******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Oops, the references to 1972 and 1976 below should be, of course, to 2002 and 2006. Guess I am still living in the 20th century. -----Original Message----- From: Marxism [mailto:marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Fidler via Marxism Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2018 9:58 AM To: rfid...@ncf.ca Subject: Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. ***************************************************************** 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. [snip] _________________________________________________________ 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
