The following is a manifesto published by Québécois Marxists inside the party Québec solidaire (QS) who have launched a campaign to fight for socialist ideas inside the party. We encourage all socialists to support this campaign.
Québec solidaire must fight for socialism!
We are members of Québec solidaire. We are activists of the labour and student movement. We are socialists. We welcomed the creation of Québec solidaire 15 years ago because it represented a break with the old capitalist parties. The party presented open anti-capitalist aspirations, as it is still inscribed the program: “In order to allow collective and democratic control of the main economic levers of Quebec, Québec solidaire intends, in the long run, to move beyond capitalism.”
However, we are increasingly alarmed by what we believe to be a significant drift away from the radical roots of our party in a reformist direction. We believe that this is a fatal error that is leading the party into a dead end.
For us, socialism means collective ownership of the main pillars of our economy and democratic planning. Although our party leaders make statements against capitalism from time to time, it is not enough to simply be against the system in the abstract. We firmly believe that if we do not defend socialism as defined above, we are ultimately accepting the capitalist market and its logic. A future QS government that does not decisively break from the capitalist market will be forced to betray the working class and the youth, just as the Parti Québécois has done repeatedly. This will only lead to demoralization and will prepare a return of the right to power, as we have seen in Greece.
While we are concerned about the trajectory of the party, we are also resolutely optimistic. In the context of the worst crisis of capitalism, the ideas of socialism are becoming more and more popular everywhere. These ideas can easily resonate with a broad layer of people who are being left behind by the system. Thus, we believe that it is possible to turn the tide in the party and, by the same token, the class struggle in Quebec.
But we must mobilize to get there. We want to bring together grassroots activists across the party to fight for a change of course. It is with this in mind that we present this manifesto, through which we wish to launch a campaign to bring QS back to its anti-capitalist roots and steer it in the direction of socialism.
Capitalism is in crisis. There is no third way. It is socialism or barbarism! We call on activists who agree with our ideas to join us in defending a socialist perspective in QS and in the labour movement.
Adaptation to capitalism
We have to face the facts: the capitalist system is in crisis. While governments at all levels in Canada have put the system on life support, pumping unprecedented amounts of public money into the market, this cannot go on forever.
The current crisis was not simply caused by the pandemic, and there will be no “return to normal” afterwards. The global economy never really recovered from the last major crisis.
While Canada was relatively less affected by the 2008 meltdown than most countries, it is now among the countries whose debt-to-GDP ratio increased the most with the pandemic. In Quebec, the government has announced a record $15-billion deficit for 2020 alone. Sooner or later, governments will have to tighten their belts, and the capitalist class will do everything it can to pass on the bill for the historic public debt to the working class.
After the crisis of 2008, our party published a manifesto on May 1, 2009 entitled “To emerge from the crisis, should we go beyond capitalism?” In it, the party said: “Those who want to ‘restructure capitalism’ are missing the real issues. We believe that capitalism needs to be overcome, that is to say, we need to move towards radically different political, social and ecological alternatives. There is no point in trying again to repeat the circle: production, consumption, debt. This has only served to benefit the rich and powerful, whose fortunes are equivalent to the budgets of hundreds of countries.”
As the current crisis is even deeper than that of 2008, it becomes more obvious than ever that we must answer in the affirmative to the question posed by this manifesto: yes, it is necessary to go beyond capitalism. We must fight for collective ownership of the main pillars of the economy and for a democratic plan of production—in a word: fight for socialism.
Unfortunately, we have seen in recent years that QS has moved away from its anti-capitalist traditions. Without a clear alternative to capitalism being proposed, the party leadership, under the guise of being “realistic”, has taken the path of moderation and acceptance of the economic and political framework of the capitalist market.
This is what we saw at the November 2019 congress as the leadership pushed for a major step back on the question of the environment. From its inception, QS rejected measures of green capitalism. The party platform opposed false solutions “that would lead to a continuation of the status quo” and explicitly stated that carbon taxes “hit the poorest hardest” and that carbon exchanges “are tools for enriching multinationals… that risk becoming a new speculative tool.” However, the party leadership has managed to reverse this historically good position, replacing it with the old ineffective measures of green capitalism—“eco-taxation”. At a time when the climate crisis is reaching a crucial point and more and more people are realizing that green capitalist half-measures have not and will not change anything, it is very significant that the party is backtracking on this most urgent issue.
We also saw the adaptation to capitalism when the party opposed the nationalization of the hydroelectric facilities of the multinational Rio Tinto in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean (which had been exempted during the nationalization of hydroelectricity in the 1960s). This position is quite unbelievable as the nationalization was already requested by a municipal councillor in the region! The reason given by energy spokesperson Ruba Ghazal is that increasing royalties is “easier” than negotiating nationalization with the aluminum giant. Easier for the company, for sure!
On the other hand, the party recently proposed the introduction of a maximum salary—30 times that of the lowest paid employee—for the bosses of companies that receive financial support from the state. Among other things, it was mentioned that: “Alain Bellemare, president of Bombardier, is paid $12.57 million, which is 335 times the salary of their lowest paid employee. Applying the 1:30 ratio, he would earn $1.1 million. That’s a very reasonable salary for the head of a company that relies on public subsidies! Hard to see what’s reasonable about a salary – still completely absurd – for employer parasites who gorge on public money!
The acceptance of the rules of capitalism is also seen in the defence of protectionist measures that would favour Quebec companies and “our” market. For example, the party calls for measures to curb speculation by foreign buyers in real estate, although the proportion of foreign speculation in Quebec real estate remains very low and has little impact on the price explosion. The emphasis is on “food sovereignty” and defending our “autonomy”, giving the impression that businesses “from here” are less bad than those from elsewhere (ignoring the fact that many Quebec businesses exploit cheap foreign labour). This sounds a lot like the buy-local policies and promotion of Quebec businesses championed by the CAQ during the pandemic.
Faced with the real possibility that QS could take power in the coming period, the temptation to moderate ourselves to appear “reasonable” and collaborative is strong. We believe that this is precisely what is happening. And we must not take this lightly. Electoral opportunism is a poison pill that has led many left-wing parties down the path of compromise, betrayal and defeat. In this sense, the struggle for the correct party program and perspective has an important concrete mission: to avoid capitulation to the pressures of capitalism.
How can we make the rich pay?
Some may ask: what’s the big deal? QS’s platform contains many important reforms and a bold plan to tax the rich. The party continues to say, and rightly so, that it is not working people who should pay for the crisis. Last year, our spokespersons Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Manon Massé presented an “anti-austerity shield”, a series of tax measures to make corporations and the rich pay for our social programs. Doesn’t this attack capitalism?
In an interview last year, GND said that making the largest corporations pay “is not a question of opportunity, it’s a question of political courage. Does the government have the political courage to stand up to these large multinationals?” This brings us to the crux of the matter. Are we in an era where it is possible to make the rich pay without breaking with capitalism?
The last period of serious reform benefiting the working class was in the postwar period. In the 1960s and 1970s in Quebec, we won major battles to improve our living and working conditions. In fact, GND compared QS’s economic plan to postwar measures: “When societies wanted to recover from the First and Second World Wars, what did they do? They said: we have to rebuild society, we have to find money, and that’s what they did. They went and got money from the coffers of the big companies to finance the reconstruction of society. That’s what QS wants to do.”
But are we entering a new era of capitalist boom with many reforms, as we saw after the Second World War? We believe that to think so is to put our heads in the sand.
Our 2009 manifesto specifically explained that the model of the welfare state and the great postwar reforms falls under an “exceptional situation in the history of capitalism” in which “large corporations like GM, General Electric, Boeing, etc. could afford to both make concessions to their workers who were fighting for better working conditions and wages, pay taxes, and pay substantial dividends to their shareholders…” It seems that the current party leadership has forgotten our own perspectives.
Recently, GND said he did not believe that “Walmart will leave Quebec if we ask them to pay more taxes.” But even before the current crisis, a Walmart branch in Jonquière shut down when the employees unionized in 2001. If the big capitalists were prepared to sabotage the economy and sacrifice thousands of workers to avoid paying more in 2001, they are 100 times more likely to resist attempts to make them pay more now.
Marxists are 100 per cent in favour of making the rich pay and we believe that we must have the courage to do so. This means being prepared to expropriate capitalists when they refuse to pay their fair share. Therefore, QS must put forward nationalization with compensation only on the basis of proven need. We must have a plan to bring the economy under collective, democratic control; otherwise all of our plans will be destroyed by the dictatorship of capital. We believe that if we aren’t prepared to mobilize a mass movement in favour of collective ownership and socialist planning, a future QS government will be forced to capitulate.
We need only to remind ourselves that in Quebec, with the economic collapse in the 1980s that followed the boom, none other than the Parti Québécois implemented drastic austerity measures, while breaking strikes with the most brutal back-to-work legislation in the province’s history. The PQ, having no intention of breaking with capitalism to make the rich and big business pay, was forced to attack workers.
We don’t have to look that far back to see other examples of this.
Reform or revolution: The lessons of Syriza
The betrayal of the old social democratic parties like the NDP, the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party are well known. In response to this, there has been a proliferation of “new left” parties like QS that have tried to take a different path. Die Linke in Germany, France Insoumise, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece are examples. But what has been the experience of these parties in power? So far, the only one of these new parties that has managed to come to power is Syriza.
Syriza came to power in 2015 with the promise of implementing a series of reforms to improve the lives of workers. But once in power, the party hit the same wall as other social democratic parties before it. They were then forced to capitulate and to implement a massive austerity program, worse than that of the conservative government that preceded it. The Syriza government, which became very unpopular, even sent the police to suppress demonstrations against austerity! Having completely discredited itself with the workers, it was no surprise that the right wing returned to power.
During this situation, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was following these events closely and writing articles for the website Ricochet. When Greek Prime Minister Tsipras put the austerity package to a vote and the Greek people rejected it by 61 per cent, GND wrote an article entitled “Is Alexis Tsipras the best politician in Europe?” The conclusions drawn by GND in this article have been proven wrong. For example, he says, “With this referendum triumph, he has indeed solidified his positions, both against Europe and his domestic opponents.” But GND had not seen the elephant in the room. Without a plan to break with capitalism, betrayal was unavoidable—and that’s exactly what happened.
This article ends with the question, “Who says the left can’t govern?” Immediately afterwards, this “left-wing” government certainly governed—however, it governed to the right, as we pointed out above.
We need to be able to explain how “the best politician in Europe”, and a party we looked to as a guide, betrayed its principles and the Greek people so quickly.
The answer, we believe, lies in the nature of the capitalist system. It was not simply a lack of “political courage”. Tsipras, for his part, did everything possible to fight austerity within the limits of capitalism. But that was the crux of the matter: it was impossible to do otherwise without breaking with the system. It would have meant nationalizing the Greek banks and big companies, and mobilizing a mass movement to defend these measures, while calling on the European working class to support the movement—all measures that the Syriza leadership was not ready to undertake.
We must learn from this. The conclusion is clear: if we do not fight for an alternative to the capitalist system, then we will hit exactly the same wall which Syriza struck. It is therefore imperative that we, QS members, place the struggle against capitalism and for the socialist transformation of society at the heart of everything we do.
The fight for socialism
The left in Quebec has strong socialist roots. The historic giants of the Quebec left have generally all been socialists or communists of some variety who fought for a socialist transformation of society. It is therefore no surprise that the fight against capitalism was central to the founding mission of Quebec solidaire.
As capitalism has entered the worst crisis in its history, there is no reason to abandon this tradition—on the contrary, we must revive and reinforce it. This is precisely what we will be fighting for in QS and in the movement as a whole.
The horror of the pandemic has revealed the decrepitude of an economic system inherently incapable of putting human health and needs ahead of profits. And the worst is yet to come. For working class people and youth, the next period will be marked—even more brutally than what we already know—by unemployment, austerity and growing inequality. It is urgent to act! A transformation of society is necessary.
Of course, there is still skepticism on the left about the “label” of socialism. We are told: “I am not against socialism, but it is a question of image”, “People are not radical”, “Quebecers are not ready to talk about socialism”, etc.
In a very good speech given in 2011 at the dawn of the student strike, GND said this:
“These people are few in number. These people control everything. They always want to control more. These people have common interests. These people have a common political project. There was a time, in Quebec, in Canada, not so long ago, that a minority like this, that controls the political and economic institutions of a country, that shares common interests, not so long ago we would call this a class. We need to stop being afraid of words. We must call these people by their name. These people are the ruling class. These people are the bourgeoisie. The struggle against the tuition increase, the struggle of those who are indignant all over the world must be called by its name. It is a class struggle.”
In this, we completely agree with Gabriel. We must stop being afraid of words! We must return to the anti-capitalist traditions of our party and we must revive the bold socialist traditions of the Quebec left. We believe that we must clearly affirm ourselves as a socialist party, and orient our program, perspectives and all of our activities toward this vision. To refuse to fight for socialism is to accept capitalism and all of the consequences that come along with it.
Everywhere, the “centre” and establishment parties are discredited and socialism is becoming popular. The case of Bernie Sanders is the best known. Similarly, dozens of polls show a growing interest in socialism in the United States. In Canada, according to a poll conducted in 2019, 58 per cent of Canadians are in favour of socialism. Another poll conducted in September 2021 shows that 35 per cent of Canadians want to move beyond capitalism! Therefore, there has never been a better time to fight for socialism. There is no reason to think that this mood does not exist in Quebec.
Quebec has a rich anti-capitalist and socialist tradition. We must revive this tradition. We invite everyone who agrees with our ideas to join us in fighting for socialist ideas within QS and within the movement at large.
In 2021, having political courage means fighting to go beyond capitalism and build a socialist society. This is why we say: Québec solidaire must fight for socialism!
