First paragraph (Teaser):

Will the election of Jean Charest's Parti Liberal du Quebec change anything for the Quebec Left? Unlikely. The Social Left's conservatism is paralleled by the Political Left's conservatism. Both are already playing the old broken record of 'the neo-liberalism onslaught' and 'the downturn in workers' struggles' to explain their own defeats and limitations.

Rest of the text:

The Quebec Left is a paradox in itself. From the outset, the future could look bright. A new party, the Union des forces progressistes (UFP), has been born to 'represent' the old and new social movements. The non-aligned leftist press has a larger press run now then ever before (1). Huge struggles have been waged in the last couple of years and new one are highly likely. But while the social and labour movements are more developed in Quebec than elsewhere on the continent (2), the Political Left, despite the so-called 'unity' process, is at an all time low. In fact, no single organised current is in a position to have a lasting influence outside of the local realm.

Whining

The victory of the Quebec Liberals is lived like a major disaster by many leftists. It's true that in their first months in power, the Liberals have made major cuts as well as other anti-social moves. But the fight back is already taking shape. A major demonstration of tens of thousands of day-care workers and parents was organised within weeks of the change of government, effectively slowing Liberal plans to change the '$5 a day' day-care program (3). Early actions by tenant unions also secured new money to help the victims of the housing crisis and to save existing social housing programs (4). Public sector unions are also gearing-up for the next round of contract negotiations. In an unusual move, the membership of the (independent) civil servant union agreed to raise dues to help build a strike fund. The problem is that, instead of building on these developments to boost the fighting mood, most of the Left is whining about the brutality of the Liberals. The question is whether we will nurture defeat or victory.

Nationalists and Social-democrats

The main current of the Left in Quebec is a politically unorganised nationalist and social democrat current. Representatives of this group can be found in the grass roots movements and at the very top of most mass organisations. While this reformist current has a diverse origin - from covert and open Parti Quebecois (P.Q.) supporters to former Marxist-Leninist cadres to Leftwing Catholics - it has blended together to form the leadership of the social movements. What both have in common is a crass pragmatism that has led most of them down the path of open class collaboration with the P.Q.. Few are willing to have an independent political life outside of their jobs as professional activists, but when they do, they generally support the P.Q. as a 'lesser evil'. Some of them do it openly, like the leadership of the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (FTQ); others do it by default, like the leadership of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) (5), whose call to beat the right-wing ADQ was a de facto call to vote P.Q..

The newest development is the UFP, which has convinced some of those people, and even some organisations (6), to openly support them or to be given the chance to address their mass memberships. However, since the UFP is not organised to reap the fruits of these developments (more on this latter), I do not think that it will go anywhere. Part of the collateral damage of the election is that the worst wing of this current - those heavily compromised with the P.Q. - will become once again politically noticeable. Already, many formerly mute bureaucrats and apparatchiks are talking about struggle and action...The question is: are they willing or even able to lead the kind of struggles necessary to beat a newly elected government?

The union of the electoral left

Few people within the nationalist and social democrat current have been faithfull enough to their old ideals to refuse the path of class collaboration and renewed support for the P.Q.. Among them are the people doing L'Aut'Journal - a nationalist pro-labour newspaper - who rejected the P.Q.'s latest turn to the right, and, at the end of the 1990s, launched an organising project that led to the short-lived Rassemblement pour une alternative politique (R.A.P.). L'Aut'Journal soon lost its control over this initiative, and this opened the door for a much more ambitious 'unity of the left' project. Within a few years, a new party was born, l'UFP, which united the social-democrats of the RAP, the 'socialists' of the Parti de la démocratie socialiste (PDS), and the 'revisionists' of the Parti communiste du Québec (PCQ).

It's hard to gauge the level of support for the new party. If we evaluate it based on electoral statistics, the level of support is pretty small (40,561 votes or just over 1 per cent). They claim to have more than a thousand members, but this does not mean much as l'UFP is not organised to have any impact in the social movements. Despite their claim to be "a party of the ballot box and of the street", they are mostly organised on an electoral basis (i.e. their clubs are organised according to provincial ridings boundaries) (7). Furthermore, while the party may be a 'party of activists' (a significant number of which are professional activists and elected officials) it is not (yet?) an 'activist party'. Their actual relationship to social struggles is similar to a traditional social democrat party : they issue supportive press releases and sometimes show-up on picket lines or at a demo with a banner. Otherwise, they do participate in Anti-Glob and Anti-War Trusts (also know as coalitions), where they play the game of respectable leftists (as opposed to those irresponsible, ultra-left anarchists), but that's about it. L'UFP may well be the 'next big thing' in student or Anti-Glob/Anti-War circles, but in the wider society, it's influence is yet to be felt.

Social anarchism

The rest of the left is even smaller, consisting of isolated radical militants, the maoists of the Red Flag (8) and the anarchists. Anarchism, taken as a whole, is probably as wide as the UFP (9) but it is not nearly as geographicaly wide-spread and it is neither organised nor united. Despite all of this, a small number of anarchists have been able to organise a few good things in the last couple of years, effectively helping struggles to move forward and to raise the profile of anarchism in the province.

Anarchists have done great work on three fronts. The first one is Anti-Glob. The fact that anarchists have been able to organise a distinct and lasting radical tendency within Anti-Glob cannot be underestimated. CLAC work, for example, not only opened-up space for radicals in the Anti-Glob mobilisations-such as the Summit of the Americas-but also had a lasting influence on the whole globalisation debate and on the issue of appropriate protest tactics.

On the immigration front, activists from No One Is Illegal - which started as a CLAC Working Group - have been able to plug into several immigration struggles, to gather support for these struggles from the social movements and to initiate the biggest demos around these issues in a few decades (if not ever). This is the first time that anarchists have established themselves on this front despite several previous attempts.

Finally, there is the housing and anti-poverty front. Anarchists have been involved in anti-poverty organising for a long time and have championed direct action for years. But it was only in the wake of the Summit of the Americas that they have been able to have an influence on the mainstream community-based movements. Key to that was the successfull establishment of a political squat by the Comite des sans-emploi in Montreal during the summer of 2001. This action opened a window of opportunity for radical grass roots activists in the mainstream tenant movement. Similar actions followed and we can now see formerly marginalized radical groups working openly in coalitions with mainstream community groups, something unthinkable only a few years back.

While these are small and fragile successes, they are something that we can build upon. While there's no easy recipe, we can see a recurring pattern emerging. First, there is no single strategy that works. What seems to work is a sometimes conflicting mix of two strategies. On one hand, there is a network of anarchists who choose to build radical, openly anti-capitalist actions and support groups to radicalise struggles from without. On the other hand, there are anarchists who would rather work inside the existing mass organisations in order to radicalise them from within. Up until now, it has been the joining of the two tendencies that seems to have strengthened anarchism within the social movements. But the real key lies elsewhere, namely, in our relation to people in struggle. We need to ask ourselves : is our participation in struggles merely a publicity stunt (to be seen) or are we there to help move struggles forward?

Which way forward?

Right now, outside of the formal leadership of the social and labour movements, no one on the left is in a position to have an influence on the class struggle. So, which way forward?

First, whether we like it or not, everyone is fully divorced from the organised working class (10). A small band of anarchists, the NEFAC collectives, and a few communists in the PCQ are the only ones who seem to be trying to make these connections. Visiting picket lines seems to be outside of the political culture of almost everyone on the Left. So, we NEFAC militants, have started doing strike support. We still lack the members and the support inside the unions, but at least we are trying to do something about it. If the left is ever to go somewhere in Quebec, it must undergo a total paradigm shift. It's not the working class who failed the left but the other way around. The organised working class outside of our tiny ranks does not need us; we need them. Unless we understand this, we'll go nowhere.

[Nicolas Phebus is a community organiser and a member of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communist in Quebec City. www.nefac.net]

This essay will appear in the next issue of "New Socialist", magasine of the canadian based New Socialist Group.

Notes:

(1) While the number of titles is decreasing, the press run is increasing dramatically. The two flagships of the nationalist and social democrat left, Recto-Verso (a bimonthly) and L'Aut'Journal (a monthly), have a press run of 80,000 and 35,000, respectively. In comparison, the biggest titles of the 1960's, Quebec Presse (a weekly) and Le Jour (a daily) sold around 30,000 copies each. Today's lefty papers are free, which makes a difference.

(2) The government estimates the number of 'autonomous community groups' at 4,000 while the unionisation rate is currently at 40.7% (27.7% in the private sector).

(3) This is a provincial day-care program where parents pay $5 per day and the government pays the rest. Under this program, the number of kids in day-care has increased by 100% in 5 years, reaching180,000 recently.

(4) The liberal government is supposed to build some 13,000 units of social housing in the next 5 years. However, they also plan to cut back in the maintenance and repair of the already-existing public housing stock.

(5) The Quebec Federation of Labour has 500,000 members, while the Confederation of National Trade-Unions has 270,000 members.

(6) An handfull of unions endorsed UFP candidates, the biggest being the Montreal Area Central Council of the CSN, which has 80,000 members.

(7) The exception being Quebec City where, in addition to riding clubs, there is a city-wide club and another one at Laval University. Other localities also have city-wide clubs.

(8) Apparently about 50 people.

(9) Sceptics should remember that anarchism's biggest 'cultural manifestation', the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, is still unmatched.

(10) To be fair, L'Aut'Journal is an important exception to this. They seem to be the voice of the 'fighting wing' of the union bureaucracy.