The Quiet Revolution: A Marxist Analysis

More than 60 years after the Quiet Revolution began, all the progress and great hopes of the 1960s and ’70s are under constant attack: crumbling infrastructure, healthcare and education systems in disarray, union rights trampled on, and the French language in increasing decline. At the same time, the national question is making a notable comeback in Quebec. At the time of writing, the Parti Québécois is ahead in the polls against the lame-duck regime of Legault’s CAQ. The PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon speaks openly about sovereignty. And there is no reason to believe that this is just a flash in the pan. In fact, the current global situation is objectively leading to a resurgence of indépendantiste sentiment in Quebec, including among a growing, although still a minority, segment of youth. Indeed, the recent repeated crises around the world caused by the decline of the American empire and Trump reaction are only strengthening the movements of small nations seeking to free themselves from the yoke of imperialism. Be it the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine or Trump’s tariff threats, the entire old neoliberal world order of “free trade” and relative peace is collapsing. And with it, so is the idea of “post-nationalism” dear to Trudeau-style liberals, who have always treated Quebec’s national aspirations as reactionary tribalism. The struggle for Quebec’s national liberation will on the contrary express itself more and more as a fight against this oppressive and crumbling world order. The question will be whether the next generation of fighters for Quebec’s cause will be able to avoid the mistakes of the past and accomplish what the Quiet Revolution only half succeeded in doing: the complete and total national and social liberation of Quebec, linked to the struggle of all the oppressed peoples of the world for their liberation.

For this to happen, it is crucial to study the lessons of the Quiet Revolution. From the early 1960s until 1980, Quebec was the scene of the most intense movements of social protest: National independence was emerging as a real historical possibility for the first time since the Patriotes Rebellion (1837-38); the trade unions were talking revolution; young people were joining far left groups; artists were singing about “les temps nouveaux [new times],” etc. Simultaneously and as a result, society was making gigantic and very concrete leaps towards national liberation, women’s liberation, trade-union power, etc. The Quiet Revolution was thus uncontestably the most progressive period in the history of Quebec: In just a few years, this oppressed nation went from a clerical “Great Darkness” similar to a neocolonial regime, to a modern and advanced society. A province that had previously been completely under the thumb of its Anglo-Canadian masters and American imperialism equipped itself with the economic and social levers that had the capacity to lay the foundations for an independent state. The Catholic Church, which had dominated all aspects of social and political life, was essentially thrown out. Public education and health programs, virtually non-existent at the outset, were established. And the Quebec labour movement, the real driving force behind the entire Quiet Revolution, emerged as a key player. In short, the Quiet Revolution was indeed a revolution in the broadest sense, a collective awakening, a paradigm shift, and the “before” and “after” were tangibly different at every level.

So why has everything been in retreat since then? It is generally understood that the defeat of the 1980 independence referendum and the neoliberal turn that followed broke the momentum of the Quiet Revolution. But this observation, while factually correct, does not explain much. Why did the social movements suddenly prostrate themselves, powerless in the face of this turning point? What is generally not understood, however, is that the current stagnation in Quebec has its real roots in the only major weak point of the Quiet Revolution: the fact that Quebec’s national and social liberation was subordinated to the interests of its political and economic elites or, as we Marxists would say, the Québécois bourgeoisie. Pushed forward by the masses, these elites led the Quiet Revolution but on the basis of their own interests: to wrest some power for themselves from the Anglo-American rulers, while repressing the workers so that they would not go beyond the framework of private property and subordination to the U.S.-dominated imperialist world order. The great helmsman of the Quiet Revolution himself, René Lévesque, personified this contradiction, denouncing the exploitation of Quebec workers one day, then attacking the unions the next; denouncing American imperialism, of which the Québécois were victims, then running to Wall Street to “reassure” the financial markets!

For a complete victory, the working class would have had to take the lead in the Quiet Revolution. In other words, it would have taken a workers party to wrest the leadership of the Quiet Revolution from the hands of Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party and later René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois. But this is precisely what union leaders and the left, even the extreme left, have always refused to do. At every turn, they have instead promoted or at least conceded that the struggle of the Québécois should be led by these bourgeois forces, even if this meant fighting for socialism “after” independence...which the Quebec ruling class has never been able to achieve.

This is all the more infuriating given that it was the labour movement that was the spearhead, the backbone and the dynamic energy of the nation that made the Quiet Revolution a reality. Ever since the 1949 Asbestos strike, it was the working class of Quebec that was the core of all the strong points of the Quiet Revolution, the most progressive period in Quebec’s history. From the early days of industrialization and the union struggles at the turn of the 20th century, workers had become a force to be reckoned with. At the same time, the Québécois capitalists remained largely insignificant village notables, in every way subordinate to the big English-speaking capitalists who controlled key sectors of Quebec’s economy. The state reforms of the Quiet Revolution were a break with this total subordination and benefited all Québécois. The reforms—the establishment of nationally controlled financial and economic institutions, the nationalization of hydroelectricity, the public health care system, a modern education system, advances for women, etc.—were all the result of the impetus of the working class. It was on the backs of workers’ struggles that the Quebec elite were able to rise and carve out a more comfortable place for themselves vis-à-vis their rivals, eventually becoming the leaders of “Quebec Inc.”

This tension between the drive of the workers on one side and the narrow interests of the elite on the other had always been present in the Quiet Revolution. In fact, the more Quebec’s “democratic catch-up” was resolved, the more the irreconcilable nature of the interests of workers and bosses came to the fore, and the more the underlying class conflict became acute and explosive. The task of the left during this period should have been to advance the working class’ aspirations for liberation, setting them against the nationalist bourgeois leadership—and the union bureaucracies that supported it—by demonstrating that the latter were in fact an obstacle to national and social progress. A revolutionary party was needed to win the leadership of the working class on this basis, demonstrating that only such a leadership would be capable of bringing the national and social aspirations of the Québécois to fulfillment through a struggle to win workers’ power. But in the absence of such a workers’ pole seeking to wrest leadership of the national liberation movement from the Québécois bourgeoisie, it was ultimately the capitalist class under the leadership of the Parti Québécois that was able to break the momentum of the workers movement with its savage attacks on public sector unions in 1982-83 and reverse the progressive dynamic of the Quiet Revolution.

In essence, the failure of the Quiet Revolution is also the failure of the Quebec left, which could not apply the lessons of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 to the Quebec context so that the Quiet Revolution could become a revolution in its own right. To do so, it would have been necessary to understand and apply the methodology of permanent revolution developed by Leon Trotsky on the basis of the experience of the Russian Revolution. Indeed, Lenin’s Bolsheviks did not simply bring the Russian working class to power by shouting “revolution!” No, for years they fought for the class independence of the workers from the liberals in the struggle against the tsarist autocracy. This was crucial to demonstrate that only the proletariat fighting for power could wage a consistent struggle for the resolution of democratic questions (the reforms in the political system and the economic and social reforms that were a necessity for Russia), especially agrarian reform and the liberation of the oppressed nationalities in the Russian empire. They showed the working class through its own experiences that the liberal bourgeoisie, its provisional government resulting from the February Revolution and its Menshevik and Social Revolutionary conciliators in the workers movement stood as obstacles that had to be swept away in order to resolve the burning democratic issues. In the words of Bolshevik leader Trotsky: “the national current, like the agrarian, was pouring into the channel of the October revolution” (“The Problem of Nationalities,” The History of the Russian Revolution). Crucially, the Bolsheviks had split from the reformist wing of the workers movement which sought to conciliate the liberal bourgeoisie. This enabled the Bolsheviks to win the leadership of the working class on a genuinely revolutionary basis.

The Quebec of the Quiet Revolution was obviously very different from tsarist Russia. But there was a similar accumulation of unresolved democratic questions, all stemming from the fact that Canada was founded on the oppression of the Québécois nation. For the Quiet Revolution to go all the way, the working class would have had to break with all wings of the Québécois bourgeoisie and fight to take control of society under a workers republic of Quebec. But the Québécois and Canadian left were never able to put forward such a proletarian, independent and revolutionary leadership. Unable to link the “national question” and the “social question” on a genuinely revolutionary basis, all these groups capitulated either to the nationalist bourgeoisie, advancing a program to ally with and pressure it, or to the Anglo-chauvinist Canadian bourgeoisie, like the Maoists who denied the progressive aspect of the national liberation struggle in the name of a totally rigid reading of Leninism, reducing it to a caricature. This flaw was not unique to the Maoists, by the way. Many Trotskyist groups, including the Trotskyist League at the time, also fell into the same trap. Some small groups sometimes came close to a correct theoretical analysis of Quebec and the Quiet Revolution, but did not know how to apply it, which meant directly challenging the pro-capitalist leaders of the labour movement.

Leftist groups have long broken their heads over this contradiction of a bourgeoisie that paradoxically made progressive advances while playing a reactionary role. First of all, the Communist Party of Canada, which claimed to carry the banner of the October Revolution in Quebec, had always opposed independence and got rid of most of its Quebec members in 1947 for suspected “nationalist deviations.” The first Trotskyists, who represented the true revolutionary and internationalist continuity of the October Revolution, defended the international lessons of Bolshevism but did not apply them in Quebec; nor did they take a position in favour of national liberation. Moreover, they were simply not a factor in Quebec at the onset of the Quiet Revolution. When the Trotskyists finally established themselves in Quebec and began to call for national liberation, they were unable to effectively combat the nationalist bourgeoisie and its labour lackeys. Similarly, the other radical left-wing groups that emerged during the Quiet Revolution, including Parti pris and the FLQ [Front de libération du Québec], also capitulated in practice to these nationalist elites. But we will come back to that later.

National question or social question? For the left, everything boiled down to this seemingly insoluble schema: fight for independence by supporting the Québécois bourgeoisie or reject the struggle for Quebec liberation on the pretext of opposing the Québécois capitalists. More than 60 years after the beginning of the Quiet Revolution, it is this false dichotomy that still dominates the Quebec left. To free itself from its impotence, the left must fight against this. We must apply the real lessons of the Quiet Revolution and struggle to lay the foundations for a revolutionary leadership of the Quebec working class. This will not be easy, given all the time that has been lost, but it is vital. And that is the purpose of the study we present in these pages—a result of the political struggle the International Communist League, of which the Trotskyist League is the section in Quebec and Canada, has waged to reclaim a genuinely Leninist position on the national question and the struggle for permanent revolution (see Spartacist [English edition] No. 68, September 2023).

The Social Roots of the Quiet Revolution

To understand the course of the Quiet Revolution, it is necessary to first understand how the pre-1960s social structure of Quebec was the product of the English conquest and, more directly, of the defeat of the 1837-38 rebellions of the Patriotes. Quebec’s social and democratic backwardness, which stemmed from its national oppression and conditioned the entire course of the Quiet Revolution, was the result of the failure of this attempt at bourgeois-democratic revolution against British colonialism and its monarchical tyranny. The historic events of 1837-38 shaped the fundamentally reactionary character of the Quebec bourgeoisie, the tasks of the proletariat that would develop over the next 100 years and the class relations that existed in Quebec at the dawn of the Quiet Revolution.

The reformers of Upper and Lower Canada (which later became Ontario and Quebec, respectively) fought for democratic republics, the separation of church and state, agrarian reforms, and equal rights and citizenship for all (all men, at least). The English Canadian radicals understood that the French Canadians’ struggle for national sovereignty was inseparable from their own democratic struggle. The revolutionary assembly in Toronto, for example, passed a resolution stating:

The rebellions were indeed the last time that French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians were truly united in a progressive struggle. They were crushed in blood by British armed forces, their leaders hanged or exiled. The oppression of Quebec became part of the very fabric of Canada. Francophones, who had then formed the majority of the population, were placed in a political minority under the 1840 Act of Union with a conscious assimilationist objective, as advocated by Lord Durham in his infamous report following the rebellions:

Wielding this elitist and racist contempt, the British colonial rulers also made sure to pit the two national groups against each other to prevent any further joint struggle against the British monarchy and for the national sovereignty of French Canadians.

The triumphant Anglo-British ruling class established a new “pact” with the Catholic Church, tolerating the language and religion of French Canadians on condition that the clergy guarantee that they would remain docile and never revolt again. Hence the colossal weight that the Catholic Church acquired in Quebec until the Quiet Revolution. For nearly 125 years, it was the “guardian” of national identity, albeit in a completely reactionary manner, i.e., based on maintaining the national oppression of Quebec and the Roman Catholic faith. From then on, from cradle to grave, every aspect of the Québécois people’s social life was subject to the omnipotence of the priests, including schools, hospitals, cultural productions and the bedroom. Women in particular paid the price, subjected to the most abject oppression.

The Patriote leaders themselves were mainly from the petty bourgeoisie: notables and members of the liberal professions inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. But it was the Québécois bourgeoisie (the class of French-speaking business leaders which was just emerging at the time) that would have immediately benefited from the social relations that the rebellions of the Patriotes would have established: the formation of a nation-state, the development of a domestic market, freedom of enterprise and trade, etc. This defeat therefore also conditioned the stunted development of the Quebec bourgeoisie. Itself suffering national oppression, it developed in a state of subordination and dependence on the rising imperialist powers in the second half of the 19th century (first the British, and later the Americans) as well as their partners in English Canada. National oppression provided even more favourable conditions for foreign capital in the industrialization process, which in turn accelerated the emergence of a powerful Québécois proletariat. By the time something resembling a distinct French-speaking bourgeois class had emerged in Quebec, it was already caught in a vise between foreign imperialism on one side and the Quebec working class on the other. It was no longer in a position to play any independent role in liberating the nation.

Indeed, the defeat of the Patriotes and the subsequent development of the bourgeoisie confirmed, in the context of Quebec, Marx’s assessment after the 1848-49 revolutionary wave in Europe: The historically progressive role of the bourgeois class was over. Faced with unfinished democratic tasks on the one hand, and on the other, a proletariat that had entered the revolutionary arena and simultaneously threatened to undermine capitalist class interests, the German bourgeoisie, for example, preferred to side with feudal reaction in order to crush the working class. Similarly, even though the Québécois bourgeoisie also had an interest in national emancipation, any serious struggle along these lines risked unleashing the proletariat against its fundamental class interests. This made it a reactionary class, bitter about its national oppression but generally complacent in its role as local henchman for the imperialists.

The programmatic conclusions Marx drew after 1848-49 apply equally to Quebec. Speaking of the German workers, Marx said:

In other words, the working class must no longer subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie under any circumstances, not even in the initial stage of accomplishing democratic-national tasks but must fight completely independently of the bourgeoisie to accomplish these democratic tasks in a continuous (permanent) struggle toward the seizure of power and for socialism. This is also the program that should have guided revolutionaries throughout the Quiet Revolution.

It was only with the arrival on the scene of the working class, bringing its own class interests to the forefront of society, that Quebec’s national liberation once again became a historical possibility. But this struggle was no longer led by the bourgeoisie, whose historical task is simply to establish a nation-state; it was now led by the working class, whose historical tasks are socialist and whose fundamental interests clash with those of the bourgeoisie. The real driving force behind the Quiet Revolution was indeed the workers, whose social and national aspirations “poured into a single current,” breaking the reactionary political structure inherited from the defeat of the Patriotes and opening the path to independence and socialism.

After World War II, the old European colonial empires, including the British, were in tatters and national liberation struggles were breaking out all over the world. It was against this backdrop that struggles erupted in Quebec, where the working class had achieved a level of organization and strength sufficient to challenge the regime in power. Its massive strikes and hard-fought struggles, although often triggered by basic economic demands, immediately confronted the entire reactionary political structure: English-speaking bosses, a subordinate French-speaking bourgeoisie, and the Catholic Church, which was completely intertwined with state power and supported the whole edifice. Under the regime of Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale, all the tensions in Quebec society were pushed to their limits and reached a tipping point. The strikes of the Asbestos miners (1949), the Louiseville weavers (1952), and the Murdochville miners (1957) almost immediately escalated to the point of confrontation with the government itself and they polarized the whole of society.

The enlightened petty bourgeoisie also sided with the working class. Already in 1948, the Refus global manifesto laid the groundwork for an intellectual revolt against Duplessis. But it was the workers’ struggles that would, in a way, give these intellectuals the means to achieve their ambitions. A young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard and the London School of Economics and now back in Quebec, wrote about the Asbestos strike the following year:

This (admittedly rather pompous) prose is none other than that of…Pierre Elliott Trudeau (“Epilogue,” The Asbestos Strike, 1956, English edition, 1974)! It is not by chance that Trudeau, later one of the most hated figures in Quebec history, was able to walk alongside workers on the picket lines in Asbestos at the time. In fact, a whole layer of future personalities of the Quiet Revolution—from Trudeau to René Lévesque to Michel Chartrand—cut their teeth in the labour movement before the Quiet Revolution. This clearly demonstrates what more or less everyone was saying at the time: It was the working class that was profoundly shaking up Quebec and paving the way for progress. It was only a question of: “Where will this lead us?” and, above all, “Who will take the lead in this outpouring of combative energy?” When Duplessis died in 1959, Quebec was already on the verge of social explosion...and everyone knew it.

The First Dead End: Support for the Liberal Party

Jean Lesage’s Liberals ran in the 1960 election under the slogan “It’s time for a change!” But social change was already well underway, and it had reached a point of no return. The success of Jean Lesage and his Liberal Party was that they had the foresight to realize that “we, the Quebec ruling class” must take the lead in this movement, use it for our own ends, and keep it within the limits we impose on it. The contradictory role and position of the Québécois bourgeoisie could not be clearer. It was not the driving force for social change and national emancipation; it was the working class that gave it the impetus and confidence for this. But the bourgeoisie also had its own interest in national emancipation and in placing itself in a better position vis-à-vis the English-speaking imperialists. Lesage explained these interests clearly in his message to Quebec capitalists in the run-up to the 1960 elections:

When Lesage spoke of the Union Nationale “blocking the path to economic progress” and of its “favouritism” and “abuses,” everyone understood that he was referring to the despised policies of the Duplessis regime, which was closely allied with the clergy: anti-unionism, brutal methods against all forms of opposition and, above all, policies that squandered Quebec’s resources for the benefit of American and English Canadian companies. Lesage told the Québécois bourgeoisie that things had to change, that we must favour “our” economic development, that of the Québécois capitalists. At the same time, he understood that the Québécois bourgeoisie had to place itself at the head of the opposition to Duplessis and the democratic and national aspirations that were driving the working class forward in order to channel all this toward its own class interests. Otherwise, this movement could indeed overthrow it as well.

The fact that the social and national aspirations of the working class were channeled into support for the Liberal Party was by no means predetermined, and the responsibility for this betrayal rests squarely on the shoulders of the union leadership of the time. They had all been educated in the school of labour conservatism. On the one hand, there were the leaders of the “international unions” affiliated with the American Federation of Labor or the Congress of Industrial Organizations, who were hostile to the national demands of the Québécois people and followed the conservative and anti-Communist directives of their bureaucracies in the United States. On the other hand, there were the leaders of the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC, predecessor of the CSN union federation), who were organically linked to the Catholic Church and preached “good relations” between bosses and workers. Both tendencies sought in one way or another to balance the interests of workers with those of the leaders of Quebec’s reactionary regime in order to maintain “social peace.” To give just the most glaring example of this perspective of class collaboration, we’ll quote the first constitution of the CTCC, which stated:

It was under immense pressure from the union rank and file that such arch-conservative leaderships were forced into struggle. From the Asbestos strike, where workers defied calls from the CTCC leadership to submit to arbitration, to the Louiseville strike, where the leadership backed down in the face of a potential province-wide strike, to the Murdochville strike, all the major conflicts that triggered the Quiet Revolution went well beyond the intentions of the labour leadership of the time.

Thus, it was not the union bureaucracies that were driving the working class forward, quite the contrary. Absolutely committed to maintaining the capitalist order on the one hand, but in the most immediate contact with the force pushing against the limits of that order on the other (the workers), the union leaders were simply on the crest of the rising wave of the working class that was crashing against the reactionary regime in Quebec, and they were therefore the first to respond and adapt. They did so in the most conservative way possible: by offering the Québécois bourgeoisie a way out to resolve the problems raised by the working class in a way that would remain firmly within the limits of the capitalist order. Thus, the political program put forward by the unions in the second half of the 1950s—essentially a reformist-nationalist program in health, education, the nationalization of certain resources, and the “readjustment” of federal-provincial relations within the framework of the constitution—were, for all practical purposes, identical, line by line to the electoral platform that brought Jean Lesage to power.

Some analysts from the Quebec left—foremost among them Roch Denis, a former member of the Groupe socialiste des travailleurs du Québec—lament the fact that the union actions of the 1950s did not lead to the creation of a social-democratic party (such as the NDP) in Quebec (see Denis’ otherwise highly informative book on the Quiet Revolution cited above). Anyone with a truly Marxist understanding of class relations and the development of the Quiet Revolution should immediately grasp how futile this endeavour would have been. Moreover, all attempts to create an organizationally independent expression of the working class on the basis of a reformist program have failed in Quebec. Given the very dynamics of the Quiet Revolution, it was the nationalist bourgeoisie that had an interest in implementing reforms and putting the program of social democracy into practice. The Liberal Party really only had to pick the fruit that the union leadership had ripened for it over the years. Hence Jean Lesage’s message to the unions before the elections:

In other words, Lesage called for unity in the national struggle rather than division along class lines. At the end of the 1950s, a large part of Quebec’s union leaders were in fact in favour of the new labour party that was being formed in Canada (the future NDP). But this project presupposed the abstention of the Québécois union movement on the question of Quebec’s national rights, which would always be ignored, or even denounced, by English Canadian labour leaders. Lesage pointed out that his program of social reforms was in line with that of the unions and that he could implement it now, so why waste time creating a workers party? Lesage’s Liberals therefore urged the unions to join the national movement...under his leadership!

The unions rallied to these arguments. No labour party contested the 1960 elections and the union leaders gave at least implicit support to the Liberals, support that would become explicit in the coming years. Yet the choice should not have been reduced to either building a social-democratic party disconnected from the national struggle or supporting a member of the upper bourgeoisie (and a federalist!), Jean Lesage, as the nation’s great helmsman. His slogan “Maîtres chez nous [masters in our own house]” actually meant that Québécois bosses would be the half-masters of a Canadian province.

The left should have shown that the price of an alliance with Jean Lesage was to sacrifice the nation’s and the workers’ interests. It had a duty to resist the very strong pressure to simply follow in the wake of the Liberal Party and the national elites. On the contrary, it was necessary to break this alliance and build a workers party by opposing the Liberals with a program that corresponded to the social and national interests of the working class, for the workers to be “masters in their own house,” that is, a program for the Workers Republic of Quebec!

The Reforms of the Quiet Revolution

In 1962, the Liberals called an election focused on the nationalization of electricity. In his speeches, Jean Lesage presented nationalization as the “key” that would make it possible to counter the “economic colonialism” supported by the “political clique” of the “roi nègres [leaders like Duplessis]”; nationalization would allow the whole population of Quebec to “determine its own economic future” (quoted in Stéphane Savard, Hydro-Québec et l’État québécois 1944-2005 [2013]). Calling for the nationalization of electricity combined with their campaign slogan “Maîtres chez nous!”, Jean Lesage’s “équipe du tonnerre [dream team]” and his star minister René Lévesque spoke directly to the national aspirations of the working class. The labour movement was already well harnessed to its class enemy when the Liberal Party took power in 1960, but this time the leaders of the trade unions openly called to vote “for the nationalization of electricity,” which simply meant voting Liberal. This was the culmination of the subordination of the working class to the Quebec bourgeoisie during this period.

The Québécois bourgeoisie had every interest in modernizing Quebec’s social structure. It needed engineers, a state bureaucracy and educated technocrats, and a health care system capable of meeting the minimum requirements of an advanced industrial society. Teaching Latin and Thomist philosophy to the educated petty bourgeoisie is useful for training priests who can debate the sex of angels; it is less useful when it comes to building hydroelectric dams and high-voltage power lines or handling economic statistics. To be sure, the nationalization of electricity in Quebec was “a highly progressive measure of national self-defense” (to use Trotsky’s words when he spoke of the similar case of oil nationalization in Mexico). Hydro-Québec, the subsequent development of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and the centralization of political and economic power in the hands of the government: To the extent that these reforms were directed against the national oppression of Quebec, they were fundamentally progressive. This is what enabled Quebec to have the economic base necessary for a future independent state and to finance the catching-up of the Québécois relative to English Canadians.

The nationalization of electricity in Quebec was a measure that ran counter to the interests of some imperialists (such as the eleven companies that were nationalized), but it remained, necessarily, within the framework of domination by imperialism and finance capital. Jean Lesage was very clear about his motives at the beginning of the 1962 election campaign, when he said:

Even though the Quebec bourgeoisie had already nationalized the Montreal area’s electricity grid and created Hydro-Québec in 1944, the economic development of the entire territory and of its own private enterprise continued to elude it almost entirely. It needed an anchor in the industrial and commodity production process from which it could influence its own development. Electricity, a strategic commodity in almost constant demand and with the greatest development potential in all of northeastern America, seemed a logical and necessary choice. To buy back the foreign companies that owned the fragmented power grid, Jacques Parizeau went to…Wall Street (after being flatly rejected by all Canadian banks) and borrowed $300 million to buy back these companies listed on…Wall Street. Willis Armstrong, then right-hand man to the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, had this to say about nationalization: “I was amused by the fact that people talked it up as something that might get everybody angry, and you know our position had been, if you pay for it, you have the right to do it.” He added:

Do we emancipate ourselves nationally from the imperialists by becoming indebted to them, allowing them to strangle us? No, obviously not! In the case of the nationalization of electricity, the Quebec bourgeoisie, backed by the strength of the working class, managed to take advantage of this relative and temporary complacency of American imperialism. But these nationalizations under capitalism are not the program of socialists. Revolutionaries defend these measures, not because they are a step that will “gradually” lead to socialism, but because the defense of oppressed nations against imperialism is inexorably linked to the revolutionary struggle. The proletariat had an interest in supporting the nationalization of electricity, not because it was a step toward socialism, but simply because it benefited Quebec’s national sovereignty. At the same time, the nationalization carried out by the bourgeoisie served to contain and hold back the struggle of the proletariat, rallying it behind Lesage’s Liberals. With the support of the trade-union leadership, this ensured that the workers did not go beyond the limits imposed by the ruling class. Because of the latter’s position as a propertied class, it cannot wage a decisive struggle against imperialism, to which it is bound by a thousand ties, without calling into question the foundations of its own class domination in private property. And it is pushed ever more into the arms of the imperialists by the working class fighting for its own interests. In fact, nationalization was the highest point of the great reforms of the Quiet Revolution. Its implementation, along with the support of the treacherous labour leaders and the absence of a revolutionary pole, actually allowed the Quebec bourgeoisie to better betray the struggle for national liberation (independence) in the long term, a theme that would recur throughout the Quiet Revolution.

The fact is, the national bourgeoisie’s leadership of the national liberation struggle will always be timid and limited. What was needed was an independent proletarian movement, a workers’ bloc fighting against the liberal leadership of the Quebec elites by mobilizing to implement nationalizations by the workers’ own methods, preserving their political independence from the bourgeoisie and carrying out reforms through class struggle means. To advance the interests of the working class in defense of reforms and in opposition to the liberals, including on the electoral level, a workers party would have fought for the working class to take the leadership of the movement to win what it was due: first and foremost Quebec independence (which, incidentally, no wing of the bourgeoisie was fighting for at the time); but also the cancellation of the debt for which the bourgeoisie has made the workers pay; and the expropriation without compensation of the electric companies, as well as other key sectors of industry, mining, banking, transportation, etc. Promoting and advancing such measures would have exposed bourgeois nationalism as an obstacle to the national liberation struggle and to the promotion of the interests of the working class. Instead, the price paid for the subordination of the union bureaucracy and the nationalist left to Jean Lesage’s program was to ensure that the central economic interests of the bourgeoisie would not be challenged and that Quebec’s national emancipation would remain incomplete.

Fundamentally, the same conclusions apply to the social reforms of the Quiet Revolution and the struggle for women’s emancipation. The sociologists behind the Castonguay-Nepveu Commission report (which led to the 1970 health insurance reform) themselves spoke of the need to attack the social roots of ill health in poverty and general living conditions. Similarly, the Parent report on education recommended free education through university to train citizens capable of participating fully in political life and societal decisions while nurturing a nascent national industry with a skilled workforce at all levels. Indeed, solving health and education problems cannot be done solely at the level of managing institutions and administrative structures, but has to involve every aspect of society from physical infrastructure to working conditions, housing, research, the cultural level of the population and so on. But even carrying out such basic reforms will raise the hostility of Anglo-Canadian and American capital (and their allies among Quebec capitalists). Once again, leaving responsibility for such reforms in the hands of one or another party of the Québécois bourgeoisie guarantees defeat. The working class certainly has an interest in supporting any reforms of this kind that may nevertheless be achieved. But it must above all mobilize on an independent basis, fully aware that the Quebec bourgeoisie and its political representatives will betray it under pressure from capital.

Subordinating the working class to the “progressive” parties of the Quebec bourgeoisie (the Liberals and then the PQ) meant condemning the reforms of the Quiet Revolution to remain firmly within the limits imposed by the Québécois bourgeoisie including: modernizing the completely dilapidated social services that were holding back the development of the Québécois bourgeoisie itself, developing a health care system to maintain a workforce that could be exploited at the lowest possible cost, and developing an education system to train a workforce that was just competent enough to meet the needs of the market, again at the lowest possible cost.

Once again, it was not the bourgeoisie that was the driving force behind these changes. It was only the impetus of the militant proletariat, which had become hostile to the clergy, that forced the bourgeoisie to get rid of the latter as a tool of social control and giving it a point of support for major social reforms. Not only had the clergy become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces as a whole, but it had itself become one of the main causes of the constant revolt that was shaking the entire base of society. It no longer fulfilled its role of maintaining a docile and submissive working class, and the bourgeoisie had to get rid of it in order to continue to contain the working class and suppress its drive.

The more the issues of Quebec’s “democratic” backwardness were resolved (with the end of medieval Catholic institutional control over society, or access to education in one’s own language), the more the social aspect of these issues was raised, and the more the clash between capitalist interests and those of the working class became apparent. Relying on the Liberal Party for social progress only served to shackle the motor force behind these advances, the working class, diverting it from the only path to advancing its aspirations. Marxists would not only have fought to break the working class from the nationalist bourgeoisie, but would have also waged a struggle against all political forces that sought to maintain unity with them. Ultimately, despite Quebec’s real social progress during this period, all the deep aspirations that animated workers and the oppressed were inevitably disappointed at the end of the Liberal years. These aspirations would erupt in even more “explosive” ways in the years that followed, only to be disappointed even more drastically by the years of PQ rule.