How Quebec’s Nationalist Movement Became the Spearhead of Racist Militancy

By Andre-Philippe Dore

Once at the vanguard of social justice struggles in Québec, the nationalist tendency is now one of the strongest components of the racist right-wing in the province. It has almost completely abandoned the fight for political and economic emancipation to concentrate on cultural politics, fighting against immigration, liberty of religion and other topics also cherished by the fascist right. While some would easily condemn nationalism in itself, going back into the history of Québec's fight for independence seems necessary to understand how Québec's liberation movement transformed itself into the reactionary force it is today.

Québec's independence struggle goes back to an old tradition of anti-British revolts like the Patriotes' rebellion of 1837-1838 or pamphleteers' writings from the early 1900s. Its golden age was situated in the 60s and 70s when groups of many horizons - from conservatives to communists - led the struggle up to a referendum in 1980 - which wasn't victorious.

The large array of pro-sovereignty groups was definitely left-leaning : at the far-left was the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which had a complicated and utterly action-packed history. With ties to the Black Panthers, Algerian revolutionaries and Palestinian freedom fighters, the FLQ relied on guerrilla tactics - robbing banks, kidnapping government members and blowing up many symbols of British imperialism. Also in the left hemisphere was the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale which sometimes quoted Ho Chi Minh, used the term "socialist" without shame and fought side-by-side with unions against the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie. Less well-known were other left-wing groups like the Action socialiste pour l'indépendance du Québec, Québec's Socialist Party or Andrée Ferretti's Front de libération populaire, all influenced by Marxist writers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi.

However, there where other groups that did not want to be associated with the left-wing of the movement, for example the Alliance Laurentienne - a catholic party of intellectuals - or Gilles Grégoire's Ralliement national - a populist party formed by proponents of the social credit theory and dissidents of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale who did not want to be involved with a party ran by an agnostic, leftist homosexual. TheRalliement national would finally merge with the Mouvement souveraineté-association - a newly formed group with René Lévesque as its leader. Lévesque - a young rising star in left reformist politics - had just left the Liberal Party because its establishment refused to back Québec's plea for independence. He then went on to create the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968.

This new party would be the main vehicle for the official and electoral struggle for Québec's sovereignty. Even though Lévesque's point of view on the national question was pretty moderate as he favored the negotiation of a new deal with Canada's government instead of seceding right away - many members of the radical left joined the Parti Québécois. Formerly living in clandestinity because of its involvement with the FLQ, Pierre Vallières publicly joined the side of Lévesque's legal struggle, as Pierre Bourgault - leader of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale - already did, enjoining the 14 000 members of his party to do the same. For many intellectuals and activists, the Crise d'octobre - which saw the Canadian army invade the streets of Québec and jail almost anyone who actively supported Québec's independence- was a traumatic event, leading them to abandon radical militancy and join social-democrat struggles. Groups who advocated armed struggle for national liberation began to disappear as their members joined either anti-secession Maoist groups like En lutte! - led by the former FLQ member Charles Gagnon - or reformist parties and unions.

The PQ went from a marginal party - as he won only 7 seats during the election of 1970 - to forming the government in 1976. This electoral victory led to a referendum in 1980 which resulted in a win for the federalists since 59% of the voters chose the No option. The referendum question illustrated well the moderate turn of nationalist politics, as it was a nuanced and hesitating text. Against the left-leaning wing of the party, led by Jacques Parizeau - who had been throughout his life both sympathizer of a communist party and banker - opposed it, Lévesque and his party asked the following :

''Le Gouvernement du Québec a fait connaître sa proposition d'en arriver, avec le reste du Canada, à une nouvelle entente fondée sur le principe de l'égalité des peuples ; cette entente permettrait au Québec d'acquérir le pouvoir exclusif de faire ses lois, de percevoir ses impôts et d'établir ses relations extérieures, ce qui est la souveraineté, et, en même temps, de maintenir avec le Canada une association économique comportant l'utilisation de la même monnaie ; aucun changement de statut politique résultant de ces négociations ne sera réalisé sans l'accord de la population lors d'un autre référendum ; en conséquence, accordez-vous au Gouvernement du Québec le mandat de négocier l'entente proposée entre le Québec et le Canada ?"

Although the main voice for the nationalist camp in Québec's media was the PQ's , many initiatives were carried by other supporters of the Yes option. The referendum campaign saw the implication of members of the Communist Party of Québec, of the Combat socialiste's Trotskyists and other far-left activists. Another part of the left opposed that option however, for example the Nouveau Parti démocratique du Québec - a marginal social-democrat party who supported the unity of Canada.

After the defeat of the Yes option, René Lévesque and Claude Morin, an informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, proposed what they named « Beau risque ». This would lead the PQ to support the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party - who proposed a mix of free market and conservatism - since its leader Brian Mulroney promised to amend the Canadian constitution to give Québec a special status in it. Québec as a matter of fact never signed the Canadian constitution since it was forced upon the province by an agreement between all the other provinces' premiers, the Canadian premier Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, the British House of Commons and the Queen of England. Many members of the PQ - including progressive MPs like Jacques Parizeau, Camille Laurin and Louise Harel - left the party. The void created by this exodus gave the right wing of the party a more prominent role. Overtly capitalist and anti-union individuals like Lucien Bouchard came to be public figures of the nationalist struggle, leading to the creation of the Bloc Québécois which participated in federal elections as the main representative of the nationalist forces. While advocating left-leaning ideas from time to time to allure their remaining left-leaning base, the Bloc's staff was mostly composed of right-wing activists that were formerly members of the Canadian Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party.

With an even more moderate Lévesque apace with the right-wing Bouchard, the nationalist side never went to propose a deal to the federal government that would satisfy Québec's population and the other provinces'. Instead, the PQ went on to rule as a candid provincial government, even importing capitalist repression tactics usually withheld as the party was said to have a « préjugé favorable envers les travailleurs » (a favorable bias toward workingmen). As 1982 began, Lévesque's government cut in social programs, tried to lower the salaries of the state employees and went at war with unions, as it voted laws to forbid certain strikes that were supported by a large part of the population. Lévesque would retire in 1985 to see Jacques Parizeau make his comeback and take his place 2 years later. The new leadership of the PQ then refocused the party around its raison d'être : to liberate Québec from the colonialist state of Canada.

Parizeau worked with his new ally, Lucien Bouchard, until the 1995 referendum, which resulted in a victory for the No option with 50,58% of the vote. Parizeau - as promised - retired after this defeat and left the gate open for Bouchard to take the leadership of the PQ. Bouchard, as he became the new Premier of Québec, shamelessly favored right-wing policies by imposing austerity measures : he took stances against unions, reduced the growth of the minimum wage and allowed his friend Paul Desmarais to concentrate even more the media outlets of the province. Nowadays, Bouchard is still a zealot of capitalism. He often accused the Quebecers of not working enough while he - since 2011 - had been a lobbyist for an oil consortium, an advisor for the highest paid physicians in the province and a negotiator for a paper company on behalf of the government (he was paid half a million for this last job).

As he went on with his plan to put Québec's independence on the back burner and concentrate on reducing the state spending by 10%, left-wing nationalists, socialists, feminists and alter-globalization militants formed groups that would later merge to create Québec solidaire - a left electoral party who supports Québec's emancipation from Canada. The PQ's change of reign in the 2000s would not rehabilitate the party for these numerous activists who disliked the politics of Lucien Bouchard just as much as those of his successor Bernard Landry - a bourgeois par excellence who became Premier in 2001. Leftists fled the party throughout the decade, while those staying in the organization claimed that other parties were only there to ruin the cause of Québec's liberation since they divided the nationalist vote.

It took up until 2012 for the PQ to be reelected with 31.95% of the popular vote. The student strike which lasted well over 100 days earlier that year permitted Pauline Marois to become Premier, as she supported the student cause and promised to cancel the tuition fees hike that caused the strike in the forst place. However, when she betrayed her electorate by indexing the tuition fees, kneeling before the mining industry and selling the Anticosti Island to a gas company, Marois' support diminished drastically. Bernard Drainville - her minister of « Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship » - found the inspiration to wave the false flag of an Islamic menace, reminiscing the 2008 rise of the populist right-wing formation, the Action démocratique du Québec, who then almost won its election with this precise tactic. These straw man politics were to allow the PQ a gain of support from a right electorate normally voting for federalist parties while the young citizens turned toward the inclusive Québec solidaire.

Drainville proposed a « Charter of Québec Values » or, in other words, a law that regulates where and when people - especially Muslims - can wear religious symbols or pieces of clothing that cover the head (with the exception of small Christian crosses). Many supporters of this law - that never passed - would later be members of neo-fascist or anti-immigration groups like La Meute,Storm Alliance or the Fédération des Québécois de souche. Among those was also the young Alexandre Bissonnette, a right-wing supporter of Drainville who would kill 7 people at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Québec City in 2017. Despite that draft law which secured them numerous racist allies, the PQ lost 24 seats in the 2014 elections since it had lost the support of non-bureaucratic unions, students, radical nationalists, POCs, Indigenous people, ecologists and feminists. On an obvious decline, the PQ continued to try to appeal to an afraid population by using a xenophobic rhetoric carried by Jean-François Lisée - a then-communist now-chauvinist who would become leader of the PQ in 2016.

During that Charter episode, most of Québec's media (possessed mainly by two companies) went on to unofficially, but conspicuously, endorse an anti-Islam line. The student strike being over, columnists like Richard Martineau, Lise Ravary or Christian Rioux had to find another scapegoat. An already marginalized population like the Muslims was an easy target for racist groups fueled by media propaganda. Pig heads were dropped in front of mosques and hidjab-wearing women were harassed, but many media defended these hate crimes by repeatedly claiming they were only bad taste jokes. Indeed, the hate crimes against the Black and Muslim population in Québec rose from 2014 and onwards according to Statistics Canada.

Having dropped the idea of Québec's independence to prioritize its populist anti-immigration turn, the PQ lost its members to a more openly xenophobic and capitalistic formation: the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) - a party formed by conservatives with the ex-PQ minister François Legault as its head. In 2018, the CAQ formed a majority government and imposed Bill 21 on June 14 2019, which forbids teachers and many other state employees to wear religious symbols.

Still relying on its racist discourse, the PQ is nowadays the only opposition party that supports this law - regardless of the fact that their popularity is radically going down since they began to employ this approach. Now with only 9 seats, making it the fourth party in importance, the PQ is on his deathbed. Instead of defending nationalism by working to build the country of Québec, it has aligned with far-right groups' political narrative. For them, the State must defend the population against ethnic diversity and Islam. However, because of the many disguises the xenophobic movements have put on these discriminatory practices - invoking laicity, Québec values and other ideological euphemisms - it took years for antifascist and antiracist groups to gain some legitimacy in the struggle against discriminatory law projects.

Instead, it was mostly moderate humanist groups that fought against these laws, leaving to the radicals the fight against overtly fascist organizations like Atalante Québec. These days, however, groups from a large spectrum of the left are allying to resist against Bill 21 and the Legault government. They are less and less afraid to point out mainstream right-wingers as racists. As the years go by, it is more and more difficult for ethnic nationalists to legitimate their movement since Quebecers have been fed their « we're not racists, but… » rhetoric to a point it cannot ingest more without taking a stance toward either chauvinism or internationalism.

Québec's situation is not bright with the CAQ in power and neo-fascist groups growing influence in the streets, but now there are counter-movements organizing. On June 19, Montreal activists proclaimed the beginning of a hunger strike to protest Bill 21. In Québec City, an anti-Bill 21 coalition was formed on the initiative of muslim women, students and other feminists. Against the media-fueled xenophobia put forward by the government, a small but significative spectrum of the population is now determined to pinpoint the fact that the nationalist movement in the province is no more a progressive-looking and liberty monger set of forces, but a proper conservative anti-immigration movement.

Democracy, Brexit Stage Left: A Socialist Critique of the Brexit Vote

By Bryant William Sculos

Of the People or For the People?

How do we understand an instance when a demos votes for something that is largely motivated by anti-democratic sentiments and produces anti-democratic results? Now, imagine a similar scenario but the people doing the voting have little to no say in the process leading up to voting, and some of the people who will likely be most dramatically harmed by the outcome lack both a vote and any power in the process. This second scenario is the kind of "democracy" that we're witnessing in the Brexit referendum-a democracy hardly worth the name.

In Marxist theory, this first scenario is typically categorized as an instance of false consciousness-when peoples' subjective perceptions of their interests are different than their objective class-based interests (of which they are ostensibly unaware). This is often where the role of communist party and leftist intellectuals comes up; their role being to cultivate a class consciousness among the oppressed workers so that their subjective and objective interests are identical. This is relatively familiar to those on the Left, and could seem like a good enough reason to criticize how democracy currently manifests, but there is a better more principled reason to reject democracy as it is practiced under capitalism and this approach can be understood by examining the recent Brexit vote calling on the United Kingdom to extricate itself from the European Union. The result in this essay is a democratic critique of "democracy."

The people voted, right? Right. There were no organized gangs intimidating voters or forcing them to vote a specific way, right? Right. There was even fairly high turnout across demographic groups, right? Right. Given all of this, how could socialists oppose this process without opposing democracy itself?

Democracy-in-Name-Only

Without staking out a firm position on whether Brexit was indeed an instance of a working class voting against its own interests, Brexit, at the very least, brings important questions to the surface: how should we understand this vote-hailed by those on the Right and Left, even among Remainers, as at least a victory for democracy-if indeed it is actually against the interests of most working people in the United Kingdom? Beyond that though, we should not limit ourselves to simply thinking about whether the results of the vote were in the interest of the people of the UK. We need to think about whether the process by which the results came to be were actually democratic.

Socialists inspired by, and forthright believers in, socialism-from-below cannot accept democracy under capitalistic conditions, because capitalism is systematically in contradiction with anything worth considering democracy. This however does not make us in any way opponents of actual democracy. In fact, quite the opposite.

Under (neo)liberal capitalism, democracy equals voting-and usually under extremely limited circumstances that themselves were not voted upon. We could call this "democracy-in-name-only." Democracy-in-name-only, as mere voting, cannot be the basis for socialism in principle, that much is obvious to most on the Left who value at the very least some kind of economic democracy, to say nothing for the fact that democracy as mere voting under capitalism often produces very harmful and regressive politics.

This is where false conscious and ideology are indeed important. Because of the ideological power of capitalism to reproduce itself through the very people that it exploits and oppresses, democracy manifests itself in conservative and often undemocratic policies. Democracy-in-name-only identifies non-democracy with democracy and gives capitalism an ideologically sophisticated discursive advantage. If capitalism has democracy, it is easy to paint socialists as anti-democratic, regardless of our protestations to the contrary. This is exacerbated by leftist arguments based on false consciousness-whatever the actual merits of such arguments.

The agents of capitalism, business and political elites, have, for centuries, convinced working people to support policies that are manifestly opposed to (socialist) interpretations of the interests of the working class. There is more justification for opposing the capitalistic performances of liberal democracy beyond just capitalism's propensity to get working people to vote against their own interests and the interests of others whom they should be in solidarity with.

Even if one tends to reject this idea of false consciousness explaining the Brexit vote as elitist, verticalist, or otherwise undemocratic, socialists should still refuse to consider the Brexit vote as an example of democracy. Socialist democracy (or as we call it, socialism), is about process as much as it is about just, egalitarian results.

Why isn't Brexit an example of democracy then? Why must we refuse to think about it-despite our academic or personal political views about the EU and the UK's place within the EU-as a glowing example of democracy in action, as an example of the people speaking out and registering their displeasure and dissatisfaction with the very undemocratic and neoliberal capitalist European Union? (as has been suggested by Green Party US candidate Dr. Jill Stein)?

Brexit was not an example of genuine democracy, not because the people voted against their own interests (again, for the moment, I'm arguing based on the contingent assumption that this is true), but rather because my mother asking me if I want either dirt or smelly gym shoe flavored ice cream is not a democratic choice. Put more seriously, being able to only choose between two bad options, with little to no say in altering or expanding those options, should never be considered anything close to democracy, never mind the kind that socialism demands.

While it is worth making the respective cases whether the results of the referendum do or do not serve the interests of the British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and the multitudes of non-European residents and citizens on the islands, the point I want us to focus on here is about process. The Brexit vote was undemocratic, not only because the potential perniciousness of false consciousness, not only because of the lack of genuine workplace democracy that fosters class-consciousness and national and global solidarity among the oppressed (while that is entirely true), the primary reason the vote was undemocratic was because those people who will be most detrimentally affected by the vote had absolutely no say in the decision, nor in the decision-making process to determine how the eventual decision would be made. This is a violation of what Jürgen Habermas has called the "all-affected principle"-the legitimizing norm that all those people who are affected by a decision should have a say in that decision, even if the eventual decision goes against their interests.

Despite that, for Habermas, his broader theory of discursively-legitimized democracy has never been adequately connected to socialist politics, it seems like a natural fit. Why do workers deserve workplace democracy? Because they are the people most affected by the policies, practices, and maldistributive consequences of their work environment. This is a socialist application of the all-affected principle.

Given the motivation of so many Brexiters to expel immigrant workers and reject future migrants and refugees entrance into the UK, it is absolutely crucial for the Left to not only criticize the bigotry of those motivations and the harmful consequences of it being implemented in policy, but even more so to emphasize the undemocratic truth that even the migrants who have been working in the UK for years who lack citizenship (and do not come from a Commonwealth country) could not participate in the political process that very well may result in their expulsion from their homes-to say nothing for the thousands of potential refugees "residing" outside the UK hoping to immigrate or be granted asylum. This is where the Brexit referendum was most horribly undemocratic.

Even for the citizenry of the UK this was not democracy. The referendum was foisted upon them, and their "democratic" power was strictly limited to saying "yes, exit" or "no, remain." Occasionally getting to say "yes" or "no" has got to be one of the most impoverished definitions of democracy around, and yet since it was solidified by thinkers like Schumpeter and Huntington, it remains a very popular understanding of democracy.

This is what socialists must refuse. Beyond whatever you may think about Brexit, the people of the UK and the immigrants who will be most affected by this vote, did not have any functional power in determining the process by which this decision was made. This was a narrowly, nearly completely non-participatory plebiscite. Plebiscitary democracy can never be socialist democracy-and should hardly be considered democratic in any substantial way, just like this referendum.

Inclusivity, Participation, and Left Democracy

Socialists interested in purely democratic forms of socialism must not hesitate to criticize something that may superficially appear to be a democratic process and result for fear of being called elitist or undemocratic. Socialists should take up a stronger mantle against false mirages hailed as democracy simply because some people's voices were momentarily audible. Socialists must call for an inclusive, participatory version of democracy that stands opposed to liberal, nationalist, exclusionary, plebiscitary democracy.

While the debates on the Left about the consequences (bothpositive and negative) of Brexit will and should continue to be had, it is absolutely necessary that we not overlook the process by which these consequences came to be. It is not irrelevant whether the results are good for the working people of the UK and the EU more broadly, but it would be easy to overlook the extremely undemocratic process if the focus is nearly exclusively on the manipulation, fear, anger, and nationalism that motivated the core constituency of Brexit.

Socialism is as much about process as it is about results, and while the consequences are being explored, taking a step back to remind ourselves that process is intimately related to the consequences is important if we want to limit the possibility for a resurgent right-wing shift in the UK, the EU, the United States, and around the world.

Democracy is more than the momentary voice of people. It is a way of structuring society and life itself, and it is a social, political, and economic form that the EU has militated against since its inception. This is the kind of ideological perversion of democracy that the democratic Left can be proud to oppose without ever risking tip-toing into the waters of anti-democracy.

Bryant William Sculos is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Florida International University whose research uses Critical Theory as a basis to explore the relationship between capitalism, democracy, and global justice. His work has been published inClass, Race and Corporate Power, Political Studies Review, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, New Politics, and with The Hampton Institute. Bryant is also an at-large member of Socialist Alternative in the US.