[For the comrades in the so-called United States who aren't aware, those of us in Canada just witnessed the completion of the latest bourgeois ritual that they call democracy. In it the social democratic New Democratic Party surged to become the official opposition, mostly in Quebec, an effect of which is that we may have seen the death knell of parliamentary Québécois nationalism, which is what this post analyses]
Québécois nationalism has been something I have struggled with for a long time since getting involved in the Canadian revolutionary left. I myself, as an indigenous person, never bought into the idea of Québec as an oppressed nation. To me me Québec was functionally little different than Anglo-Canada, however acceptance of the idea (I consider it a myth) of Québec as an oppressed nation has almost complete blanket support amongst Canada’s settler “left.” Two organizations that I was involved in during my Trotskyist days bought into it: Socialist Action (and by extension the NDP Socialist Caucus) and the New Socialist Group. Other groups, both Trotskyist and non, like the IMT’s section Fightback, the Socialist Project, the Communist Parties (original flavor and ML), Socialist Voice, the International Socialists etc. all buy into this idea.
While I certainly had Canadian leftist friends who on an individual level did not buy into the whole Québec oppressed nation complex, it wasn’t until I read the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP-PCR)’s program that I encountered an organization that took as its line that Québec is not an oppressed nation. Upon first reading it I liked what the RCP-PCR had to say, but I didn’t think it went far enough demythologize the history of Québec as an oppressed nation. (However, as the comrade who wrote the below piece pointed out to me on the discussion around it on his own site, the RCP-PCR has been much more clear in other documents about the nature of Québec.)
The contradiction between Anglo-Canada and the Québécois is born of Anglophone chauvanism, but I don’t think that ever made them an oppressed nation in the same way the indigenous people of the Americas are. The contradictions that exist between Anglo-Canada and the Québécois is same contradiction that exist between all imperialist and colonial powers. It’s a struggle for control of land and resources that do not belong to either nation, because they were stolen from the indigenous people, who, despite the best efforts of the Anglo and French settlers, are still here.
The truth is that the real revolutionary anti-colonial struggle in Canada is the struggle waged by indigenous people against imperialist white power, settler-colonialism, parasitic capitalism and the very existence of the Canadian (and Québécois) nation state(s). The fact that the settler “left” in Canada cannot, or refuses, to see that point shows where they truly lay in the alignment of forces.
Below what I have reproduced is another excellent post by comrade JMP, this time examining the impact of the NDP surge in Québec and subsequent obliteration of the Bloc Québécois on Monday’s election, and it’s impact on the Québécois national-settler project. Importantly he makes use of a concept that I find very helpful in analyzing the Québécois national-settler project, which he calls “Ideology of Losing Colonialism”.
What I find most interesting about the recent federal elections (aside from the fact that again around 40% of registered voters refused to participate) was the crushing defeat of the Bloc Quebecois. Normally this Quebec nationalist party dominates its province: it is not only as “social democratic” as the NDP (if not more so), but its Francophone nationalist line tended to make it more appealing to many left-inclined French Canadians. This year, however, like the Liberal party it was completely decimated.
The Revolutionary Communist Party Canada (PCR-RCP) that emerged in Quebec, and in the midst of Quebecois left struggle, has long argued that Quebec nationalism is a dead project: “as a nation, Quebec is no longer subjected to any form of oppression that would prevent its own development and would then justify––as some people still want us to believe––a national liberation struggle.” Furthermore, the PCR-RCP argued that the entire Quebec national movement “has for the most part harboured ideas contrary to the interests of the proletariat” and that Quebec “is not on the side of the dominated countries, but on the side of the dominating countries.” These insights were proved this election when the majority of the people who would normally vote for the sovereigntist Bloc voted NDP instead––now even the lingering ideology of Quebec nationalism no longer holds sway in the imagination of the average Quebecois voting participant. And yet Gilles Duceppe went out in a Quebec sovereigntist blaze of glory, ranting about how Quebec “liberation” was somehow still a relevant issue when, if anything, it is only the issue of racist cultural nationalists who would rather vote for the retrograde Parti Quebecois than the Bloc.
Quebec nationalism, though providing important moments of revolutionary struggle (i.e. the Front de Libération du Québec), was by-and-large a false revolutionary nationalism. While it is true that the francophone sovereigntist struggle emerged in response to anglo-chauvinism, it was still the product of a nation of losing colonizers. The French arrived to settle, enslave, and genocide this hemisphere’s indigenous population––just like the English––they just happened to lose a colonial war and become a nation of subjugated colonizers. Even when they were under the economic domination of the Anglophones, they remained a parasitic settler-colonial nation: they would send their police to smash indigenous resistance, their sovereigntism was most often a denial of anti-colonial struggle because the only national struggle it recognized was a struggle of settlers. And this nationalism is, to paraphrase Fanon and Cesaire, ultimately nothing more than “a war amongst brothers.”
And yet, for a long time, the Canadian left has tried to argue that Quebec nationalism is the only nationalism that counts––the primary national liberation demand of Canada, more important than actual anti-colonial struggle. This conception of false revolutionary nationalism, the focus on Quebec’s right to secede as a nation, is still defended by certain sectors of the left: for example, some groups still argue (and do so publicly) that only Quebec constitutes a “nation”, whereas the various indigenous nations do not, and so while the former has the revolutionary right to secede, the latter should just integrate. The terribly economistic and chauvinist theory behind this assertion is that only Quebec possesses a “real political economy.” Although how its political economy is any different from other provincial political economies, and how it is not integrated into the overall colonial-capitalist state of Canada, is a question conjured away behind this supposedly robust claim about nationhood. At the end of the day, despite any rhetorical flourishes and despicable sophistries, the argument is nothing more than colonial ideology: indigenous people cannot constitute “nations” because they are supposed to be outside of history, frozen in time, apparitions of a landscape no different from trees or other roaming animals––this was the racist thinking behind colonial ideologies like terra nullius.
The national question that emerged in the Leninist period of marxism––discussed to its most minute details by Lenin and by the participants of the Third International’s Second Congress––should not be reduced to such pathetic colonial qualifications. Of course, those who defend this false conception of the national question do so because they benefit, as so many of us do, from colonial-capitalism and this benefit, this privilege, produces and ideological mindset: it is in our interests to reject a concrete analysis in a concrete situation of the national question… far better to apply it to a population of losing colonizers who, if they ever secede from the rest of Canada, will maintain colonialism and capitalism.
And many of these groups who still push Quebec nationalism as the only revolutionary nationalism that counts were extremely angered by the PCR-RCP’s analysis of the national question that rejects Quebec nationalism in favour of anti-colonial indigenous nationalism. This is a more concrete and revolutionary understanding of the national question, and one that even takes anglo-chauvinism into account, because it understands that capitalism in Canada grew out of colonial conquest––a colonialism initiated, and now maintained, by English and French alike.
If anything, the fall of the Bloc demonstrates that French Canadian voters do not care about this false understanding of the national question promoted by antiquated “marxist” organizations who still imagine that they’re living sixty years ago. Quebec sovereignty must no longer be relevant to the Quebec middle class if all of their class needs are being satisfied by a Canadian capitalism that now treats French Canadians no different from English Canadians. And the Quebec proletariat probably does not care if the exploiting bourgeoisie is Francophone or Anglophone, either. As the PCR-RCP argued in the chapter of their programme that defends native sovereignty over and above Quebec sovereignty:
“To claim that Québec has played the part of an oppressed nation historically within Canada is one thing. To voluntarily blind oneself to its current reality and in the face of changes that have taken place after almost 40 years of domination – if not hegemony – by the national movement in Québec: this is a big mistake, that has been made at the cost of the proletariat.”
Hopefully the Bloc’s humiliating defeat in these recent federal elections will finally exorcise the ghost of that predatory nationalism that has lingered over the mass graves of indigenous peoples since its emergence.
P.S., if you wanna check out my take on the Canadian elections, see the post on my regular site Conservative Majorities, NDP Surges & Revolutionary Struggle
I know it may be an unfamiliar topic to my comrades from down south, but up here Québécois nationalism is kinda the elephant in the room for those of us involved in revolutionary struggle.
As I point out in my intro to the piece, the Canadian settler “left” just blanket support the idea that Québec is an oppressed nation with the revolutionary right to self-determination up to and including the right to independence. At the same time though the settler “left” in Canada denies this right to indigenous people (they may indeed waxon about Native people have the right to self-determination, but they do not mean it the same way that they mean it for Québec).
The Québec-as-oppressed-nation complex though is a form of leftist mythology. The simple fact is that Québec was birthed on this continent, just like Amerika, just like Anglo-Canada, as a predatory, parasitic settler-colonial nation, and as such, like like Amerika and Anglo-Canada, Québec is an OPPRESSOR nation, and has always been a junior, though fully integrated partner in the projects of imperialist white power, settler colonialism and parasitic capitalism.