Convergence Through Practice 1: The New Left

(New) New Left?: radical considerations in Canada and Quebec from the post-1968 moment to today

Mike Mowbray

Introduction

This paper begins with so-called ‘New Left’ in the particular context of Canada and of Quebec — as seen through the lens of some radical publications. I will begin with a note on the notions of the ‘New Left’ itself, and with a thumbnail sketch of the local socio-political developments and prominent aspects of radical contention relevant to the Quebec-Canada context. Subsequently, I examine some ideas and expressions of the New Left, as emerged in the pages of the twin Montreal publications Our Generation and Noir et Rouge in the explosive climate of the later 1960s, a period referred to in French as “les annees 1968.” Discussing the notion of the “revolutionary youth movement” (and its early theorization by Quebec sociologist Marcel Rioux in particular) in relation some of the broader currents and debates in Quebec left radicalism at the time, I hope to indicate some of contours of this particular case. In so doing, I will point to some aspects of convergence, and of friction, between Marxist and anarchist-influenced interpreters of what many saw as a potentially revolutionary historical moment — particularly over questions of nationalism, organization and counter-culture, considerations which I hope to show have molded some of the problematics exemplified in the radical press today. In concluding, I will try to touch on a contemporary counterpoint, flipping the calendar forward 35 years from the end point of this extended historical moment, and note recent efforts to conceptualize a ‘New New Left’ in the pan-Canadian journal Upping the Anti. Finally, I bring the discussion back to Quebec. In this particular context, I suggest (drawing on the anarchist publications Ruptures and La Mauvaise Herbe) that although the contemporary anarchist contributions have predominantly rejected Quebecois nationalism (at least explicitly), many current tensions — particularly over organization and the debates pitting ‘social’ or class-struggle against ‘lifestyle’ or radical-pluralist (and often ‘counter-cultural’) anarchism — remain as vestiges of the New Left problematic exemplified by recourse to the “revolutionary youth movement.”

New Left: ‘les annees 1968’ in Quebec & ‘the revolutionary youth movement’

‘New Left’ is a term broadly applied to those movements and political ideas which emerged in opposition to both “an ‘obsolete communism’ and a ‘sold-out social democracy‘(McKay 2005:183)” during the 1960s and 70s. Highlighted internationally by such paroxysmal moments as May 1968 and the Chicago Democratic National Convention, a typical New Left politics rejected Western industrial capitalism (associated with American imperialism, conformity and crass exploitation) as well as the ‘real-existing’ socialism of the USSR (in light of the 1956 revelations and an analysis of Soviet bureaucratic statism). Very generally, elements of the New Left sought to transcend the alienation of the individual in economic, cultural and psychological terms through creative action and the progressive elimination of both structural constraints and institutional authority, and tended also to prioritize decolonization and an end to military aggression.

In Canada, as elsewhere, the New Left moved away from previous political formations’ emphasis on the industrial proletariat as revolutionary agent, and from the state-planning socialism of the traditional CCF/NDP (Canada’s leftmost parliamentary party). Many New Left expressions tended to be marked by a spontanaeist tendency, and an anticipatory orientation — outlining a prefigurative politics supplemented by ‘direct action’ or protest that sought to confront the repressive authority of prevailing ‘bourgeois’ institutions and evade the hollow homogenaeity of cookie-cutter consumerism (McKay 2005).

In Quebec, the influence of May 1968 — which one might expect to be great given shared language and national history — was largely secondary to American influences, counter-cultural and political and to endemic tendencies tied to a newly awakened Marxist and anti-colonial consciousness. The province has a large francophone majority which has always been conscious of its subordinate position in both pre-and post-Confederation Canada, and young radicals increasingly came to view this as analogous both to Third World colonization and, famously, to the situation of American blacks — a position propounded by Pierre Vallieres in his book ‘Les Negres Blancs d’Amerique.’ By the mid-1960s, a concerted ‘independantiste’ movement, itself highly divided, had taken hold, and life in Montreal was marked by the simmering low-level terrorist activities of the Front de Liberation de Quebec (FLQ).

The so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960s saw secular soft-nationalist elements in the provincial Liberal party pull the province of out of its decidedly conservative Catholic past in favor of a technocratic planning-state which quickly built up a Keynesian base for the social and economic betterment of the Quebecois and ushered in an intense cultural liberalization. The period was also marked by significant radicalization and consolidation of peace, students,’ workers,’ and feminist groups in Quebec, simultaneously and sometimes in conjunction with Quebec national-liberation movements linked to a logic of decolonialization and which saw the progress of the Quiet Revolution as decidedly insufficient. The case of the New Left in Quebec is complicated by the national movements’ sparring ideological stances, drawing on anti-colonial discourse and a hard-wrought sense of national (collective) identity forged in the crucible of the relative cultural and economic marginalization of the province’s French-speaking majority — and by tensions between these movements and a broader pan-Canadian ‘New Left.’

Periodization is, of course, a problematic exploit, particularly with respect to the New Left, so often lumped under the banner of a decade — the 1960s — or focused on a single year, 1968. For the sake of expediency, I frame my discussion in terms of the rough periodization of ‘les annees 1968,’ (the 1968 years) comprising roughly 1968–1970. This is a period marked by an intense demographic spike — the ‘baby — boom’ generation — and the extension of educational opportunities to portions of the population previously excluded, which concentrated much of the action in the student milieu. Commentators on ‘les annees 1968’ in Quebec point to radicals’ emphasis on ‘direct action’ and the refusal of cooperation or ‘participation’ (in rupture with prior left student union lobbying) which invoked spontaneism, utopian idealism and intense collective frustration. The very concept of representative organization was put in question, as the main student union, UGEQ, dissolved itself as “unrepresentative,” and failed to reconstitute. Here we see a portion of the student or ’youth’ constituency engaging a loosely ‘anarchist’ (more properly radical libertarian) current common to the less politically astute Cohn-Bendit and Jerry Rubin-inspired protesters — though often with a minimum of conceptual articulation. As one ‘contestataire’ put it “L’anarchie, c’est faire ce que tu es, et rien d’autre (Paiement 1969, cf. Warren 2008a: 117). In this context, tensions emerged not only among Quebec left-nationalist movements and between such movements and a broader ‘New Left,’ but also between different Marxist and anarchist-influenced interpreters of revolutionary prospects for ‘les annees 1968,’ and between the less articulated politics of an explosive counter-culture and those who sought a well-considered path to social revolution.

Actions at post-secondary institutions (and many high schools) were prominent, including a widespread student strike in Quebec junior colleges (or CEGEPS) in 1968, numerous occupations and confrontations with institutional administrations, government, and sometimes police, capped by the so-called “Operation McGill francais,” in which 12,000 people demanded official unilingualism and that the prestigious university (McGill) be put in service of the francophone majority. A high point of radical popular contestation, ‘les annees 1968’ brought together a host of immediate demands (for free schooling, unilingualism, better terms of collective bargaining) and wider political objectives (national liberation and independence, an end to capitalist exploitation, cultural liberalization). The October 1968 student strikes and occupations in Quebec (mainly centered in Montreal), while often invoking the name and organizing frame of anarchism, seem to mark an invocation of the optimistic belief that spontaneous radicalization and mass social solidarity with activist struggles would bring the state and corporate powers to their knees (Warren 2008a); this is not dissimilar to some accounts of the relationship between May 1968 and anarchism in France (e.g. Baillargeon 2004) — though such accounts fail to acknowledge the political commitments of even the most famously irreverent, such as the Situationists. For some radical publications, this ethos stayed on as an animating theme; for others, it stood out as a hopeful sign, though one associated with a perceived lack of a firm theoretical base, which prompted ‘New Left’ publications such as Our Generation and Noir et Rouge to theorize and seek to mold a “revolutionary youth movement.”

Radical & ‘New Left’ publications

The emergence of the New Left internationally was marked by “a massive outpouring of publications (McKay 2005: 183)”; by the late 1960s, the desire of opposition groups, often contending among themselves, for effective communications gave rise to a number of independent publications in Quebec (Raboy 1983). As it happens, one of the most prominent ‘New Left’ publications with a pan-Canadian orientation was based in Montreal — which entailed taking a stab at the Gordian knot of complications affecting radical-left analysis in Quebec. Our Generation emerged from the student/anti-war movement, self-identified with the ‘New Left,’ espoused an admixture of marxist, left-libertarian, and anarchist arguments under the rubric of a nonviolent extra-parliamentary opposition movement with revolutionary aspirations. The September 1966 edition begins with an “editorial statement on Quebec” avowing a commitment to make “social developments in Quebec [...] a permanent feature,” and content during ‘les annees 1968’ reflects this commitment — though the emphasis on ‘youth’ as revolutionary agent seems to represent an attempt to bridge class, ethnic and national tensions. As such, it brings in a strong universalism in tension with particular group claims.

The short-lived Noir et Rouge (“la revue trimestrielle de la nouvelle gauche quebecoise”)emerged as a kind of French-language sister publication in the aftermath of the student revolt and advanced similar positions, with several articles cross-published in translation. The latter publication, although it does not include the kinds of explicit repudiation of national-liberation as a path to social revolution which sometimes made the pages of Our Generation (though notably alongside more positive evaluations acknowledging the reality represented by the composition of Quebec radical constituencies), does relegate such considerations to secondary status in its insistence on the student movement as a key actor which required a move back to the organizational drawing board (reconstituting and revitalizing a dissolved provincial student union). Its primary concern lay with the Quebec student movement — with two of three issues devoted entirely to the topic — and with disseminating a vision of nonviolent direct action and a synthesis of Marxist and anarchist theoretical perspectives (often adapted to include critiques of bureaucracy and homogenization in consumer society) including work by Daniel Guerin, Thoreau and Ramus.

Both publications exhibited a sometimes tense interplay between Marxist and anarchist currents in the thought of radical movements, foregrounding both...

While my work focuses on these two journals, there are of course many others. For example, any discussion of Quebec radical publications in the 1960s cannot fail to acknowledge the importance of the review Parti Pris. Whether as a source of inspiration or as the foil against which others were forced to define their positions, the journal espoused a revolutionary etapisme (stage-ism), an approach which privileged Quebec independence as a pre-condition for an equitable socialism. Some, such as the journal Mobilization (linked to the Mouvement pour une Liberation Populaire, or MLP and to the dissident McGill University professor and avowed Marxist Stanley Gray), by contrast, took a stand against the Parti Pris position and argued that the ‘neo-nationalism’ and technocratic management ascendant in the Quiet Revolution would simply see to the formation of an endemic bourgeoisie and leave the economic bases of exploitation untouched (a position advanced by some authors in Our Generation and implicit in the quest for a more universal construction of revolutionary agency throughout both Our Generation and Noir et Rouge). Serious-minded Marxist theory and national liberation strategy, however, were not always the main focus of publishing efforts on the left. The Quartier Latin, to provide just one other example, thrived on irreverent political commentary, arts coverage, poetry, humor and cartooning: despite criticism for it’s “spontaneity and lack of ideological precision,” it printed 30,000 copies semimonthly at the end of the 60s — far more than the ‘serious’ journals.

The ‘revolutionary youth movement’ in Our Generation and Noir et Rouge

As an ensemble, the radical publications of this historical moment (like the student struggles) represented a convergence of ideas and interests concerned with revolutionary struggle — though by no means one in which consistent positions on relative priorities or tactics. Both Our Generation and Noir et Rouge took their distance from the sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll aspects of the emergent American-inspired counter-culture (unlike the Quartier Latin);, and (nominally) from the loose radical libertarian spontaneism noted with regard to elements of the student movement; while incorporating the general ethos of a ‘peace and love’ revolution and a marked concern for issues of personal autonomy, its contributors generally maintained a focus on what might be called the ‘serious business’ of politics. The counter-culture in the student movement was seen as a resource, a pool of antiauthoritarian energy and feeling. As Our Generation editor-in-chief Dimitrious Roussopoulos (later publisher of Black Rose books, and long-time activist) put it in his 1970 article ‘Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement,’ which shares a title with Mike Klonsky’s resolution to the December 1968 SDS council and claims that “although put together by one person, [it] reflects the general thrust as well as potential directions of the new left’s thinking [in Canada]”:

The most important process going on in our society today is the sweeping de-institutionalization of the bourgeois social structure. [...] This molecular movement creates an atmosphere of general lawlessness; a growing personal, day-to-day disobedience, a tendency not to “go along” with the existing system, a seemingly “petty” but nevertheless critical attempt to circumvent restriction in every facet of daily life.

The locus of this process, and the main constituency ascribed to the New Left — the collective actor on whom hopes are pinned — is described in the category of ‘youth.’ The ‘revolutionary youth movement’ is seen as a potential — conceptual and practical — extension of the ‘student movement,’ drawing on what one author terms the “third combat” against “depersonalization in a hyper-rational and overorganized society” and upon the structural position of youth in a drawn-out period of pre-employment. Roussopolous, however, outlines a rejection of the vision of the working class as revolutionary agent stronger than anything in Klosky’s essay of the same title, retrospectively echoing Wallerstein’s (1989) claim that 1968 was “the ideological tomb of the industrial proletariat” in writing that “the young worker becomes radical not by becoming more a worker but by undoing his ‘workerness.’“ Being a worker, then, is an imposed and constraining particularity, but ‘youth’ holds a valorized cachet (explicable, in ambivalent fashion, through the work of Marcel Rioux, discussed in the next section).

Against sterile bureaucratic modernity, but also against tradition, including religion and elements of secular morality, the family structure, and sexual mores, an idealist thrust pervades this point of view (even if Roussopolous suggests in the same article that the counter-culture has “reactionary” tendencies), as well as post-orthodox Marxist view of capitalism in which the middle classes and youth joined the working class and oppressed groups in a loose assemblage of potentially ‘revolutionary’ agents). As Francois Ricard (1992) has argued of the baby-boom generation in general, and in Quebec in particular, there was a manifest desire to dissolve the world and create anew, articulated in generational terms — a kind of messianism, a self-valorizing group identification (particularly in the student milieu), and an idealist inclination to view ‘ideas’ as the terrain of struggle. A valorized esthetic of the ‘new,’ of the unconstrained and authentically creative, was seen as key to differentiating the ‘New Left’ in this context, and to the hopeful effervescence that so many authors in Our Generation and Noir et Rouge sought to channel and refine into organized and sustained political action.

This notion that ‘ideas’ are a primary field of struggle, and that the fresh ideas of a youthful movement constituency can somehow solve intractable problems is emphasized in both publications.[1]

(note concern with reproduction through education, as well as counter-cultural conceptions of resistance in de Lucy 1970, OG editorial of 1968,)

Invoking the events of May 1968 in France, a kind of ‘organic’ or spontaneous revolutionary process is described:

Magnificently apposite and poetic slogans emerged from the anonymous crowd. Children explained to their elders what the function of education should be. The educators were educated. Within a few days, young people of 20 attained a level of understanding and a political and tactical sense which many who had been in the revolutionary movement for 30 years or more were still sadly lacking (PAGE).

Noir et Rouge marked out a similar ideology in that it chose to focus so intensely on student issues (the CEGEP strike, the state of the provincial student union, etc.) and explicitly called for the student movement to take a leading role in a movement of unions which would bring its forces together with those of labor and...(“La revolte des etudiants” 1969: PAGE). In “Paix, Liberte, Amour,

Fraternite,” (1970), Noir et Rouge editor Francois de Lucy describes the same fundamental questioning of values, notes their violent manifestations in the context of terrorist ‘independantiste’ movements,

The vision of the “revolutionary youth movement” forwarded in these publications, I should note, does not seem to fit with either of the major factions by the same name which emerged out of the split in the SDS in the United States’ SDS; Our Generation and Noir et Rouge solidly rejected both the clandestine activities advocated by the RYN 1 (later Weatherman) and the vanguardist party-building of the Maoist RYN 2 — likely in no small part due to the prevailing analysis of the FLQ strain of the Quebec national-liberation movement, which had presaged the Weatherman strategy of exemplary action in a terrorist vein, intended to spark the population to action, and to an anarchist commitment to decentralization and autonomy which precluded a Marxist-Leninist party strategy. Ultimately putting their faith in a loose coalition of movements, stirred in their radicalism by movement intellectuals such as the contributors to these very journals and swelled by the ranks of the baby-boom generation, the New Left in Canada suffered significantly from a failure to solve organizational and coalition-building problems. Resolved not to take state power (nor to overthrow it by violent means), they took the social movement model of nonviolent direct action, independent organization, agitation and the building of parallel structures (including municipalist movements) as far as they could. Sights were set high, consonant with the vision of a world completely dissolved and made anew. As Roussopoulos puts it:

Revolution cannot end with [...] the “seizure of power”; it must culminate in the here and now with the dissolution of power as such.

Spontaneity, the counter-culture & the Sociology of Marcel Rioux

Drawing on modified Marxist precepts, Universite de Montreal sociologist Marcel Rioux penned an article for Our Generation in 1966, predicting — in concert with the later positions of the editors — that ‘youth’ were in the process of effectively supplanting the working class as the motor of social change in industrialized societies. ‘Youth’ is, for Rioux, characterized by “lag, plasticity, availability, pliability.” These are the characteristics which suit a context requiring flexible actors, a context in which technological change requires constant adaptation, in which permanent education was just emerging as a mainstream idea. The difference Rioux ascribes to the youth of the late 1960s (relative to previous generations of the working class) is that they reject and rally against the bourgeois culture and society “after knowing it and belonging to it.”

Rioux holds that “change is welcome” in (then-) contemporary societies focused ever-more on knowledge production and the provision of services. Drawing a parallel between the ‘social class’ and the ‘social generation,’ he indicates that both are “actual groupings which can either constitute real collective units or contain only the potential for unification, [.which] do not necessarily embody group consciousness.” 1960s protest movements, according to him, was less interested in ‘catching up’ to the economic status of their predecessors or oppressors than in living differently, in making of society something completely new. Of course, in Quebec, this situation was complicated at the time by the question of whether the province (or nation) is primarily an ‘underdeveloped nation’ (for which there were good economic arguments) or ‘an advanced industrial society.’ Rioux concludes that Quebec is both, and that one of its unique aspects is that economically well-placed sectors of its youth (college and university students) perceive the colonial character of their predicament (and are profoundly affected by it) at the same time that they are immersed in a wider North American youth culture tied to the ‘affluent society.’

After ‘les annees 1968’: co-optation and marginalization

The relationship between the self-identified New Left in Quebec, associated with the journals Our Generation and Noir et Rouge, always existed in tension with the more radical Quebec nationalists, not because of ambivalent attitudes towards nationalism as such but because of tactical differences concerning nonviolence, the efficacy of clandestine and violent exemplary actions. The “sweeping deinstitutionalization of the bourgeois social structure” described hopefully in Our Generation was particularly sweeping in Quebec. Two hundred years of conservative clericalist rule under an essentially colonial economic and cultural oppression combined with a dose of liberalization under the Quiet Revolution to unleash a broad restructuring of legal and normative standards; however, the economic structures remained rigidly capitalist, albeit under a veneer of ‘social consultation’ which pretends at a neo-corporatist consensus. The aversion to centralized organization typical of the New Left organized around Our Generation and Noir et Rouge turned out to be a dead end after a brief spike in radicalized labor actions in the early 1970s, as decentralized organizations foundered amid a polarization on the left between an increasingly liberal-centrist sovereigntist party, the PArti Quebecois, and Marxist-Leninist factions En Lutte and the PCO. Marxist-Leninist parties drew the most radical students, but soon foundered amid their failure to incorporate other struggles, their support for authoritarian regimes, and rigidly austere and often dogmatic tendencies — not to mention their lack of impact — which fostered both disintegration into rival factions and burnout, dissolving the two organizations around 1980. After the October crisis of 1970 in which the Canadian state imposed martial law and jailed hundreds of nationalist and radical activists and conducted thousands of intrusive warrantless searches, public opinion shifted in an ever more nationalist direction, but one in which the option of political revolution was off the table. Many of the previous student radicals, cowed by the show of force or shifting out of periods of biographical availability, moved on from radical political activity — especially those associated with the counter-cultural movements, as evidenced by the quick disappearance of the Quartier Latin.

As it happens, the anti-nationalist analysis of the writers in Mobilization and Our Generation who predicted the formation of an endemic bourgeoisie were not far off. The Parti Quebecois, having incorporated radical labor and a wide swathe of the nationalist movement,t won the elections of 1976 (though failing to achieve sovereignty). Ultimately, they continued the Liberal strategy of building up what is referred to as ‘Quebec Inc’ by supporting the development of an ethnic-French capitalist elite, and dashed the hopes of its more radical supporters by invoking the economic crisis of the late 1970s as justification to reign in the unions (who had already lost much of their bargaining power). By the mid-1990s, the PQ came to positions largely indiscernible from their Liberal Party rivals with whom they now alternate power — with the exception of the national question.

Towards a New New Left?

The offshoot of all of this is that the radical left in Quebec (especially among anarchists of various stripes) have tended to take a strong anti-nationalist stance, particularly around the 1995 referendum on sovereignty — in contrast to that of 1980 which tended to split opinion. The anarchist press in the intervening years had often displayed its ambivalence, for example in the 1980 referendum issue of La Q-Lotte (a public-sector union-associated paper which emerged in the mid 70s) where contributors resolved simply to allow each to present arguments (some serious, other humourous) for and against. Yet by the next time around, a number of anarchist publications which had popped up in the mid-1990s displayed what continues to be a contemptuous attitude towards a project which had been thoroughly co-opted. Instead, the focus is again on the “here and now” — though common debates rage, as elsewhere, between class-struggle and radical pluralist anarchists, over questions of organization and the question of revolutionary agency. Nonetheless, there have been some recent successes, particularly around a revitalized student movement and work with marginalized communities over police brutality. However, the problem of organization, and how to gain a wide impact through implication in a diverse array of social movements, remains on the table.

THIS IS THE POINT WHERE THE PAPER NEEDS TO BE EXTENDED TO INCLUDE THE DISCUSSIONS I INDICATE IN THE INTRO, BUT I HAVEN’t THE TIME TO INTEGRATE THIS NOW. SPECIFICALLY, I INTEND TO ADDRESS:

• Upping the Anti has explicitly framed its mission (in an early editorial in 2006) as constituting a ‘New New Left”; I will discuss how they assess the Canadian New Left, particularly in terms of its failures to overcome problems of organization, and how this pan-Canadian radical journal brings together important insights of both anarchist and Marxist perspectives along with insights from anti-oppression politics which emphasize the need to incorporate specific struggles without incorporating them into a universal — but all the while ensuring that the capitalist dynamics deeply implicated in so many forms of oppression and domination are explicitly foregrounded and theorized (I am suggesting that this is a fine and promising project, and will articulate why in some more detail...but not too much)

• It seems to me that the social vs. lifestyle anarchist debate (a la Bookchin/Black, but more generally located in debates between platformists and others and radical pluralists/synthesists in another of its important dimensions, between those who insist on a limited — usually ‘working class’ — revolutionary agent and those who conceptualize a plurality of agents, between anarchists insisting on ‘here and now’ projects which are more attuned to a renewed micro-communalism and sub- or counter-cultural focus vs. those who often eschew such projects in favor of ‘serious’ politics) derives in many ways from the tensions described in the New Left around counterculture...and I will briefly summarize how this debate remains central in Quebec, and easily summarized through polemic (and more subtle cues) on the pages of Ruptures (NEFAC-Quebec magazine) and Mauvaise Herbe (a radical pluralist/primitivist-sympathetic anarchist magazine)

• I will conclude by suggesting that the problematic is a sticky one, as small, rigid organizations (such as some platformist ones) often seem exclusive and thus fail expand their reach (vs., say some of the coalitions around the 2001 FTAA protests in Quebec City), but that loose — radical pluralist — forms easily suffer attrition an co-optation

• I finally suggest that some aspects of this can actually be brought back to Rioux’s 1966 explanation of how the functional social requirement for “plasticity” is implicated in patterns of social reproduction that make ‘youth’ look like a good candidate for ‘revolutionary agent’ in the 1960s, and that given this, and Ricard’s points about the baby-boom generation, we get a glimpse of a key contemporary difficulty — the fact that the social dynamics that foster particular kinds of movement participation are tied to cultural practices which often hinge on patterns of work and consumption

• This is something which Upping the Anti is actively engaging with, and which recent developments with NEFAC-Quebec reforming as the Union Communiste Libertaire seem to indicate a better acknowledgment of...so hope for the best!

Bibliography

(I need to double-check and add references to this text)