because mass struggles include all kinds of folks
By Way of Introduction
In many neighbourhoods and cities and towns across Quebec, there is a
new phenomenon of people going into the streets every night and banging
pots and pans together to signal their opposition to the government’s
new repressive legislation, Law 78. This is in the context of an upsurge
of mass struggle and rapidly escalating tactics within a student strike
that has been going on here for months. It is an unprecedented
situation, and the struggle here seems to be transforming itself at what
seems like breakneck speed.
On one of the first of these “pots and pans” nights, i went wandering
around Cote-des-Neiges, a mixed class immigrant neighbourhood, my little
pot and my little spoon in hand, both curious to see where (indeed,
whether) i would find some noise, and hoping to maybe join in.
i was not surprised that all of the clanging seemed to be between
Isabella and Queen Mary, i.e. where the area is at its most Quebecois,
and its least working-class. At 8pm i saw people opening their doors and
starting to bang. Wandering around looking for people actually on the
street, i could find none. Regardless: as a tactic, especially as a new
tactic, it was dramatic. You can hear someone clanging on a pot for
blocks, so even though there was less than 1 person per block doing
this, the effect in the area was that you could hear noises all around
you. This was really effective.
As i wandered up Fulton, an older man was sitting on his stoop. He
looked at me and motioned around in the air, asking if i could hear what
was happening. i nodded. "Terrorism," he said in a thick European
accent, "That's terrorism." Amused, and curious, i asked him if he was
scared. He nodded. i asked what of, and he just repeated "They are
terrorizing the city." After a brief disagreement, i left with him
saying "God bless you", and then, under his breath but quite audibly,
"you stupid terrorist." For what it's worth.
(Turns out i was lucky: speaking to a friend the next day, who recently
moved to Cote-des-Neiges, he told me how he went out with his little pot
and pan and ... got punched in the face! Luckily, the way he put it,
the puncher was an old guy who couldn’t pack much force, so his main
worry was that his assailant would have a heart attack. But still.)
To be clear, i believe how this is playing out in this neighbourhood -
and i would guess in Montreal North, Park Ex, St-Michel, all heavily
immigrant - is different than in most neighborhoods affected by the
casseroles. In Quebecois working-class neighborhoods i have no trouble
believing this is happening in a more organic and broad way. Similarly,
in Quebecois mixed-class neighborhoods and even in neighborhoods with
sizeable student populations i don't presume that participation will
correlate to more middle-class streets. As such, however, this does
underscore the national dimension to this surge, and hints at how this
may relate to class.
"It's time to awaken; Quebecois, on your feet!"
The Labor Aristocracy
There is an argument, unpopular within the white left, that in North
America and other settler societies, “the colonized peoples have been
the proletariat, while the white working class has been a labor
aristocracy.” [1]
While this view is by no means marginal or beyond the pale amongst
people living in oppressed nations, within the white left it is
extremely rare; it finds its primary expression in a current of tiny
groups known as Maoist-Third-Worldist, and is most familiar to white
activists thanks to J. Sakai’s book
Settlers: The Mythology of the White
Proletariat (available online at
http://www.readsettlers.org). There
are variations on this position, mainly regarding the degree to which
workers in oppressed internal colonies (the Black Nation/New Afrika,
Aztlan, Puerto Rico, Indigenous Nations, etc.) are also labor
aristocratic, with the “maximal” version of this argument holding that
there is in fact no proletariat within the First World, period. [2]
While some might dismiss these as esoteric debates, occurring largely
between internet activists with too much time on their hands, this would
be deceptive. Within oppressed communities, in prisons, in immigrant
neighbourhoods, and indeed throughout the Third World, these questions
are accepted by many people as completely legitimate. Furthermore, while
not necessarily expressed as such, the question of how class relates to
nation is being addressed (albeit often in confused and confusing ways)
every time someone asks “where was the color at [fill in the blank]”,
during every discussion about whether some person was killed by police
because they weren’t white or because they weren’t middle-class, every
time people note how “white” a protest or group or campaign is. Or,
conversely, whenever “identity politics” dovetails with middle-class
politics, defying some people’s expectations.
This current surge in Quebec provides a nice field to discuss this, and
different interpretations, conclusions, and political consequences of
these positions. So i'm going to go somewhat out on a limb here and
share some rough thoughts on what is happening, informed by my sympathy
to the idea that the political behavior of the metropolitan (or First
World) working class is determined by its position in the global
division of labor, so that it will not act as if it "has nothing to lose
but its chains", but that its dominant sections (both in terms of
numbers of political influence) will adhere more closely to the forms of
activity and politics normally associated with the petit bourgeoisie.
"It's a student strike; it's a popular struggle"
The Student Strike
The situation in Quebec is inspiring. Very inspiring, in fact. For those
of you unfamiliar with what is happening here, it will be impossible
for me to do it justice in just a few sentences, so i would suggest
reading this
Report on Quebec’s Student Strike.
But in an inadequate nutshell: students have been on strike for over
100 days against a tuition hike – a preeminently reformist
casus belli.
Yet faced with at-first-routine police harassment and court orders
against their pickets, the students fought back - literally - and police
were sent running from angry mobs - repeatedly. The street tactics have
been escalating steadily, and the State has been relying primarily on
police violence and repression in the form of new legislation - Law 78 -
outlawing many traditionally accepted forms of protest here
(demonstrations without a permit, pickets in front of schools, strikes
by education workers, wearing masks, etc.).
Rather than isolate the movement, government repression led to an
explosion of public support, the most obvious current example being the
aforementioned “pots and pans demonstrations” where people go out in
their neighbourhoods banging their kitchenware together every night at
8pm. There are hundreds of these nightly protests, involving tens of
thousands of people every night. These supplement larger nightly
downtown demonstrations which have turned into riots several times over
the past month. Neighbourhood assemblies have also been organized,
potentially creating an opening for the struggle to extend to new
fronts.
Adding to this promising situation, current plans are to disrupt the
various summertime festivals on which Montreal’s tourism industry
depends – starting with the Grand Prix, set for early June. Meanwhile,
the police and the right-wing Liberal government continue to make all of
the best of mistakes, and indeed a few days ago for the third time the
government simply broke off negotiations with the student
representatives.
It is the most enjoyable thing i have seen in decades, if ever.
white students in blackface,
pulling puppet which implies Charest is "really" english
The Oppressor Nation
The movement, however, is not only First World/metropolitan, it is
overwhelmingly white, and while class politics play an important part in
how things are framed, this is very much from a perspective that sees
whitelife - in this case, Quebecois whitelife - as the norm. Putting
aside the ubiquitous complaints about people being pushed out of the
middle class, and the various racist incidents that will often occur
when masses of white people congregate, this also plays itself out also
in terms of how the government's counteroffensive is being framed. One
person hit the nail on the head when they jokingly suggested as a
slogan, "We're Already Racially Profiled in Small Groups, We Don't Need
Law 78!"
Now, the clichéd stereotype about those of us who see the First World
working class as largely compromised is that we would do nothing but
shit on the student strike, that we would argue that revs should not be
involved, period. Perhaps some folks might point to a certain reading of
Settlers or a certain analysis of imperialism, arguing that this is
mainly an uprising of white people in the metropole (i.e. the labor
aristocracy), and as such that there is nothing to be gained by
participating.
To be clear: i reject such a dismissive approach. It treats the
privileged character of First World life as near-homogenous, with nobody
experiencing privation or oppression outside of those actually
producing the super-profits at the center of world capitalism. This
flies in the face of lived experience, conflates the concepts of
“working class” and “proletariat”, and reduces oppression (which is
often determined by immediate context, and lived subjectively) to
exploitation. Perhaps worst of all, it involves being closed to the
possibility of the unexpected, as if we were guaranteed to have a
theoretical grasp on any and all existing social contradictions.
There are divisions and differences in life-experience and
suffering within the metropolitan working classes, privileged as many of
them may be; if the dominant sections enjoy the profits and benefits of
Canadian or Quebecois whitelife, with even many racialized sections
enjoying First World privilege, there are numerous pockets whose
situation is far more complicated. The problem is that to the degree
that they identify with the oppressor nation, the political
consciousness of these pockets remains tied to the labor aristocracy
that holds sway over the class.
A dismissive approach grossly underestimates this question of
consciousness, and the fact that even when we are literally fighting and
challenging State power, we are still engaged in what Gramsci referred
to as a "war of position", i.e. a war to open up cultural and political
space. Or as some German comrades argued, as they grappled with this
very question some forty years ago, “to write off entire sections of the
population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply
because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane
and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.” [3]
My view, and my reading of
Settlers, is quite different from this
cliché, even though i do consider that the global division of labor
determines both what is possible and what is probable in our various
struggles. What needs to be grasped is that what is happening in Quebec
is a breakthrough, but it’s not the rev. While we have every reason to
be overjoyed, identifying its limits will be key, not only to our
ability to overcome them, but also to our survival as conditions change.
no comment
The Dangers
Thanks to the numbers involved, and the political crisis this has
engendered for the State, the student strike of 2012 will likely go down
in history as the defining event for a generation of Quebecois youth,
the moment when, as Fanon put it, they found their mission. This is a
major upheaval, not business-as-usual in the metropole. If it breaks out
of its immediate limits, it will alter the very terrain upon which we
will be struggling for years to come. If it is neutralized, it will
represent a defeat that may weigh against us just as heavily.
True to metropolitan form, at the mobilization’s more swollen moments,
radical sections become easy to miss in what becomes a humungous
cross-class mass. Even while the pots-and-pans demonstrations represent a
creative and promising turn, take note that the Liberal Finance
Minister has also applauded the way in which this fits with the image of
Montreal that he wants to project, and how they decrease the scope for
property attacks during the big nightly marches. In fact,
in some areas this "peaceful" mobilization has been spearheaded by the same forces that previously opposed the strike. Similarly, at the
biggest demos (hundreds of thousands of people in the streets), some of
the slogans may be proletarian but the foot-troops, and the money behind
the buses, are middle-class or else labor-aristocratic.
In terms of neutralization, as already mentioned, the government has
passed legislation (Law 78) which criminalizes various protest
activities, with potential fines for organizations running into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the municipal level, Montreal has
changed its bylaws so that wearing a mask at demonstrations or
participating in an “illegal assembly” will make one liable to heavy
fines (up to $3000 for repeat offenders). Federally, the Conservative
government is passing legislation to make wearing masks at
demonstrations illegal, with maximum prison sentences of 5 or 10 years,
depending on the circumstances.
While many protesters see this as unprecedented, and words like
“dictatorship”, “police state”, and “fascism” are being bandied about,
none of this surpasses the level of repression that has been directed
against certain individuals and groups (most notably certain Muslim and
foreign-based organizations) over the past years, the difference being
one of scale not intensity. More important still, this does not come
close to the level of repression that can be enacted by a State while still retaining its bourgeois democratic form, as the European experience in
the 1970s and 80s bears out. Finally, we must bear in mind that
non-State repression – i.e. the mobilization of “law abiding citizens”
and far right forces to attack the students and the left – has so far
remained relatively (though not completely) undeveloped.
People freaking out about repression does not necessarily serve us well,
and may in fact prevent us/them from grasping the full scope of what
can occur.
At the same time, for revolutionaries, repression will only ever be one
part of how we get neutralized; isolation and demobilization through a
process of integrating the bulk of protesters will be at least as
important to the government’s strategy. The traditional means of doing
this in metropolitan states is through social democracy, often tinged
with nationalism. Indeed, in the context of Quebec, the only province
where Canada’s francophone minority forms a clear majority, nationalism
is likely to be more than just a “tinge”.
As such, one likely outcome is that the State channels this surge into a
social-democratic project with a Quebecois nationalist dimension.
Quebec Solidaire is clearly positioned to try and take advantage of
this, though its small size and meager infrastructure will mean that
this will be an uphill battle for it. (The New Democratic Party,
Canada’s main social democratic political party, seems to have been
fucked by the same national contradiction that prevented it from winning
a foothold in Quebec prior to 2011: even though it is now the main
federal party here it is unable to act like a social democratic party
should for fear of now undercutting its potential for growth in english
canada.) And of course, the PQ is feinting to the left, pretending to
support the students, as there’s nothing to gain by any other position
at the moment.
Any viable social democratic consolidation, regardless of the
parliamentary form it takes, or even whether it manages to form a
government, will sow confusion about Quebec’s actual status in the world
(as an imperialist nation-without-a-state) and the actual nature of
class and national oppression within Quebec. It will reduce any
proletarian class consciousness and combativity. It might even unleash
energies that will be instrumentalized against the most radical or the
most oppressed, either within this society, or else oppressed Indigenous
nations which survive within Quebec’s claimed territory. At the very
least, these risk being marginalized as footnotes to the main drama at
hand. All bad things, to be sure.
the current priority is to break through all patriarchal-colonialist-capitalist limitations
Engagement
While recognizing these as serious limitations on the current arc of
struggle, in no way do i mean to suggest that revs should sit this one
out. Rather, we who live in this oppressor-nation should be involved,
albeit without illusions. This does NOT mean being involved with
hesitation - tactically, we should be in with both feet, no holds barred
- but it does mean that we should be careful about how we think and
talk about what is going on, and wary of what strategic alliances or
perspectives we get integrated into. It also means that as we adapt to
the new conditions we should make sure to not abandon areas of work
where we have already developed a base.
While we should be all-in tactically, strategically we should keep our
eye on the limited prize of winning as big a minority as possible for
our politics, which go far beyond a tuition freeze or even free
education for all. We should not be disappointed or feel betrayed when
the movement reveals its social democratic complexion, any more than we
should when the social democrats turn on us – and we should be preparing
our allies (our real ones), so that they don’t feel disappointed or
betrayed either.
Our aims and our methods should therefore be minoritiarian, in
preparation for a reversal-of-fortune down the line. Doing so will help
our comrades, as well as those new folks we are reaching out to, to
experience this reversal-of-fortune as something unfortunate but to be
expected, rather than as a defeat. It will also help prepare people to
navigate the forms of long-term repression that are to come, i.e. not
mass arrests, but political ostracism; not having an organization
banned, but having it funded and promoted with a leadership inching to
the right while verbally posturing to the left; or else targeted attacks
on tiny groups of "troublemakers" or “terrorists” who will be easy to
spot by their not cheering whatever the new "consensus" status quo will
be.
In this regard, a not improbable worst-case-scenario would involve Law
78 staying on the books after the mass mobilization subsides, at which
point police will not hold back from enforcing it each and every time we
take to the streets.
This minoritarian approach is complicated by the fact that we may not be
at the tail end of the surge, we may only be at the beginning. Things
are likely to get a lot better before they get worse. This may end this
summer, or this may simply be the beginning of the first year.
(Obviously there is always the hope that global changes or political
breakthroughs will occur that will permit this surge to break out of the
limited model i am placing it in – comrades have pointed out that world
capitalism is already in a crisis, and therefore has less room to
maneuver than it did in the sixties – though to those who think that
spells “rev”, i would suggest they read up on 77 as well as 68, taking
special note of Italy and France.)
The surest way to fuck up in terms of winning more people to our
positions would be to act as if this were not a breakthrough, or to act
as if things were calming down when really they are heating up. So the
(subjective) challenge is in maintaining a cheery disposition but
reminding oneself of a long-term gloomy forecast, keeping an umbrella in
your backpack despite the sunshine outside. Or to be more prosaic and
precise: to fight to break out of this cycle (of metropolitan militancy
being re-integrated by patriarchal colonialist capitalism) will leave us
in a better position even if we do not succeed.
But we have to fight like we mean it – as hard as we can.
Rearguard Objectives and Avenues of Advance
At the same time, we should work to encourage elements in the mass
struggle which highlight deeper problems, which will break people off
from their patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist nations. Or, barring that,
which will serve as obstacles to reactionary tendencies within their
(our) communities. Rather than abandon the terrain and capacities we
have developed prior to this upsurge, this is where we can build on
them, making connections that will both aid the more radical and
oppressed sections of the present mobilization, while also establishing
some political barricades against our opponents. (That this is already
being done, in at times brilliant form, can be seen from before March 15
to after May 1, with examples ranging from CLASSE reps’ statements
about Indigenous sovereignty to the upcoming trans night-time demo…)
In his book
The Defeat of Solidarity,[4] author David Ost describes the
rightward turn of labor in Poland in the 1990s, making the point that
anger at neoliberalism was unavoidable, but that because the left and
liberals opted not to organize it, it took on a right-wing, racist, and
sexist complexion: “In the end, workers turned to the right because only
the right appealed to them as workers, because no one else offered a
clear narrative validating the class experiences they were having.”
This is similar to Sakai’s observation that to many leftists, “the white
workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer - which they
aren't unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors - or they're
like ignorant scum you wouldn't waste your time on. Small wonder
rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the
left.” [5]
With this worst-case-scenario in mind, we should never shy away from
reaching out to people, hoping to win them over or at least create some
space in which they can think outside of the
patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist box. This is one way we can work to
prevent the social energies that have been unleashed from being captured
by the far right. We all have contradictions and doubts, and if we can
sow doubts or hesitations in the minds of tens or even hundreds of
thousands of people about the worst aspects of capitalism or national
oppression or patriarchy, this might make it more difficult for our
opponents to recruit them. It might also make it possible for us to win
a few of them over to our side in the battles to come, even if they
currently remain beyond our reach. As such, although at present we may
only win a tiny minority over to clearly anti-capitalist, anti-colonial,
and anti-patriarchal positions, that doesn't mean we cannot influence
much greater numbers in some more partial and long-term way.
In practical terms, there are a number of ways to do this, the most
obvious being to properly contexualize repression: remembering and
talking about the dozens of people killed by police in Montreal over the
past decades when we discuss police violence at the ongoing protests,
and placing the sexual harassment women are facing at the hands of
police during these protests in the context of gendered violence being
carried out by police – and other men – every day. In both these
examples, our ultimate aim should be to frame these interventions in the
context of opposing reactionary tendencies within the current
mobilization itself, i.e. the fact that women and racialized people have
been dealing with sexist and racist shit from both the State and also
at times within the student-movement throughout the strike.
Theorizing and acting around this are two obvious ways of making
connections, of extending the offensive both within the mobilization and
in new ways outside of it. This is the liberatory potential that exists
within the dialectic of oppression and revolt.
Of course, other possibilities abound: resisting the ongoing
deportations, most glaringly perhaps the case of Dany Villanueva;
solidarity with resistance elsewhere, for instance the ongoing prison
hunger strikes and rebellions in the u.s., which can be related to
prison-expansion plans here; protests and attacks around the
anti-abortion bill that is about to be voted on federally in parliament;
support for Indigenous resistance everywhere, including of course in
regards to Plan Nord; what people do the next time tragedy strikes and
police kill someone in this city (
you have a plan, right?); mobilization
around the new Employment Insurance changes … the list goes on and on …
One nice example of something comrades have been doing: there have been
noise demonstrations held outside of area prisons where people arrested
in the context of the current movement have been held, making
connections between targeted political repression and the broader prison
system, and building on previous more limited initiatives of this sort
over the past years. This kind of action makes all the right things easier to see.
In the current situation, where militant tactics have provided so much of
the fuel that has fired this surge forward, any disruptive resistance to
any of these attacks will be seen as relating to the broader upheaval.
Though this may not last long, for the moment the tactics themselves
have become the symbol of the general politics at play. While tactics
must always be tailored to what one’s base will support, with a
minoritarian strategy it is important to remember that the base in
question is not the general public at large or even your average
protester. (By the same token, with a strategy of sowing doubts amongst
our opponents in the long-term, actions that negate our politics will of
course lead to defeats.)
The trick remains to engage in these more specific, sharper, conflicts
in a way that does not instrumentalize them to buttress the “broader”
mobilization, but which rather uses them to splinter people off or at
least tug on people from the cross-class mass now in the streets.
map showing where the "pots and pans" protests were occurring as of May 25
Solidarity from the Oppressed?
As to our comrades who are not from this oppressor-nation and who do not
focus their political activity within it, this article is not directed
at them, as their decision on how or even whether to relate to this
mobilization will have to be made with different criteria in mind. Group
autonomy and self-determination do not mean that members of oppressed
communities and nations should not join in this mobilization, they
simply mean that this decision should be made without illusions, and
with specific goals and factors in mind. Goals and factors different
from what needs to be considered by those of us within the
oppressor-nation.
Calls to “find the color” in any oppressor-nation mobilization, or to
make everything “inclusive”, come from multiple, even hostile, class and
political stands. Sometimes the oppressed are better off not lending
their energies to mobilizations that do not serve their interests. We
need to get used to the idea that if people from oppressed communities
are not joining in some allegedly “broad” mobilization, maybe that’s
because they have better things to do. Not necessarily a problem to be
solved. Simply a choice that has to be made by people in (and not merely
from) those communities, and it goes without saying that it needs to be
made autonomously, not as the result of some call or demand or request
from the settler left.
In terms of internationalism, the worst thing that the settler radical
left can do is provide an excessively rosy picture of what the situation
is. The second worst thing would be to provide an excessively gloomy
one.
At the same time, when comrades criticize racist and sexist behavior and
chauvinism, remedying this should be a priority. Not so that
we can do a better job at recruiting more “color” to our events or
because we are embarrassed by a lack of “diversity” or to hush up news that might damage our image - all reactions
that have more to do with neocolonialism than antiracism. The main
reason should not be to seduce allies (who might not benefit from such
an alliance, after all), but simply because these forms of oppression
are inimical to our politics and our principles, period. To the degree
that this is a strategic priority, it is because racism, sexism, and
national chauvinism are three of the strongest chains tying people to
the labor aristocratic and middle-class elements that will try to drag
this movement into the social democratic camp, and thereby
instrumentalize it against the most oppressed. This is the ominous
alternative to the aforementioned ways to extend the struggle; we can
refer to it as the reactionary potential that exists within the
dialectic of oppression and revolt.
In the here and now, the worst example of this kind of approach is
summed up in the slogan "students and immigrants, same struggle" - a
banner i saw at the monster demo on May 22. The conflation of interests
implied by such "unite and fight" catchphrases is simply dishonest, and
this despite the fact that the folks who say such things often mean
well, and may even be comrades. These slogans cover up what we should be
trying to expose. Indeed, the political content of such slogans is just
as racist as the white students who wore blackface to a protest a few
weeks back – if you think about it, they’re actually saying the same
thing.
"After 2012, the chasm has become an abyss"
By Way of Conclusion
To get back to my little life in my little neighbourhood: a few of us
got together last week, and by the end of the evening we were at times
as many as fifteen walking through the streets, getting lots of smiles
and occasionally having people lean out from their windows to chime in
with their own kitchenware. Not everyone knew why we were banging pots
and pans. Some people did not even know what we were talking about when
we said “the student strike.” Personally, i hope if this continues in
our neighbourhood, perhaps the focus can be something local folks can
relate to more - i.e. against racism and/or against the police…
But i digress: it was a nice night - the most important thing is to be
there, in the streets, alongside people - and better to try and fail
than not to try at all.
For that reason, as well as all of the others outlined above, i don’t take the position that we should boycott these surges. Nor do i
agree with the superficial antiracist approach that we should join them
in order to add issues to some laundry list. However, i also reject the
view that we should have a unitary response to them, or that we should
blur the lines between the specific and the universal. Such an approach
generally leads to privileged elements gaining political hegemony and
leaves the radical – and, where they exist, proletarian – elements at
their mercy.
for what it's worth...
Foonotes
[1] As stated by J. Sakai in
When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited.
[2] While the question of Quebec’s status is an interesting and
important one, for the purposes of this discussion it is unambiguously
NOT an internal colony, as regardless of its irregular State form, it is
fully integrated into the First World/metropolitan core.
[3] Red Army Faction,
“The Black September Action in Munich:Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle”
[4] David Ost
The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell University Press, 2005), 96-7.
[5] J. Sakai
When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited.
PDF
Posts
