First paragraph (Teaser):

This is the first part of the booklet From Nationalism to Internationalism. We will publish it in six parts. This booklet tells the story of an activist over a period of about 35 years. His booklet is both intended as a criticism of past activities (for example, a critique of the Maoist current in which he’d long evolved) and to show that these same activities were alien to the proletariat.

Internationalists Communists of Montreal (ICM)

Rest of the text:

From Nationalism to Internationalism

Table of Contents

Introduction
My origins
My years in the dead-end of nationalism or the nation before classe struggle
Taxi drivers’ Struggle against Murray Hill
My years in the dead-end of Maoism or socialism in one country
October 1970 crisis
Other important events in Quebec and internationally that influenced me
L’Atelier Ouvrier
The In Struggle! (En Lutte!) team
1976 Olympic Games underground
Once again, the police and their mercenaries
Dissolution of the Maoist group In Struggle!
Fight against pesticides in a suburban town
Years ‘89 and ‘90: the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites
Summer of 1990 :The Mohawk bourgeoisie’s struggle against the Quebec and
Canadian bourgeoisie
Memoir that plays into the hands of bourgeois democracy
1996 socio-economic summit
Summit of the Americas Quebec City April 2001
Discovering the existence of the communist Left

Appendices
I- Basic Positions of internationalists of Montreal
II- "every man for himself"
III- Marxism and the police
IV- Terrorism, a War Weapon of the bourgeoisie
V- A circus of darkness and lies: the National Assembly
VI- from The Question of Trade Unionism in Quebec
VII- Data on major Quebec companies
VIII- Origin of the Communist Left
IX- Capitalism is dying !

"A theory of Marxism is as follows: in every historical epoch, the proletariat of any capitalist country contains, latent or active, solutions to problems of class and, better yet, international data that allow it to address specific problems.

A counterfeit, a caricature of this thesis exists as well, and this consists of inventing organizations and parties, which will then invent solutions that, although clothed in the phraseology of Marx or Lenin, are ideologies foreign to the proletariat, even if they seem to draw lessons from the Russian Revolution and other historical events. It serves to introduce among workers positions, which in the name of the revolution and the revolutionary struggle of yesterday, become the means to defend capitalist society today. "
(The Communist Left in France Contribution to a history of the revolutionary movement))

From Nationalism to Internationalism

Introduction

The purpose of this booklet is to comment on my political activity as a militant, while grounding myself on my current knowledge of Left communist positions.

My intention is to take critical stock of my past activities (for example, to critique the Maoist current in which I developed for a long period) while showing how these same activities are alien to the proletariat. In fact, I’ve written this mostly so that young workers can avoid the same pitfalls and gain an understanding of Left communist politics, the true camp of the proletariat. Learning from our struggles and past mistakes is a crucial aspect of Marxism.

I recount my life as a militant, not to highlight it but to examine the groups and political organizations that have been central to a large part of my life. For these nationalist and leftist movements have diverted and continue to divert workers and students from their struggle for socialism and internationalism. Some of this text comes from lectures in 1986. It has been revised, with important additions made from the revolutionary perspective of Left communism.
[see Appendix 1 on the basic positions of Left Communist groups].

Too much emphasis is perhaps placed on police repression in the text. But without trying to underestimate the police, I can speak of a variety of militant adventurism, cut off from the working class, practiced among other things by radical nationalists, anarchists and Maoists such as the Canadian Communist Party (Marxist-Lenninist) (CPC (m-l)) of that
time, contributing to an intensification of this repression.

However, we should not be legalistic, and keep in mind that the police have proven themselves the armed branch of the bourgeoisie, its routine defense agency, its brutality increasing as a measure of the conscious development of working class struggle.

My origins

I was born in 1946, my father a farmer and my mother a worker who had left the la Belding Corticelli factory in Point St. Charles, Montreal to live on her husband’s farm in Boucherville.

How then did I become politically involved? It’s important to understand that we don’t come into the world as revolutionaries. Social conditions, rather than family or pyschological problems, are what make us revolutionaries. There’s no denying the postive or negative influences that a family undoubtably has on the development of revolutionary ideas in an individual, but it’s the family’s class position that counts above all.

As a farmer’s son, formal schooling was a minor consideration for my father. So from the fifth grade on, he wanted me out of school to carry on the family tradition, to work the family farm, that is, to become a farmer myself. I liked school a lot, and was first in class, so I cried go back every September. Often, I’d miss the first week or two, but always ended up going back to school. This pressure from my father to quit persisted right up to the eleventh grade (Section IV today).

Work on the farm was really quite hard. From age six, I had to be up by 6:00 a.m. seven days a week, working from morning to evening, right through summer vacation, taking part in the drafting of cows all year long, and after dinner get my homework done and be off to bed early. I got very good marks in primary school, though, and did not want to become a farmer.

In the early ‘60s, an aerial view of the farmlands would have revealed an assortment of geometric shapes in varying shades of green. A few years later, these rich arable lands had been reduced to a scaley patchwork of industrial lots and warehouses, criss-crossed with ribbons of asphalt. Capitalism’s savage development had made its mark. Nostalgia of the Union paysanne didn’t affect me; to go back was impossible.

The famers had all pretty much sold their farms or had been expropriated to make way for the Trans-Canada Highway. There was no future for a farmer’s son. My father had sold his land. A terrible negotiater up against speculators with their finance capital, he sold at the lowest price of all. And so he ended up having to work as a schoolbus driver until deafness put an end to that.

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The first I’d heard of “communism” was in 1956, during the invasion of Hungary by imperialist Russia. Our teacher, under the thumb of the Catholic faith, as were almost all Québécois francophones in the ‘50s, terrified us with horror stories of Stalinists – ‘the communists’, as she called them. She told us of a Cardinal Mindszenty, condemned to life in prison in 1948. “One had to beware of these hellhounds,” she said, “who could lead us straight into Hell.” She had been right in a certain sense, as Stalinists have condemned generations of workers to the hell of State capitalism.
In life I’ve learned that our intelligence is not merely innate, but also largely acquired through our interactions with others who contribute their experience to our personal development. [see Appendix II “every man for himself”].

So I talked to neighbours about my leaving school, and especially to two of my aunts, Alice and Adrienne. I mention this to show that this wasn’t simply an individual decision. In capitalist society, the media focuses above all on the star, the business man or woman – the “self-made man”. But we develop with the help of others – parents, friends, and members of different social classes. Individuals may move from one class to another. Marx and Engels, themselves from bourgeoise origins, represented working class consciousness. Louis Laberge, worker with Canadair, became head of the FTQ. This union toad who, for his collaborative union leadership with the bosses association and various governments, was honored by the business world and by politicians at his state funeral.

In 1964, I began university courses in physics, and a major thing on my mind was the beginning of the American war against Vietnam instigated by Kennedy. He was first to send troops there. I recall long discussions with friends going so far as to disrupt classes. In early August 1964, two US destroyers ventured into North Vietnamese territorial waters, provoking retaliation by the North Vietnamese. At least, that was the American CIA’s version of affairs (the crew of the vessels involved later denied it had happened at all). The Gulf of Tonkin incident gave President Johnson the pretext for a military intervention. Later, he ordered the bombing of
North Vietnam under the guise of reprisals. They had what they needed to justify their invasion of South Vietnam and to ship hundreds of thousands of soldiers there. This was to shape a whole generation of North American and European militants.
In Vietnam in 1954, Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinists stood a strong chance of winning elections there; and so Americans would assist a Southern Vietnamese military clique in preventing those elections. This as well serves to show the futility of parliamentarism and of bourgeois elections, They are invariably subject to the bourgeoisie’s factional ambiguities or of this or that struggle between imperialisms.

The Vietnam war was one of the bloodiest conflicts between the two main imperialist blocks dominating the world in the decades following the Second World War: the USA and the USSR. 54,000 Americains and over 2.5 million Vietnamese were killed during the course of it.

Its impact thrust me into my first involvement with political militancy. This war was to last more than 10 years. I got caught up during in those years in supporting the Vietmanese national liberation struggle.

The following quote really shows how the dead-end of national liberaion struggles lead the country’s proletariat to the capitalist camps :

“The era of history when national liberation was progressive for the capitalist world ended with the First Imperialist war in 1914. The global character of capitalism in the imperialist epoch means that the apparent diversity of social formations in the world is not the reflection of a variety of different modes of production. Thus there is no need for the proletariat to adopt different strategies for revolutionary action in different parts of the globe. Marx’s work had already drawn a distinction between the mode of production and the social formations more or less corresponding to it. The historical experience of class society confirms that different social formations, the product of different histories, can exist under the capitalist mode of production but they all nevertheless are dominated by imperialism, which makes use of national, ethnic and cultural differences to maintain its own existence. Just as the social strata and traditions differ in various regions and countries, so does the way in which the bourgeoisie dominates politically. However, in every case the real power which they represent is the same: that of capitalism. Any idea that the national question is still open in some regions of the world and that therefore the proletariat can relegate its own revolutionary strategy and tactics to the background in favour of an alliance with the national bourgeoisie (or worse with one of the imperialist fronts) has to be absolutely rejected. Only when the proletariat unites to defend its own class interests will the basis of all national oppressions be undermined. Revolutionary organisations reject all attempts to prevent class solidarity through ideologies of racial or cultural separateness.”
Platform of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party 1997(IBPR)

And before that, in 1915, Rosa Luxembourg states in the Junius pamphlet (The Crisis of Social Democracy):
“For no oppressed nation can freedom and independence blossom forth from the politics of the imperialist states and from the imperialist war. The small nations, whose ruling classes are appendages and accessories of their class comrades in the large nations, are only pawns in the imperialist game played by the great powers. They too, like the working masses, are being misused as tools during the war, and will be sacrificed to capitalist interests after the war.”

Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinist party physically annhiliated most militants from the left internationalist opposition such as the Trotskyists, and in 1945, in Saigon, it helped the “foreign imperialists” to crush the Workers’ Commune. This put the Stalinist party completely under the dictates of imperialist Russia. Workers and peasants paid dearly for this compromise with French colonialism, bourgeois nationalism and Stalinism – at a cost of millions of lives. I sure wish I had known the Left Communist view on this during the 60’s and 70’s. Vietcong nationalism was compelled to oppose workers’ internationalism and to denounce the various brands of imperialism there. In Vietnam, it was chiefly the French, Japanese, American, Russian and Chinese imperialists.

In 1975, state capitalism, which already existed in the North, began to build in the South. During the ‘90s, private capital had become more and more predominant. The Vietnamese working class paid and still pays dearly for nationalism and its Stalinist leaders.

From 1964 to the end of the ‘70s, besides the war in Vietnam, several events influenced me. Here are some of them:

From 1959 to 1963, there had been a struggle between the various Stalinist parties in the so-called communist countries; there had been a split between China and Albania on the one hand and the USSR on the other. Two of these countries had even reached a stage of armed conflict – China and the USSR. The latter had ceased its diplomatic relations with China and Albania. In the USSR, as well as in China and Albania, state capitalism prevailed, even if in theory the leaders called themselves socialists or communists. At the time, I didn’t know a thing about Left communism, or even of its very existence.

1966 saw the beginning of the Chinese Cultural revolution under Mao Tse Tung, who unleashed millions of Chinese youth with the task of supposedly transforming society. In reality, it was only to consolidate Stalinist power under Mao.
"This event gave rise to one of the worst falsifications of history, which was attended with unusual fervor by bourgeois ideologues on all sides. Driven by an incredible thirst for power, Mao would hedge his bets. On the one hand, he would build on the framework of an army skilfully reorganized by the Minister of Defense pro-Maoist, Lin Biao, contingent on the planned coup, and well versed on "Little Red Book"; on the other hand, he would call for the formation of the famous "Red Guard", recruited from the layers of petty-bourgeois students, excited and lured by positions in the State. These two forces would be increasingly facing off, pulling in large sections of the proletariat, plunging the country into civil war and misery, in indescribable chaos, which was precisely Mao’s intention in order to blame the leaders and reap all the benefits. This is what he would do, for that matter, after three years of horrors under the leadership of the "great helmsman", from massacres of the population, to massive purges in the PCC, until his return to power in 1968 when he would sign the death warrant of these "Red Guards" who were fooled by his motto "Do not forget the class struggle." The death toll from fighting and famine was incalculable. But hundreds of thousands are a figure put forth by the Western media, Mao, with complete cynicism, would himself say at the end of his life that this was far from the truth!"
Our translation from French Excerpt No 269 Révolution Internationale of Communist Current International (ICC)

In 1967, Che Guevara was captured and executed in Bolivia. His “internationalism” had nothing to do with proletarian internationalism, which is the abolition of borders and nations. Guevara and Castro had advanced the national slogan “Homeland or death” a complete contradiction with the Marxist assertion: “The working class has no country”.

In 1968, the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia. A nationalist anti-Russian imperialist movement was crushed.

In the same year, we witnessed May ’68 in France with on one hand a student movement with its petty-bourgeois ideology and on the other hand the emergence of the working class with 10 million strikers. Something unheard of in 40 years…

United States during the ‘60s and into the ‘70s witnessed black revolts igniting American cities just about everywhere. Tanks patrolled the streets as the National Guard swept through black neighbourhoods in Chicago and Detroit, crushing revolts. It was a struggle for equality between blacks and whites.

One group, the Black Panthers, advocated armed struggle as the only defense against police repression. American police, including the FBI, liquidated many members of the Black Panthers.

In the ‘70s, a group of young whites, sons and daughters of the American bourgeoisie, The ‘Weathermen’, carried out bombings against American army bases and military recruitment centers. The Weathermen were an American terrorist organization founded in 1969 convinced that world communism was emerging from the Third World, rather than from the working class.

May 4, 1970, the American National Guard killed four students protesting the Vietnam war on the campus of Kent State University.

****
In Quebec, after the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959, we witnessed in the “quiet revolution” the rise of a more populist and deceptive nationalism. This quiet ‘revolution’ was an important development of capitalist relations at the State level that helped in the development of the Québécoise bourgeoisie, the state compensationg for the Québécoise capitalists’ lack of capital. The ‘Société générale de financement’ and the ‘Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec’ were created mainly for this purpose. Also, in order to serve this exploitative class, new adjustments were necessary in education and work relations. It was on this new terrain of working class exploitation that the nationalist movement had developed as far as the thesis of Souveraineté-association promoted by the PQ, in relation, naturally, with capitalists from other provinces. It is in fact a project of renegotiation of the Canadian constitution which would give a larger share to the Québécoise bourgeoisie

At Expo 67 we saw terrorist actions by the FLQ which culminated in the October crisis of 1970, several demonstrations for the right to work in French, the most important of which was McGill Français. These demonstrations, just as the FLQ action, reflected the ideological influences of the petty bourgeois and a faction of the big capitalists.

In Quebec, until the early ‘60s it was impossible to be served in French. In some parts of Montreal’s west end, even with a Francophone waitress, the customer had to speak English. To any kind job, Francophone workers very often had to be bilingual, even to sweep floors for the City of Montreal. At the University of Montreal, a French university, in the sciences, alone, 80% of books were in English and some lectures too.

I attended the noon-hour debates at university. All the bourgeois politicians came to take their turn: Jean Lesage, Premier, René Lévesque, Liberal Minister of Natural Resources, François Aquin, resigned deputy of the Liberal Party and First Independentist Member, Jean Chrétien, Doris Lussier to promote the dominant ideology. This dominant ideology was the political mindset within the framework of the bourgeois parties and of parliamentarism for modernizing the capitalist Québécois state. All these noon hour debates were prepared in a nationalist gravy of a Canadian or Québécois variety, depending on the politician invited.

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Appendix I

Basic positions of the Internationalist Communists of Montreal

* The October 1917 revolution in Russia took the first step towards real communist world revolution in an international revolutionary wave, putting an end to the imperialist war, and went on for few years after that. The failure of that revolutionary wave, particularly in Germany in 1919-23, condemned the revolution in Russia to isolation and rapid degeneration. Stalinism was into place during the 20 s, and thereafter created not communism but state capitalism centrally planned according to the doctrine of “socialism in one country” that we reject.

* Since the First World War, capitalism has been a social system in decline. It no longer has anything of progressive value to offer. It has twice plunged humanity into a barbaric cycle of crisis, world war, reconstruction, and new crisis. The theory of decadence is a point of view in dynamic movement that makes it possible to foresee the direction that world capitalism seeks to take.

* The former of Eastern Europe countries, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc., have never been communist despite bourgeois propaganda. Some of these countries are yet under a specific form of state capitalism.

* We view trade unions as organizations bound by a thousand and one threads to the state by laws, subsidies and dialogues. To change the leadership directions of the trade unions or attempt to transform the unions is impossible insofar as their links to the state are organic. This implies the rejection of the red or anarchist trade unions.

* We reject such tactics of “united front”, “popular front” and “anti-fascist fronts”. All these tactics enmesh the interests of the proletariat with those of factionsof the bourgeoisie whatever they may be, and are ultimately used to divert the working class from its revolutionary objectives.

* All nationalist ideologies, of “national independence”, of “right of self determination”, whatever their pretext, ethnic, historical, religious, etc., are a real drug for the workers. They aim to make them party to one faction or other of the bourgeoisie and lead them to pit one group of workers against the other, thus enabling them to go to war.

* The working class is the only class capable of making the communist revolution. The revolutionary struggle of necessity leads the working class into a confrontation with the capitalist state. To destroy capitalism, the working class will have to overthrow all the states and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat on a worldwide scale – the international power of the workers councils, gathering together the whole proletariat.

* “Self-management” and the “nationalization” of the economy are not the means to overthrow capitalism and progress to lead to a communist society. Communism requires the conscious abolition by the working class of capitalist social relationships and the creation of a society without the State, without class, without money, without national borders or professional standing armies.

*A first step towards this goal is the revolutionary political organization of the class consciousness proletariat and uniting us into an international political party. The role of this party will not be to seize power in the name of the working class, but to participate part in the unification of the its struggles, thus controlled by the workers themselves, and in the spread/dissemination of the communist program. Only the working class in its totality, through its own autonomous bodies, can institute socialism. This task cannot be delegated, not even to the most conscious and capable of class parties.

* We see our mandate to intervene as often as possible, according to our real forces, within our class, in order to participate in the exchange of ideas in the clarification of the proletarian program, and in building the revolutionary party.

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Appendix II

“Every man for himself”

That “Every man for himself” should characterize humanity… This is an incontestable characteristic of bourgeois man, of the“selfmade man”, man alone, and is nothing but an ideological expression of capitalism’s economic reality, and has nothing to do with "human nature". Otherwise we would have to think that "human nature" has changed drastically since primitive communism or even feudalism with its village community. Indeed, individualism made its massive entrance into the world of ideas when small independent property owners were emerging in the country and in the city (with the abolition of serfdom). The small property owner who succeeds – notably through the ruin of his neighbors – adheres with bourgeois fanaticism to this ideology, calling it "natural".
Revue Révolution internationale #62 CCI

« It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. »
Marx, « A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy », Preface