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Thanks, Mark. It strikes me that “independent political action” in the US at present comes down to a largely ideological action – small sects running candidates in their own name hoping to attract some individuals to their “party,” or simply commenting from the sidelines. Perhaps that is all that is possible at this time, as you may be suggesting. Obviously, in Quebec (not in Canada as a whole, unfortunately) we are in a much more favourable position. Québec solidaire is a party with a much more developed program than anything you have in the USA, and is certainly much more influential than the DSA or any of the sects. But this is the result of a long process that began about 20 years ago, when some survivors of the old Trotskyist and “Marxist-Leninist” (Maoist) groups of the 1970s began to get together and discuss how to build a new broad left party. Over the next few years they reached broad agreement to put aside old doctrinal differences of 20th century socialism and to focus on a few key programmatic themes: feminism, left pluralism, opposition to global imperialism, and, not least, in the Quebec context support for Quebec national independence from the Canadian state (an intellectually liberating concept as it freed their thinking from the restrictions imposed by the existing constitutional division of powers). This could not have occurred until the dominant pro-independence party, the Parti québécois (PQ), had become widely discredited as a result of its implementation of capitalist austerity while in government and its failure to win majority support for independence in the 1995 referendum. Crucially, the regroupment process sought ways to build alliances with the existing social movements, especially the women’s movement (still relatively strong at that time in Quebec, where the world march of women began) and the “altermondialiste” (global justice) movement. More recently the fight against climate change has become a dominant theme. Then they began a few electoralist experiments – a candidacy against the PQ prime minister, in which their candidate (Michel Chartrand, an old social-democratic leader) got about 18% of the vote, and most successfully in 2001 in a Montréal by-election where their candidate (a leader of a short-lived municipal workers party in the early 1970s) got 24% of the vote. This led to the formation of a “union of progressive forces” (UFP) in 1972, followed in 1976 by a merger with a coalition of feminist and community-oriented social movements to form Québec solidaire. Since then QS has sought to operate as both “a party of the ballot-boxes and the streets” (the expression first popularized in France by the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire), although there is a strong pull toward electoral action as the priority. The party’s elected members see themselves as parliamentary spokespersons for the social movements, but QS still has to define more clearly how to work in conjunction with the broader social movements. There is much more to be said, of course, and I have tried over the years to document and analyze this process for a non-Quebec English-speaking left audience. But I often wonder if a somewhat analogous process might be possible south of the border. You certainly have many mass protest movements, but as you say they tend to be one-off single-issue and “punctual” efforts, without sustained existence. However, the recent rapid growth of the DSA suggests there is an appetite for something more permanent and positive, even if its “socialism” is largely undefined. You also have an intellectually productive left judging from the materials often referenced on Marxmail (Counterpunch, Truthout, etc.) and of course the remnants of some 20th century sects such as the ISO or Against the Current. So far you lack (as do we in English Canada) some agglutinizing influence that could initiate a broader regroupment process. In Quebec this existed largely because of the Québécois national question and its radicalizing influence on young people. (This was completely misunderstood by the sole article Jacobin published on the recent Quebec election campaign.) I’ll leave it there, for now. But as I say I think there is much the US (and Anglo-Canadian) left could learn from the Quebec experience. The language difference complicates this, of course. But that can be overcome with a little effort. Richard From: Mark Lause [mailto:markala...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 10:07 PM To: Richard Fidler; Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition Subject: Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump Thanks, Richard. An interesting piece. I agree with the points made about the necessity of independent mass movements, etc.--but I think that we're finding ourselves in a very different situation than the old road maps would have indicated. There are lots of reasons for this, but I'll try to avoid tangents. The biggest single problem we've faced over the last few decades has been the smudging between mass movements and protests (I similarly think that the idea of building a party with protest votes is equally problematic.) The big women's march after Trump's election and some of the later actions, including the Kavenaugh protests, recycled an idea that came out of Occupy. We have protests that are essentially one-offs, and exist mostly at the whim of the Democratic Party or sections thereof. Part of this likely draws on the desire for television wallpapering comparable to that provided by the earlier Tea Party B.S. that Republican lobbyists funded and fielded. These never really amounted to much as a movement in the streets, but it was heavily hyped, widely discussed and treated as a serious "movement" by those who wanted the Republican Party to pursue its mad agenda. In the process, the very idea of what a movement was and is supposed to do seems to have been taken out of our hands and translated into something of a ritualized street theatre that existed to frame whatever B.S. the politicians wanted to hype. That kind of non-movement "movement" isn't going to give rise to independent political action--no more than building a fanciful "wing" of the Democratic party is going to lead to the emergence of a mass party of the working class. A major priority would seem to me to involve our regaining control over what a movement is and what it needs to do. In that sense, independent political action can play something of a role on that question right now. Conversely, not doing anything about it cedes the venue to the dead end of "lesser evil" politics and whatever degree of conservatism is passing as "liberal" these days. Cheers, Mark L. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
