national demonstration against Trident in the spring, a call which was met with passionate applause in the closing plenary.

In the afternoon an international rally saw a diverse range of speakers share their experiences of building a variety of movements, from the Quebec and Catalonia independence struggles to the fight against the devastating austerity measures besetting Greece and southern Europe.

Leading French Front De Gauche activist Danielle Obono said “from Greece to Palestine, it is very important that internationalism is stronger than ever”. SYRIZA member Stelios Pappas told the conference that Greek activists were building a coalition that would change Greece and transform Europe. It was clear from the diverse discussions during the day that Scottish independence could be a springboard for a more radical future for the country.

Delegates took to Twitter to praise the conference: @martinDiPaola tweeted, “goosebumps when Stelios Pappas raised a clenched fist and so many responded”. “Lots of shades of red and green with plenty of fiery rhetoric”, commented @PeterKGeohegan. “Enjoyed speaking at #ric2012 today, and was inspired by passion, vision and commitment of attendees”, said @JeanUrquhartMSP.

Independence through unity

The Radical Independence Campaign can provide a much needed forum in which unity can be forged as the left takes it’s arguments for another kind of Scotland out into the streets, workplaces and communities.

Much like the wider movements against austerity and war, broad, organised and politically focused campaigning will be essential if a progressive vision of independence is to capture the hearts and minds if those far beyond the ranks of the left. The RIC conference was a major first step towards that goal.

For a full list of the declarations made by the conference and for videos of speeches, visit the Radical Independence Campaign website.

Colin Fox: Radical independence -- an idea whose time has come

By Colin Fox, Scottish Socialist Party spokesperson

November 25, 2012 -- I was looking forward to the Radical Independence Campaign conference in Glasgow yesterday and I was not disappointed. Conference organisers billed the event as “a one day conference to discuss Independence and the way forward for Scotland” and they are to be congratulated on presenting a stimulating event, in comfortable surroundings with modern facilities, conducive to thinking, discussing and learning from others. Moreover with delegate passes priced at just £4 [unwaged] they also succeeded in keeping the event within everyone’s reach.

Inevitably with several important and attractive sessions and 800 people attending throughout the course of the day the conference was tightly timetabled and often too unwieldy to decide very much, some “workshops” had 300 people in them. But rightly the event’s emphasis was on beginning the process of deliberation over the many important issues in front of the entire Independence movement in Scotland.

The thing that struck me most was that, just as the independence movement which covers a multitude of philosophies, we too had a wide range with socialists, greens, trades unionists, social democrats, nationalists, internationalists, feminists and single-issue campaigners all content to describe themselves as “radicals”. Equally we learned to accept, as more than one person said in the 10 workshops, there are presumably radicals who support the union [between Scotland and England] out there too! The word “radical’”in itself means almost nothing if we are honest, it’s like the phrase “the people”.

Nonetheless the 800 people who gathered yesterday will have been greatly encouraged by what we have in common, and no one put this better than my Yes Scotland coalition advisory board colleague Patrick Harvie, who said that “people who like the status quo will vote no, what we need to win a majority for Independence is a transformational agenda with more democracy, more redistribution of wealth, more public ownership and more co-operation”. And this unanimity was echoed in the packed workshops. I attended one on the case for a Scottish republic. Here each of the arguments for monarchy were abjectly dismantled and ridiculed. Conference accepted there was nothing democratic, progressive or modern about the principle of a hereditary head of state. And while we were all able to agree that republics are not, in and of themselves radical, there can be no doubt that achieving a modern democratic republic for Scotland would be both a huge blow for the British ruling class and a seismic advance for democracy.

I was able to mention how the burgeoning Yes Scotland movement has advanced in recent weeks during the session on strategies for independence. I tried to infuse it with the sense that we are part of a powerful mass movement which compares with the anti-poll tax campaign of 25 years ago. And there was a widespread acceptance that the place for the Radical Independence Campaign is inside the Yes Scotland coalition helping to ensure our transformational agenda has maximum impact and influence. This is certainly the role myself, Patrick Harvie, Pat Kane, Elaine C Smith and others advance on its advisory board. Clearly the addition of thousands of others would be pivotal in shaping the future strategies of the Independence coalition.

In drawing the day-long conference to a close, Robin McAlpine of the Jimmy Reid Foundation stressed how powerful and persuasive ideas themselves are in the world today saying, “We [the RIC] are above all an idea and we need to turn that into a story the Scottish people can understand and support.”

How true. For here were echoes of Karl Marx’s wise words. “Philosophers”, he reminded us 150 years ago, “have merely interpreted the world, the point however is to change it”. For me the most refreshing aspect of yesterday’s conference was that these powerful and persuasive ideas, so powerful and challenging, now have greater semblance to gain traction among the Scottish people in 2014.

Declaration for radical independence

November 26, 2012 -- The following text was drafted by Robin McAlpine and was read out at the Radical Independence Conference 2012 by Pat Kane.

We call for independence for the Scottish people.

No responsibility more defines a generation than its responsibility to leave a legacy of hope and possibility. Our generation has a historical opportunity to leave such a legacy. It is for us to choose not a government but a future.

We are offered two. One warns us not to risk the attempt to be a better society, one asks us to hope we can be.

Britain is the fourth most unequal country in the developed world. It has become two nations, one for the rich and one for the rest. The campaign against independence does not invite us into its Britain of wealth and privilege. It expects us to endure our Britain of austerity and exploitation.

They want us to vote No to independence because they want us to vote Yes to inequality, Yes to poverty, Yes to corporate greed. They want us to know our place, not to get ideas above our station. They do not even offer to try to be better.

They are satisfied with this Divided Kingdom. We are not. They believe their first duty is to protect wealth. We disagree. A country that believes there are things more important than the fate of its people has failed.

We believe the success of a country comes from the hard work and commitment of all. We believe that a good country is one in which all share fairly the success of good times and all share fairly the burdens of bad times. We believe that the people who run a country should reflect and represent the people of that country. We believe Scotland belongs to us all and that neither this land nor its people should be exploited only for the profit of a few.

This is what the people of Scotland believe too. At election after election Scots have used the ballot box as a loudhailer to ask for a better country. But at every turn the path from here to that better country has been blocked by the alliance of wealthy people who run Britain for their own benefit. The more Scots have voted for justice the less just Britain has become. Instead we have corrupt wars, a corrupt media, corrupt bankers, corrupt corporations, corrupt politicians.

But a path to a better Scotland is open once more, one that does not require us to ask the permission of those who do not want us to reach our destination. In an independent Scotland the only thing holding us back will be ourselves.

This is not a campaign for independence but a campaign for a better Scotland which we believe can only begin with independence. We are tired of complaining about Britain. It is time to talk about what Scotland can be.

Scotland can be a participative democracy. Where no-one’s view is worth more because they have money. Where financial interests don’t drown out the voices of the people. Where decision-making belongs to the many and not just an elite. Where communities are not told what they will be given but decide what they need. Where our institutions are reformed to include the people in their governance. Where the media is balanced, education creates active citizens and information is free to all.

Scotland can be a society of equality. Where poverty is not accepted. Where pay gaps are small and poverty wages are ended. Where tax redistributes wealth. Where no human attribute is a justification for discrimination and prejudice. Where human rights are universal.

Scotland can be a just economy. Where profit never justifies damaging people and the environment. Where essential industries are owned by all and not exploited by the few. Where workers have the right to fair treatment and to defend themselves. Where industrial democracy makes better businesses. Where investment is for development, not for speculation.

Scotland can be a great welfare state. Where the social contract is not between the state and the people but between the people themselves. Where from cradle to grave society cares for all regardless. Where delivering more and better social services is the national priority, not austerity. Where the government of the people is never used to create private wealth.

Scotland can be a good neighbour. Where we seek to work with nations around the world to resolve global inequality, climate change and conflict. Where we never join international alliances for exploitation and war. Where we work to reform and democratise multinational institutions. Where we see our deeds, our national culture and our values as a message of hope.

Scotland can be a moral nation. Where mutuality, cooperation and fellowship define our relationships. Where we are good stewards of our country and hand it on to the next generation in a better state than we inherit it. Where our values are not dominated by greed, selfishness and disregard for others but by patience, generosity, creativity, peacefulness and a determination to be better.

This is a Scotland which British politics has robbed from the Scottish people. We want it back.

Our future is unknown. Good. Only in uncertainty can hope and possibility prosper. We choose the chance to fight for a better Scotland; we reject the offer to endure more of the same indefinitely.

We are socialists, feminists, trade unionists, greens. We are from the peace movement, from anti-poverty campaigns, from anti-racists groups. We are community activists, civil liberty campaigners, the equalities movement and more.

[We are also creatives, artists, entrepreneurs and innovators who put our enterprise at the service of society, and use markets, audiences and our skills pragmatically to that end! - PK]

We are the Radical Independence Campaign, the start of a movement to win back Scotland for its people, to offer them the country they deserve.

A previous generation, in 1979, had a chance to offer a legacy of hope and possibility to the next generation. They failed, Thatcher took power, Scotland suffered.

We cannot afford to fail this time. Scotland cannot afford us to fail.

It is time for our generation to reject fear and choose hope. Our hope begins with independence. For the sake of the Scottish people.

The Left and the fight for Independence: the case of Québec

Published October 8, 2012

by Benoit Renaud, member of Québec solidaire‘s co-ordinating committee.

The people of Québec, the only Canadian province where the majority of the population has French as their first language, have been struggling for decades with the issue of whether they want to remain a part of Canada or become an independent country. Two referendums were held on that issue in 1980 and 1995. In the first one, the “yes” vote to sovereignty was at 40%, in the second, it went up to 49.5%. Both these referendums were initiated by provincial governments of the Parti Québécois (a close equivalent to the SNP).

Since 1995, the PQ has been struggling with what to do next on independence, some arguing for a third referendum, others against. While in government (until 2003), it alienated many people in the social movements and part of its own base with neo-liberal policies, including support for free trade deals and attacks on health and education. This has led to a convergence of forces on its left and the founding of Québec solidaire, a party uniting the left and also supporting independence.

On September 4, the Québec provincial election brought back to power the Parti Québécois. But this was a very narrow victory, with only 54 out of 125 seats going to the PQ, and 50 to the Liberal party (PLQ), which was in government for the preceding 9 years and is dedicated to Canadian unity. The remaining seats went to The Coalition for Québec’s future (CAQ, 19 seats), a fiscally conservative party led by a former PQ cabinet minister, which calls itself nationalist while rejecting independence; and Québec solidaire (2 seats and 6% of the popular vote).

This election was called after six months of an unprecedented student strike against a planned tuition increase of 75%, which sparked a much broader social mobilisation on social justice, environmental and democratic issues. With 200,000 students on strike for several weeks and daily actions of various types and sizes – several of them leading to confrontations with the police – this movement had its highlights in a series of mass demonstrations counting in the hundreds of thousands in downtown Montréal, on the 22nd of each month starting in March. Some people have referred to that movement as the Maple Spring (a pun in French on the Arab Spring, “érable” rhyming with “arabe”).

It can be argued that this student strike not only was victorious, but that it effectively brought down the government. On the first day of the campaign, each party put forward their positions in relation to the student movement. And on its first day in power, the new government cancelled the planned tuition increase as well as the repressive law that was passed in May with the goal of ending the strike, unsuccessfully.

During the election campaign, the national question was also a significant factor, but in a strangely negative way. The Liberals and CAQ were constantly attacking the PQ for considering the possibility of a third referendum on sovereignty. But the fact is that current PQ leader Pauline Marois founded her leadership on the rejection of any firm commitment to hold such a referendum. Her party had suffered its worse electoral setback in 2007, coming in third place, after including the promise of a referendum in its platform. Even many supporters of independence didn’t vote for them because they didn’t believe they could win a third referendum after having lost the first two, with the same leadership and the same strategy.

In fact, a new party formed out of a split from the PQ just a year before the election. Option nationale (ON) is dedicated to achieving independence by all means, including creating facts out of an election victory (which, as we have just seen, can be achieved with only 32% popular support), before holding a referendum. This comes from the idea that the federal government stole the 1995 referendum by not respecting the rules. That party got 1.9% of the vote and came close to electing its leader, Jean-Martin Aussant, who was a rising star of the PQ caucus before his resignation in May 2011.

This never ending debate, both within the nationalist movement and in the broader political scene over referendums, their merits and how and when one could be won by pro-independence forces, is symptomatic of a general acceptance of top down politics as practiced in the province since the first Parliament was elected, back in 1792, on the British model. In short, what new Prime Minister Pauline Marois was asking the electorate, was to trust her with all the decisions: when a referendum should take place, what the question should be, how the transition to a new political status for Québec would be managed, etc.

For Québec solidaire, independence is not only a means of preserving the culture of the French speaking majority and righting the wrongs of history, it is also a path to achieving social, environmental and democratic goals. Our party’s starting point is not nationalism but principles associated with the Left, like feminism, labour rights, anti-racism, international solidarity, etc. We have reached a broad consensus in favour of independence in part because fighting against national oppression is one of those progressive principles, and the Canadian state has proven many times that it is not willing to fully recognise Québec as a nation. But also, we see the struggle for independence as a way to bring people together, through the democratic process of a constituent assembly, and decide collectively what kind of society we want. In short, we want to give its full meaning to the idea of self-determination. Our view of the national struggle is from the bottom up.

Also, our party and its relative successes – considering it is the only such creature in North America – was made possible because it came from a series of mass struggles from below against neo-liberal and imperialist attacks. From the March of Women of 1995 and 2000 to the student strikes of 1996 and 2005, including a mobilisation of 100,000 in Québec city in April 2001 against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and an almost unanimous rejection of the Iraq war, Québec has been at the centre of the fight back against corporate power and for a better world.

The very close results of this election, with the formation of a minority PQ government, mean that there is likely to be another battle for votes very soon. Also, the new government, after signalling left in the lead up to the election and implementing some of their more progressive commitments early on, will be inexorably pushed to the right by the corporate lobbies, the parliamentary majority of the other two centre-right parties and their own belief in neo-liberal principles. Inevitably, other struggles from below will be needed in the near future. Our hope is that out of all that turmoil, our vision of Québec’s place in the world as an independent country showing that a more just and green society in the heart of North America is possible, will become more and more relevant and eventually rally the support of a majority.

Québec solidaire are supporting the Radical Independence Conference.

Quebec student leader convicted in outrageous political trial

Quebec student leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was convicted November 1 of contempt of court for publicly criticizing a court injunction issued during last spring’s student strike. The injunction ordered the strikers to allow dissident students who opposed the strike to attend classes.

Nadeau-Dubois will be sentenced on November 9. He faces a fine of up to $50,000 and possible imprisonment for up to a year. This is the first time in the history of the Quebec student movement that a leader has been convicted of contempt of court. In a highly politicized judgment, the court declared that in criticizing the injunction and defending the democratic decision to strike made by the students in mass assemblies he had advocated “anarchy,” encouraged “civil disobedience,” and his comments could be used to pave the way to “tyranny.”

Nadeau-Dubois has announced that he will appeal the conviction, and called on supporters to donate funds to aid his defense. A web site, www.appelatous.org, has been established to publicize statements of support and collect contributions. And some solidarity demonstrations have already been held both in Quebec and elsewhere (including a small protest in Toronto on November 3).

The original injunction was issued in May to a student at Laval University who disagreed with the decision taken by the members of his student association, an affiliate of the Coalition large de l’Association de solidarité syndicale des étudiants (CLASSE), to join the massive strike against the Liberal government’s tuition fee increase.

At its peak the four-month strike saw about 300,000 students shut down classes; some of the demonstrations mobilized close to a quarter million students. Although the immediate goal of the students was to block the fee increase, the CLASSE advanced the demand for free university tuition, an initial objective of Quebec’s extensive reform of public education in the 1960s, and campaigned against other government budget measures such as a new tax on health care around an explicitly anticapitalist perspective.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was a co-spokesperson for the CLASSE, which grew to more than 100,000 members during the strike. Also participating in the strike were the official student federations representing CEGEP (college) and university students, the FECQ and FEUQ.[1] All three groups are recognized under Quebec law as the exclusive representatives of the students in their respective universities or colleges.[2] All regard the right to strike — to shut down classes, enforced by mass picketing and other action — as an important weapon in their arsenal of tactics. Since the late 1960s, the Quebec students have staged seven general strikes with varying degrees of success.

The injunction in question was one of many issued by the courts in early May in an attempt to break the student strike. Many were initiated by students associated with the young Liberals, the youth affiliate of the then government party led by Premier Jean Charest. The courts were only too happy to oblige; the chief justice of the Superior Court, François Rolland, himself issued seven such injunctions, all identically worded, between May 3 and May 12.[3]

The injunction rulings all had in common a refusal to accept that the mass action by the students was a strike. Instead they called it a “boycott,” and thus not subject to the rules governing legal strikes or Quebec’s anti-scab legislation. In the case of the injunction that was at issue in Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois’ contempt prosecution, issued May 3, the judge stated flatly that the students had no real right to strike under Quebec legislation.

The premise behind these injunctions, stated or unstated, was that the students had no genuine collective interests worthy of being enforced by common strike action; they were individual consumers of a college or university education, with no right to restrict access to that “commodity” by other consumers. Neoliberal reasoning of the first order.

The student associations argued in return that injunctions restricting or prohibiting their picket lines were an infringement of their right to free expression of belief, and that their legally recognized right to represent the students could only be effective if they had the right to enforce the majority decisions taken democratically in mass assemblies of the students they represented.

In the result, the injunctions failed to break the strike, the students simply ignoring or defying them, often in the face of brutal police repression. The Charest government then enacted Bill 78 (later named Law 12), which (among other things) shut down the campuses until August and threatened severe fines and loss of legal representation rights to student associations that violated its provisions.[4]

In a television broadcast May 13, an RDI journalist interviewed FECQ president Léo Bureau-Blouin and CLASSE spokesman Nadeau-Dubois concerning the injunctions. Bureau-Blouin stated that his federation was urging students to comply with them as “precise orders of the Court….” Bureau-Blouin, a successful candidate in the September 4 Quebec elections, now sits on the Parti Québécois government benches.

Gabriel Nadeau-Blouin, for his part, stated:

[Translation]

What is clear is that those decisions, those attempts to force the return to class, never function because the students, who have been striking for 13 weeks, are in mutual solidarity, and generally respecting the democratic will that was expressed through the strike vote and I think it is completely legitimate for the students to take the steps to enforce the democratic choice that was made to go on strike. It is of course regrettable that there is indeed a minority of students who are using the courts to by-pass the collective decision that was taken. But we think it is completely legitimate that people take the necessary steps to enforce the strike vote, and if that means picket lines, we think it is a completely legitimate means of doing so.

That is the statement for which he has now been convicted of contempt of court.

A striking feature (if I may use that adjective!) of the 20-page judgment by Superior Court justice Denis Jacques is its highly charged political language. The allegation against Nadeau-Dubois is essentially that his statement to RDI was likely “to impair the authority or dignity of the court,” to cite the language of Article 50 of the Quebec Code of Civil Procedure, one of the two contempt provisions at issue. But the judge goes even further. Whether or not Nadeau-Dubois was specifically attacking the injunction in question (the judge decided he was), the student leader, in his criticism of injunctions and defense of the students’ democratic strike vote, was held to be impugning the “rule of law” and promoting “chaos.”

“Defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny,” said the judge, quoting President John F. Kennedy, a quotation he found in what was the major legal precedent for his judgment: the court decision convicting the leaders of Quebec’s three trade-union centrals of contempt of court in 1972, when they refused to order the striking members of their common front of public sector unions to obey injunctions ordering them back to work.[5]

Adopting a similar tone, the judge found Nadeau-Dubois guilty of urging non-compliance with court orders. Was he defending democracy? No, “instead he advocated anarchy and encouraged civil disobedience.”

The shock of the contempt conviction provoked an immediate wave of protest, especially in the social networks. Many comments focused on the political nature of the court’s decision. Some cited a 2005 La Presse article showing the judge’s connections with the Liberal party.

One of the first and strongest statements of support was by Québec solidaire MNA Amir Khadir on behalf of his party. “This court decision is an insult to all the youth who mobilized last spring in a massively peaceful way,” he declared in a written statement. “Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was the embodiment of that youth and is now punished for having put himself in the service of a cause. They have tried him politically.”

Khadir noted that Charest’s Bill 78 had specifically singled out Nadeau-Dubois: it invalidated all the injunctions issued in connection with the student strike, but made one exception — for the sole prosecution for contempt of court that had resulted, the one aimed at Nadeau-Dubois. And Khadir recalled that at the time he had publicly adopted as his own Nadeau-Dubois’s entire statement that was the subject of the prosecution.

Khadir contrasted the rough “justice” meted out so precipitously to the student leader with the lax approach taken by the authorities toward the widespread corruption in Quebec politics now being revealed in the hearings of the Charbonneau Commission. “While for years they let things ride with the bribers and their accomplices in the engineering firms, law firms, municipalities and the National Assembly, the trial of a student spokesperson who dared to stand up to a government worn through with scandals is already ended.” It was a case of “two weights, two measures.”

Québec solidaire, said Khadir, remained in solidarity with Nadeau-Dubois and the CLASSE. And he urged the student associations and others to demonstrate their support.

Unfortunately, the FEUQ and FECQ have so far made no statement on the Nadeau-Dubois conviction. Their silence underscores the divisions that have reappeared within the student movement. In contrast, the ASSÉ declared its “unfailing support” for the student leader. “The words that earned Mr. Nadeau-Dubois his conviction,” said spokesman Jérémie Bédard-Wien, “are the refrain of the entire student movement. History will prove him right.”

And several teachers’ unions have already signified their support of Nadeau-Dubois and declared their intention to contribute to his appeal.

---

[1] Respectively, the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec and Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec.

[2] An Act respecting the accreditation and financing of students' associations, R.S.Q. c. A-3.01.

[3] Jean-François Morasse v. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, Quebec Superior Court, File No. 200-17-016412-124 (November 1, 2012), para. 23n.

[4] The new PQ government has declared its intention to repeal these provisions.

[5] In that case, the union leaders were sentenced to a year in jail. But that in turn provoked a massive province-wide spontaneous general strike involving up to 300,000 people that included occupations of factories and radio stations, blockading of bridges and airports, and worker takeovers of some industrial towns. So great was the pressure on the Liberal government of the day that it had to ask the imprisoned union leaders (Marcel Pepin, Louis Laberge and Yvon Charbonneau) to appeal their contempt convictions so as to make it possible for the government to release them from prison and continue bargaining. The common front then went on to win some key demands, including a $100 minimum wage for the lowest paid workers, mainly women.

‘The struggle is class . . . against class’

- Ceci n’est pas La matraque des profs contre la hausse

‘Strike or no strike, the struggle continues’

 

Introduction

The following is my translation of a feature article in the Autumn 2012 issue of a 16-page tabloid produced by Profs contre la hausse (Profs against the fee hike), the group of university and college professors that helped to mobilize support for the striking students in Quebec’s “printemps érable,” or maple spring. The newpaper bears the evocative masthead “Ceci n’est pas La Matraque des profs contre la hausse,” the matraque, or police truncheon, referring of course to the brutal repression of student demonstrators by the cops.

During the strike this spring, a statement (“We are all students”) issued by Profs contre la hausse was signed by more than 2,000 professors.[1] The current issue of the profs’ newspaper, which is subtitled “The spring continues,” states on its front page: “We present this newspaper to the students, who, through their unprecedented mobilization, were able to revitalize the Quebec political landscape. Their powerful speeches and their creative opposition to the bards of austerity and the ‘fair share’ inspire us in our own practices of political freedom.”

– Richard Fidler

* * *

The political economy behind this year’s student struggle and the increase in Quebec tuition fees

by Eric Pineault, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)

The spring student strike is quite probably the inaugural act of a new period of social conflict in Quebec, analogous to the struggles that are traversing the other societies beset by the similar exhaustion of a neoliberal political economy. After three decades of relative “civil peace” (1982 to 2012) and neoliberal bracketing of conflicts, Quebec could be entering an era of political and cultural awakening in which it is once again possible to hope for a fundamental transformation of economic and social relations. Such changes do not occur without arousing strong resistance, and the social offensives needed to drive them forward must be equally combative.

It was precisely based on such analyses that the ASSÉ, then the CLASSE,[2] prepared the big strike of 2012. It was necessary, from the outset, to link the fight against the increase to a more comprehensive challenge to the neoliberal state model, in particular the so-called “cultural revolution” of fee-based public services, a regressive tax system and privatization of the common heritage of the Québécois and aboriginal peoples. So for the CLASSE, at least, it was not simply a fight against the fee hike — which, to be sure, would have soon unraveled in a negotiated increase. Rather, it was a social struggle for free education and for a decommodification of the university system.

The so-called “radicalism” of the CLASSE is derived, as the expression suggests, from the fact that the analysis framing its strike action went to the root of the problem and grasped it in its totality: the fee increase and the commodity and corporate drift of the university system are products of a neoliberal political economy that is imposed on all aspects of Quebec society. This political economy is not an invention of Jean Charest’s Liberals; they systematized and adapted a more general model applied pretty well everywhere in North America, some key aspects having been installed by the PQ in the socio-economic summits following the 1995 referendum.

The former Conservative turned nationalist Lucien Bouchard passed the torch of austerity and competitive deregulation to the former Conservative turned Liberal Jean Charest who, at first, simply developed in complete coherence what was already implicit in Bouchard’s zero-deficit policy, then accelerated and generalized the establishment of the neoliberal model in Quebec. These developments followed a long period, between 1982 and 1995, of exhaustion of the social model established in the traces of the Quiet Revolution. The Quebec model of neoliberalism was also prepared through the construction at the federal level of its neoliberal macro-economic framework: free-trade agreement, conversion of unemployment insurance into “employment insurance,” a disinflationary monetary policy, financial deregulation, lower taxes and the fight against the deficit they provoked.

It can be said that the crisis of 2008 marked the end of this ascendancy of neoliberalism, both here and elsewhere in North America and Europe, for it was the crisis of the economic model it had spawned. Since then we have been caught in a trap that combines economic stagnation with austerity. There is nothing in the policies responding to this crisis that eases this tendency to stagnation. The elite has apparently turned its back on the growth on which, in theory, the viability of advanced capitalism rests.

Such is the political economy context of the coming social conflicts in Quebec: an anaemic economy, most incomes stagnating, and a state caught in the vice-like grip of an austerity that generates further stagnation, with greater austerity in response. This context is not peculiar to Quebec; the essential sources of this stagnation trap lie elsewhere, in the United States and Europe, and by opening up our economy we have made ourselves dependent on economic cycles over which we have no influence. The Plan Nord can only accentuate this dependency. In this context, what are the possible sequels to the social movement of the spring of 2012?

One way of thinking about the last three decades of neoliberal hegemony is to see them as thirty years of a one-sided “class struggle,” and one way of making sense of what began in the spring of 2012 is to understand it as the end of this one-sidedness. The class struggle is now working both ways. How can we understand neoliberalism as a one-sided class struggle? To understand that, a small detour through history is necessary. For the greater part of the 20^th century, the political economy regime was characterized by a certain compromise between capital and labour, between big corporations and employees. The profits of the first rested on the consumption of the second, and firms were constrained to share their productivity gains with the workers so that the latter could (over)consume massively what was (over)produced massively. That was the major lesson learned during the crisis of the 1930s, a crisis of overproduction, underconsumption and under-investment.

From 1939 to 1980 in North America and Western Europe, real wages of the majority progressed from year to year, while everywhere the share of the wealth going to the most well-off (the highest 1% of incomes) decreased year by year, from the ceiling of 1930 to the floor of 1980. It was not through kindness or necessarily by far-sightedness that the capitalists were led to share the proceeds of economic growth. On the contrary, it was essentially thanks to the strength of the trade-union movement, the pressure exerted on the state by a mobilized citizenry, the presence in the political arena of left-wing parties, and the counter-model constituted by the so-called “communist” countries that the welfare state, and a form of partially socialized capitalism, developed.

Quebec’s Quiet Revolution arrived toward the end of this period, and constituted for us a sort of catching-up with an historical trajectory that was much longer elsewhere. Within a few years, Quebec acquired a modern social state and a progressive labour law; nationalized some major sectors of its economy; created the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement, the public university and college networks, and the health care system; made working conditions in the public sector a lever for raising conditions in the private sector; and, finally, equipped itself with the tools to develop its natural resources under its own control. Added to all this, a progressive tax system that took more from the well-off than from the majority, and that tapped into profits almost as much as wages, gradually but ineluctably reduced the power of the business elites and big corporations in the society and the economy.

Neoliberal policies are a struggle by the elites to reconquer the economic and political power they lost to the workers, whom they have managed to fragment into a multiplicity of groups, each forced onto the defensive, each attempting to preserve some acquisition that guarantees its dignity. The great secret of neoliberalism is that what we understand as the dismantling of some part of the social state, the privatization of some public service, the imposition of market competition in some sector, the deregulation of this or that is in fact a vast transfer of resources, wealth and power from “the commons” to the hands of the elite and their big corporations. That has been the true nature of the one-sided class warfare waged by the elite against society, for some thirty years.

That warfare could continue uninterrupted for as long as it held the promise that this was the only way to guarantee economic growth that would eventually allow the workers to increase their living standards. After the crisis of 2008, belief in the need for austerity helped to extend this context of one-sided struggle. But with the spring of 2012, the veil was lifted and the elite appeared for what it is: a class of “appropriators” who live and enrich themselves by transforming our collective heritage into their individual wealth and into assets for the big corporations. The future of the universities did not escape this logic, and the fee increase was an essential tool in this strategy of incorporation of the university. By challenging the increase in the name of free tuition, the movement altered the context. The struggle is now being waged by both sides. It is possible to think of a post-neoliberalism, and to go about constructing it. Over and beyond the electoral pause, a new era of change and social debate is opening before us.

---

[1] For an English translation, see “Massive demonstrations support Quebec students striking against fee hikes”; the statement is appended to the article.

[2] Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante – Association for student union solidarity (ASSÉ); Coalition large de l’ASSÉ – Broad coalition of the ASSÉ (CLASSE).

Quebec nationalist leader critiques PQ’s anti-immigrant ‘charter of exclusion’

Introduction

As I mentioned in my report on the Quebec election, among the issues championed by the Parti québécois was that of strengthening Quebecois identity, focused around the PQ demand for a charte de laïcité or Charter of Secularism that would effectively exclude women wearing the Muslim hijab or scarf from employment in government or public services. PQ leader Pauline Marois drove the point home by parachuting a notorious Islamophobe as the party’s candidate in the riding of Trois-Rivières. Djemila Benhabib was defeated, but not before this provocative action had been widely publicized.

Now a powerful voice has been raised within Quebec nationalist ranks in protest against the PQ position. In a major op-ed article in the September 22 issue of the Montréal daily Le Devoir, Jean Dorion explained why the PQ’s position on “secularism” had convinced him not to support the party in this election. Dorion is a former MP of the Bloc québécois, a former official in PQ governments and former president of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montréal. The SSJB is an historic Quebec institution, founded by leaders of the Patriote movement in the years leading up to the 1837 revolt against British colonialism and today is a leading secular voice in the broader nationalist and sovereigntist movement.

It is to be hoped that Dorion’s statement, which I have translated below, will open up a much-needed debate within sovereigntist ranks on such issues as what is meant by secularism, the difference between state neutrality toward religion and freedom of religious belief, and the related questions of the role of immigration and the challenge of finding ways to welcome and integrate oppressed and visible minorities within Quebec society.

There is much confusion on these questions, and it extends through much of the left as well. An example is the record of the left party, Québec solidaire. At its November 2009 program convention, QS adopted what it termed a “model of secularism” that, among other things, defended the right of “state agents” (i.e. employees and officials) to wear insignia of their religious beliefs, if any — a position that would oppose the PQ’s proposed charter with its imposed dress codes. (For a full report, see “Quebec left debates strategy for independence.”)

In a follow-up article in Le Devoir, published January 18, 2010, QS co-leaders Françoise David and Amir Khadir defined the party’s position on the wearing of “ostentatious” signs of personal religious belief as “neither obligation nor prohibition”: that is, no one should be required to wear such signs nor should they be prohibited from doing so if they so wished. The article strongly defended individual freedom of conscience and the need to protect it from state intrusion.

However, since then QS leaders have backtracked somewhat on the party’s adopted positions. Early this year Khadir and David gave 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, even though it could hardly be termed a “weapon” as alleged.

Although the PQ campaigned prominently around narrow exclusionary identity issues, the QS platform in this election did not address them. It did not reiterate the party’s formal position in support of freedom of religious belief, although it did advocate affirmative action to promote the employment of immigrant women and visible and ethnic minorities in the public service.

Here, then, is Jean’s Dorion’s explanation of why he chose not to vote for the PQ and to vote instead for another party in this election.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Charter of secularism – When a separatist separates

The polls announced a PQ government and we have one. At least, my electoral turn-about cannot be treated as opportunistic; for the first time since the PQ existed, I did not vote for this party.

I was torn by this break. It will lose me some friends, disappoint some sincere militants, be misinterpreted. I did not reveal it prior to the election; it would have been seen as treachery instead of an opportunity for reflection. No, I am not the Guy Bertrand[1] of modern times. And I refuse in advance any invitation to come and relax at Sagard.[2] But a time comes when a decision must be taken.

I simply cannot come to the defense of the PQ’s Charte de la laïcité, a bogus project that if pursued will divide a society that is already too divided. It will make the independence of Quebec even more difficult by alienating us from liberal public opinion in the rest of the continent, the only sectors otherwise likely to respect our choice. And it will devastate for a long time our relationship with the greatest Francophone immigration Quebec has ever experienced — a milieu, even yesterday, relatively open to our aspirations. The PQ had four Muslim candidates in 2007, none this year. The chickens do not vote for Colonel Sanders.

Screen for intolerance

And we do not need any such charter! Apart from some minor adjustments, Quebec is already a secular society, as a result of measures taken by the Quiet Revolution, crowned by the deconfessionalization of the school system.[3] Bravo to the people who called for this — I was one of them — and to Pauline Marois who got it written into the law and the constitution.

Alas, when a political personality can boast of success in one area, she seems incapable of letting go, in the belief that “more of the same” [in English] will be even more pleasing. The secularization Part II project of the PQ would concord with Karl Marx’s saying that History repeats itself, the second time as farce.

What indeed are we to say about a party that votes to maintain a crucifix in the National Assembly but at the same time advocates a prohibition on working in the public and parapublic sectors for ordinary citizens who, in their personal capacity, wear a religious sign such as the Muslim scarf or the Jewish kippa? The crucifix does not prevent me from sleeping, but secularism as a screen for intolerance does.

I tried for four years to convince many PQ MNAs to avoid this trap. The final response to my discreet representations and to those of others was the parachuting of Ms. Djemila Benhabib into Trois-Rivières, an augury of a secularism locked twice-over.

I have read the books of this woman of a single cause. She has suffered much and seems very sincere to me. I would say as much of Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, the scourge of crime. Unfortunately, having suffered and having accounts to settle does not necessarily make someone the most judicious counsellor. The Senator’s remedies against crime (more repression than prevention) would increase criminality. The PQ’s discriminatory Charter, unparalleled in North America, would play into the hands of the Islamic extremists, who must be hoping for its adoption with baited breath.

Compatibility of views

I will always defend the right of anyone to criticize any institution, including religions. But the choice of a candidate by a party is not a matter of right but of relevance. I have known and appreciated quite a few Muslims, Sikhs and Jews; I was the government’s liaison agent with these communities. Ms. Benhabib’s parachute candidacy in Trois-Rivières is as great a misstep for the PQ in the Muslim community as the choice of Stéphane Dion as leader of the federal Liberals was for that party in French Quebec. In both cases, a party became infatuated with a member of a minority not because of that person’s efforts to increase understanding of the minority, but solely because of the compatibility of his or her views with the phobias of the majority.

I do not personally know each of the 200,000 Muslims in Quebec, but all those I do know, practicing or not, saw the parachuting of the author of Ma vie à contre-Coran [My life against the Koran] as a provocation. How would Christians react (practitioners or even those non-practitioners who want a crucifix in the National Assembly) to the candidacy of a person whose proudest merit was a book entitled My life against the Gospel? In my opinion, those responsible for this choice do not display the judgment and sensitivity required by a project as complex and demanding as the accession of Quebec to sovereignty. Like Maurice Duplessis, who also built part of his electoral career on the back of a religious minority (the Jehovah’s Witnesses), they are more interested in their re-election than in the future of Quebec as a society.

Is France a model?

Some seemingly respectable arguments are invoked against the presence in the public services of women wearing the scarf. That, it is claimed, is how they will be “liberated,” as if a job and salary were not the primary guarantors of their freedom. But the most obvious reason is the fear of what is alien, as the contradiction over the crucifix illustrates.

The second most important reason is probably, among some baby-boomers, an inverted legacy of a Quebec now gone: the obsessive hostility toward religions and scorn for their adherents. This hostility, this contempt will yield no good in a Quebec in which diversity is increasing. The stigmatization of believers is unlikely to create any empathy among and towards immigrants who, in their majority, attach great importance to their religion — Christian, Muslim, or other.

The model to be imitated, it appears, would be France, a country I passionately love, but not to the point of folly. Since the Second World War France has held the western world’s championship for its electorate’s support to an openly xenophobic party, if we consider both the scope and duration of that support. In France, looking like someone from North Africa will often have the police asking you for “Your papers!” every day — as reports none other than Djemila Benhabib in Ma vie à contre-Coran (p. 190).

And what about the angry young people from the immigrant communities who set fire to hundreds of cars each year on the night of July 14 [Bastille Day]; do we see such things in Montréal on the 24^th of June [the Fête nationale], in Toronto on Canada Day, in New York on July 4?

Annoying the rest of the continent

Quebec is in America. Some of us are beginning to discover, with surprise, how much a secularism of exclusion shocks the prevailing ethic in the United States, as in Canada. On July 4, 2009, President Obama denounced the prohibition of the hijab in the West; he was criticized very little for that in his country. In Canada, three turban-wearing Sikhs, elected in majority non-Sikh ridings, sat in the House of Commons when I was there myself, without anyone taking offense. One of them is now a minister.

In Quebec, with the Charter planned by the PQ, he could not even be a clerk in a government liquor store. The countries of Protestant origins value freedom of conscience. In the United States, secularism means strict separation of Church from State, not a prohibition on the expression of beliefs.

Of course, we can choose to annoy all the rest of the continent, I have often done so myself on the language, but it is still necessary that the issue be worth the trouble. If we multiply the cases, we allow our adversaries to link them together in order to paint Quebec as a fortress of intolerance in all respects.

Charter of exclusion

Treating Québécois as racists is unfair, agreed: a recent poll showed we are more open to immigration than Ontarians. But when it comes to accusations of intolerance toward religious minorities, a good way to refute them, or to discredit those who make them, would be not to show ourselves as worse than our neighbours in this area.

There are Jews and Muslims everywhere in the United States and Canada, countries that have some sixty state or provincial legislatures with comparable powers, overall, to those of our National Assembly. Name me a single one of these legislatures or, in recent times, a major party that has proposed a charter of exclusion like the one advocated by the PQ. Halal and Kosher rites are practices in all these states and provinces. Name me one of their legislatures or a major party that has recently made such a song and dance over this (complete with a news conference!) as the PQ did in the National Assembly last March.[4]

Could it be that all these other legislatures, without exception, are controlled by “useful idiots” in the service of the Islamists? Might it not be, instead, that our insecurity and our religious antecedents sometimes inspire in us reflexes that are excessive, unfair and counter-productive? Of course, some will see in the singularity of our conduct some (further) proof of our intellectual and moral superiority. Chauvinism is the contrary of patriotism: instead of encouraging the nation to improve, we exalt its errors; and that generally ends up badly.

I have therefore left it to those who dream of living some day in the only corner of North America in which a mother could be deprived of a livelihood for wearing a Muslim scarf the responsibility of their project. I remain an independentist, a radical defender of French.

It was necessary to vote and I chose Option nationale (ON). This party had the good idea, in its platform, to advocate the secularism of public institutions, not the forced secularization of each of their employees. I know many of these militants, young people for the most part. They would not make that kind of mistake.

[Note by Le Devoir] Jean Dorion. A sociologist, the author has been a political attaché of Immigration Minister Jacques Couture, chief of staff of minister Gérald Godin, liaison officer with the cultural communities, president of the SSJB de Montréal, delegate general of Quebec in Tokyo and MP for the Bloc québécois.

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[1] Guy Bertrand is a Quebec City lawyer, once a fervent sovereigntist (he even ran for the PQ leadership), who became an equally fervent federalist in the 1990s, and sometime later reverted to sovereigntism.

[2] A town in Charlevoix region containing the sumptuous residence of the very well-connected billionaire Paul Desmarais. It is frequented by the who’s who of the Quebec and international Francophone elite.

[3] In 1997, the addition of s. 93A to the Constitution Act, 1867 made possible the abolition of denominational school boards in Quebec and the reorganization of Quebec's school boards on the basis of language. Marois was the PQ minister of Education who piloted this constitutional amendment from Quebec’s side.

[4] André Simard, a PQ member of the National Assembly, with the support of his colleagues, campaigned in March against halal ritual slaughter practices, claiming (against all evidence) they were becoming the norm rather than the exception in Quebec.