Debates with the IBT on the National Question: Quebec

Let us start with what we agree on. Quebec is a nation, and like all nations it has the democratic right to self-determination. That means it has the right to leave Canada and form its own independent state. We oppose any use of force by the Canadian state to retain Quebec, and it would in fact be the duty of Marxists to militarily defend Quebec were Ottawa to use violence to keep it. We oppose any national privilege for English Canadians inside or outside Quebec, and we denounce any manifestation of Anglo chauvinism within the English-Canadian working class.

Our similarities would seem to end there. The basic difference is encapsulated in the following passage from your 2017 article, “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra”:

Your claim that Quebec should have been independent “starting with the conquest of 1759” because “it was oppressed by another nation” reflects a retreat not only from Leninism but from any materialist understanding of the national question. Whether the francophone Catholic seigneurs and their tenant farmers on the banks of the St. Lawrence should have been independent from an anglophone Protestant mercantile empire in the mid 18th century is a moral question, not a question of proletarian class strategy. Your formula is simple: since Quebec was oppressed, it should have become independent. Where is the class struggle? What does this have to do with the proletariat and its fight for socialism? These are questions that are outside your framework.

What is the point of saying that Quebec should have been independent since (or even before) its inception as a nation? There is no question that the British Empire dominated Quebec and tried to assimilate francophones, and there is no question that the Québécois were oppressed within Confederation from the beginning. Even today, despite the growth of the French-speaking bourgeoisie in Quebec and its increasing integration with Anglo capital, Ottawa continues to formally subjugate Quebec through the Clarity Act, denying Quebec’s right to separate with a simple democratic majority. Leninists oppose forced assimilation and national oppression and are for equal democratic rights for both nations, since any other policy would hamper the development of a revolutionary workers’ party.

So what is the point of your position that Quebec, abstracted from any consideration of the class struggle, should be independent? The answer can only be that you see a positive historical development in the growth and maintenance of the Quebec nation and an independent Quebec state. In other words, your position is Quebec nationalist. It is anti-Leninist. We will explain why.

Let’s start with the fact that you, unlike Lenin, are opposed to the voluntary assimilation of nations, specifically Quebec and the English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States. In the 2017 “Hydra” document, you write:

Seymour’s article, “The National Question in the Marxist Movement, 1848–1914,” falsifies nothing about Lenin’s position. You assert that the revolutionary iSt advocated “the assimilation of the oppressed nations by the oppressors under imperialist capitalism,” i.e., which is to suggest forced assimilation, but the quote you cite does not say that. It says the Leninist position is “for the gradual, organic assimilation of the various nationalities making up the working class,” i.e., whatever new national identity emerges from the intermingling and increased interaction of working-class people from different nations. You don’t like this because you want to maintain the distinct identity of a French-speaking Quebec nation even in the absence of forced assimilation by the Anglo-dominated Canadian state. This puts you at odds with Lenin, who wrote:

Lenin continued:

Lenin argued for a consistently democratic policy towards nations, a policy that would remove state compulsion and let economic realities assert themselves on the development of nations, which could include their assimilation:

Marxists oppose the forced assimilation of national minorities and the denial of their right to form their own states. Outside the framework of force, we favor the voluntary assimilation of nations. It seems you do not, as you have denounced the iSt’s simple advocacy of “the gradual, organic assimilation of the various nationalities making up the working class.” Lenin favored voluntary assimilation and the adoption of “the international culture of democracy and of the world working-class movement.” He spoke clearly of “the benefits to be gained from the intercourse, amalgamation and assimilation of the proletariat of the two nations” (in this case, he was talking about Great Russians and Ukrainians).

You do not attempt to refute Lenin but instead to falsely claim his authority. The mental gymnastics you must engage in are astounding. Take, for instance, your support for Quebec’s language laws. In the “Hydra” document, you write:

The right to self-determination means the right to form a separate state. Lenin argued that “the self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.” He added that “it would be wrong to interpret the right to self-determination as meaning anything but the right to existence as a separate state” (“The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” 1914). You invent the category of nationalist “defensive measures” as a “partial expression of self-determination.”

Going back at least to the Official Languages Act of 1969, the French language has not been threatened by any form of state compulsion, despite your convoluted argument that official bilingualism represents the forced assimilation of francophones:

Ottawa is not “forcing the English language on French speakers” by offering government services in both languages or requiring English and French on food packaging. For more than half a century, the threats to the survival of the French language in North America have come from the numerical and economic preponderance of anglophones and the use of English as a global lingua franca.

Bill 101 sought to promote the use of French above English (and other languages, including those spoken by Indigenous people off-reserve) by making “French the language of Government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business.” For instance, immigrants who settle in Quebec must put their children in French-language schools and are denied the possibility of enrolling them in English-language schools. This is not “an extension of Lenin’s struggle for the equality of languages” but a total contradiction of it.

You refer to the historic state suppression of French within Quebec to justify your shameful policy of supporting the forced assimilation of non-francophone immigrants to Quebec:

You support the law preventing “free choice” of immigrants to school their children in a language other than French. Your reason, dressed up as opposition to oppression (!), is that you “are in favor of immigrants in Quebec integrating through learning the French language,” i.e., assimilating. You admit that you favor the forced assimilation of immigrants, but you think this is acceptable because they do not constitute a nation and because Quebec is oppressed:

What non-francophone immigrants to Quebec are not “allowed” to do is send their children to non-French schools. In other words, their acceptance of “the reality of assimilating into” the Québécois nation is not voluntary but forced. Leninists favor the right of the inhabitants of Quebec or any area (whether or not they are part of one of the recognized nations) to education either in the dominant language or in another language, provided there are enough people choosing it to make it feasible. And the fact that the government of an oppressed nation is doing the forced assimilation does not make it a legitimate (or “partial”) expression of that nation’s right to self-determination.

In “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin wrote:

In “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” he wrote:

For Lenin, privileging “one language” is not part of the fight against oppression or the struggle for self-determination. As the 1974 WV article that you repudiate (and which cites Lenin clearly and accurately) notes:

In Quebec, Marxists oppose all barriers to French in public life and support expanded French education, including making it easy for immigrants to access free, quality French-language instruction—but we also see no justification for opposing bilingualism or multilingualism in workplaces or education, making life harder for Québécois workers looking for jobs in other provinces or throwing up needless barriers to anglophone and allophone workers (including immigrants) in Quebec.

Your support for Quebec’s language laws is not Leninist. It represents your desire to foster the development of a French-speaking, Québécois “national culture” even in the absence of state coercion from Ottawa. Here is what Lenin had to say about your approach: “Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general?—Of course not” (“Critical Remarks on the National Question”).

Consider this question and see if you hesitate to answer it: If Quebec were to separate, i.e., exercise its right to self-determination, would you, in that context, continue to support its language laws? An independent Quebec would not be subject to Ottawa’s bilingual policies or any other law, though it would still be subject to the economic pressures towards assimilation, which Lenin favored. If you are not promoting the development of Quebec “national culture,” then you should at least be opposed to Law 101 in an independent Quebec.

Your general support for Quebec “national culture” leads you to elevate the independence of Quebec above the needs of the class struggle, though you falsely assert that the struggle for Quebec independence will somehow spark the class struggle. For you, defense of an oppressed nation’s right to self-determination requires advocating its independence, instead of making a “conjunctural” assessment as to whether or not advocating independence advances the class struggle (although it seems you do not apply this consistently, e.g., Scotland).

Let us demonstrate Lenin’s “conjunctural” approach to the national question:

A decade later, Lenin expressed the same view:

A year later, the same thing:

Your “non-conjunctural,” strategic, eternal, time-travelling call for Quebec independence has nothing to do with Leninism, which is concerned only with advancing the class struggle for socialist revolution.

You claim that you support Quebec independence because it is a “motor force” for socialist revolution, but the reality is that you view Quebec independence as a higher priority than advancing the class struggle. Support for independence in Quebec has fluctuated over the decades, the highest point being around 50 percent in 1995. In 1995, we advocated a “no” vote in the referendum on Quebec independence because there was neither a clear majority in favor of it nor evidence that nationalist antagonisms were undermining joint class struggle. If a majority of Québécois had voted for independence, we would have defended the actual separation of Quebec from Canada. But both before and since 1995, support for Quebec independence has mostly floated between 25 percent and 40 percent.

Significantly, there have been countless examples of united workers’ actions across national lines (both within Quebec and between Quebec and English Canada). We could cite several Canada-wide strikes by rail, airline and postal workers—and in fact, we did precisely that in the second edition of our pamphlet, Marxism & the Quebec National Question. Most recently we have written about the Canada Post strike late last year, a hard, month-long class battle involving 55,000 workers (including francophones and anglophones throughout Quebec and across the rest of Canada). In our article, we noted:

It was not Anglo-Chauvinism or national antagonisms between Quebec workers and their siblings in English Canada that ended those strikes, but the treachery of a trade-union bureaucracy more afraid of unleashing the power of its base than of losing the battle. In other words, the class issues dominated the conflict, and this is the consistent pattern we have seen for decades. You can produce no evidence to the contrary, and you don’t feel you have to, since you place Quebec independence above maintaining links between workers and advancing the class struggle.

A revolutionary approach to the national question in Quebec must start with a correct understanding of the dynamics of Canadian politics.

I’ll start at the beginning: Why does Canada exist? The simple answer is the British Crown and the Quebec national question. These are the two features which historically distinguish it from the United States.

The French colony of New France was conquered by the British in 1760. The first great act of revolutionary disunity between francophones and anglophones in North America occurred during the American Revolution a few years later. After defeating the French and sensing growing discontent in the anglophone colonies, the British gave certain concessions to the newly conquered French population, playing them against the anglophone colonial population of North America. As a result, the Quebec elites overwhelmingly refused to join the struggle against the British monarchy in the 13 colonies. Because of this, the American Revolution did not extend north, and after the victory of the revolution the British loyalists migrated north, forming the province of Upper Canada, now known as Ontario.

However, the same economic and social trends of capitalist development that caused the American Revolution eventually developed in the British provinces. This eventually led to the rebellions of 1837-38; in Quebec we know it as the Patriots Rebellion. It was a bourgeois democratic revolution which united anglophone and francophone in a joint struggle against the parasitic hold of the British monarchy, which was holding back the development of the economy and society. Although the uprising in anglophone Upper Canada was much weaker, this is the great historic example of united class struggle in Canada. Key to this unity was the understanding by the anglophone revolutionaries that their own democratic emancipation was tied to that of the French population.

The physiognomy of modern Canada was directly determined by the defeat of this bourgeois revolution and was enshrined in the Act of Union of 1840. The francophones were placed in an artificial political minority and an explicitly assimilationist policy was implemented. This was in line with the report Lord Durham made after the defeat of the revolution, an infamous report taught in schools to this day in Quebec. In it he stated that:

At the same time, to avoid further trouble the British enacted several top-down democratic modernizations, which laid the basis for the further capitalist development of both provinces.

The political dynamics of Canada today are directly inherited from this time. English Canadians were pitted against French Canadians, and to this day all social conflicts, whether they be over class, native rights, or immigration (questions I cannot get into today), are shaped by the national conflict. Let me be clear: I am not denying that class struggle is the main motor force of history in Canada; I am simply saying that class struggle is warped by the national conflict.

In English Canada, the defeat of the Patriots Rebellion effectively killed off the struggles against the monarchy and the solidarity with the national-democratic aspirations of the French Canadians. This in turned shaped the Canadian workers movement, which for the most part grew organically from the United States rather than on the soil of homespun revolutionary traditions. Even in its more radical forms, whether trade-unionist, Communist or Trotskyist, the workers movement generally ignored the Quebec national question or embraced the chauvinist prejudices of the ruling class.

On the side of the francophones, this history has ingrained a deeply felt sentiment for national survival against forced assimilation and anglophone oppression. This brings a peculiar dynamic to the development of the workers movement in Quebec, where national and social aspirations are profoundly intertwined. It is this dynamic which is behind the emergence of the Quebec workers movement as the most militant and organized in North America. The IBT notes that this militancy has a strong positive influence on the English Canadian workers movement. This is true. What it misses is that this militancy is fueled by the struggle against national oppression. Of course, the other result of this national oppression is that the nationalist leaders in Quebec have historically been able to divert the class struggle by presenting themselves as the champions of national rights. And so you have the contradictory situation of a workers movement that is extremely militant and organized but does not view its political interests in class terms.

Political Conclusions

So how are we as Marxists to approach this overall picture?

The first thing to understand is that the historic struggle for the Québécois nation to emancipate itself from national oppression is a progressive cause which has fueled class struggle in Canada. This cause must be supported by Marxists no less than the struggles of other specifically oppressed groups that are not strictly class-based, whether it is the struggle of women, native people, black people in the U.S. or any nationally oppressed people fighting for their emancipation.

The basic and fundamental mistake made by the IBT is that it places itself in opposition to the progressive and legitimate democratic struggles of the Québécois nation. It sees struggles to assert national rights as an impediment to the class struggle when in fact the whole history of Quebec and Canada demonstrates that it is a powerful accelerant to class struggle.

The mistake is just as crude as it would be to argue that fighting for the emancipation of women somehow distracts from the class struggle. Of course, the bourgeoisie exploits women’s oppression in all kinds of ways to blunt the class struggle. But to turn your back on the struggle for women’s rights is pure idiocy. This is not the IBT’s position, but on the national terrain it applies the same ultra-left methodology.

To recognize that the struggle against national oppression in Quebec is legitimate and a powerful motor force for class struggle is of course only the first step. The much more difficult task is to construct a revolutionary party which can unite not only English Canadians and Québécois workers but also all the other oppressed groups in Canada.

In Quebec this requires waging a resolute struggle against the Quebec bourgeoisie. Of course, this includes their attempts to pit Québécois workers against anglophones, immigrants, Muslims and native people. But it is also necessary to show how Quebec nationalists undermine the very cause they claim to represent. If Quebec is not a country, it is because of the servile and treacherous nature of its ruling class, which always puts its economic interests above the fight against national oppression.

In English Canada it is necessary to struggle against the social-democratic leaders of the workers movement, who are ultimately loyal to the ruling class. A key component of that fight must be to champion the national rights of Quebec. This is the only basis on which a binational alliance can be built. Just as it would be absurd to ask black workers to unite with white workers based on continued racial oppression, so too is it absurd to expect that Québécois workers will unite with English Canadian workers based on accepting their national oppression. At bottom, it is the historic refusal of Canadian social democrats to stand for the national rights of the Québécois that is responsible for the national division within the workers movement in Canada. It is also necessary to oppose Trudeauist liberal ideology. Trudeauism and multiculturalism, the Canadian form of liberalism, was born explicitly in order to stem the wave of national liberation, deny national rights for Quebec and mobilize immigrants, native people and other oppressed groups as a battering ram against Quebec independence.

Some Concrete Questions

From this general Marxist approach let’s get to specific questions.

If one looks at the Quebec national question with a Marxist historic lens, it is obvious that since its conquest by the British, the francophone nation of North America has fought ceaselessly against its assimilation. The natural and progressive outcome of this struggle for national existence is the formation of an independent francophone state, i.e., Quebec independence.

Short of this outcome, it is necessary to defend measures that defend the linguistic and democratic rights of the francophone minority. This includes insisting that immigrants who settle in Quebec should learn and be educated in French. This is not a privilege for French but a basic measure of self-defense against the historic policy of national assimilation by the anglophone ruling class. The Quebec language laws do not oppress the historic anglophone minority in Quebec, which remains the most privileged sector of society. Opposition to the language laws in Quebec is not a defense of the equality of languages but a defense of the privileges of English over French. The Quebec working class will never follow a party which defends this position.

Conclusion

Throughout my presentation I have sought to pedagogically explain the dynamics of the class and national struggle in Canada. I have not responded to demagogic slanders on the part of the IBT against me and other comrades from Quebec, accusing us of being unrepentant bourgeois nationalists.

If I have followed this approach, it is not because I have any doubts or illusions about the reactionary implications of the IBT’s approach to the national question, but rather because it is my internationalist duty as a Québécois communist to do the utmost to build unity across the national divide by convincing comrades from the English Canadian workers movement that it is their duty to champion the national rights of Quebec. This is a huge historic challenge which cannot be solved with epithets. Ultimately, class struggle will resolve the debate. But it is our duty now in the current preparatory period to make the political contours of this debate as clear as possible in order to build the revolutionary movement in Canada on solid foundations.