Québec's left regroupment
According to Bernard Rioux of La Gauche magazine, Québec's new Coalition for a Political Alternative is a "starting point for real and unified political action by the left" The Coalition is against neoliberalism and supports the independence of Canada's French-speaking "province"
n May, nearly 350 people gathered in
St-Augustin, Québec for the founding convention of the Regroupement pour une alternative politique, (Coalition for a Political Alternative).
This convention decided to form an electoral coalition on the basis of a "movement fighting against neo-liberalism, and which calls for the independence of Québec, making an unbreakable link between Québec's national liberation and social emancipation."
This founding convention marked a starting point for real, unified political action by the Québec left. Which is why we should take the time to evaluate the progress of the Regroupement, known by its French initials RAP
The RAP was launched in Montreal in November 1997. That meeting of 600 people put the left back in the public eye. Unusually, even the independentist left got media coverage.
Subsequent regional gatherings met with varying degrees of success. These revealed that there were many political differences and undefined areas within RAP. The primary focus of debate was the place of Québec's independence in RAP's political project. There were also various positions on the eventual formation of a party (as opposed to remaining as a movement). The proposed texts
The draft platform proposed for the RAP was completely inadequate. The marginalisation of the Québec independence question, the total absence of a feminist dimension, and the absence of a dynamic towards breaking with capitalism meant it would have to be substantially amended to be acceptable.
The draft manifesto finally proposed by the RAP's national co-ordination constituted a step forward in understanding the independence question, which was placed at the centre of the effort to define the RAP's project.
This advance makes it possible to go 18 International Viewpoint #305 November 1998 beyond the false opposition of Québec independence as a means or an end. It allows us to get past the "technical approach" - posing the question in terms of the relative weight of the struggle for independence or of the struggle for social justice. Instead, it allows us to show the strategic connection between these two essential fights.
True, the draft manifesto contains no explicit anti-capitalist perspective. The conception of the state is limited to left Keynesian rhetoric [the idea that expanded state welfare programmes could create a balanced capitalism in which both business and the people would prosper].
In the end, despite fairly productive workshop discussions, the founding meeting of the RAP adopted neither the manifesto nor the platform. Only the statutes could be adopted in the meeting plenary. The party/movement debate
The Gauche socialiste group argued that the RAP should seek to initiate a political party as soon as possible. We think that the formation of a party could mobilise activists on the concrete field of struggle for working class and popular power against the power bloc of the ruling Parti québecois (PQ). Any other approach seems to us to put off concrete political struggle indefinitely.
The party/movement debate is not simply a left/right division. There are very moderate social-democrats who wanted to move as quickly as possible to a party, because they wanted concrete politics and refused to be caught up in endless intellectual discussions.
In contrast, some activists who had only partially broken with the PQ rejected any step toward a party. They want to shake up the PO, not challenge it in the electoral field.
Some other activists saw the formation of a party as a turn away from extra-parliamentary struggle. Other mouvementistes saw the eventual formation of a party as the end of a long process of rooting the RAP in the population and broad political education work. This position was fed by a distrust of the partisan politics of the traditional parties.
Eventually, through the workshop debates, it became clear that a majority bloc of very diverse anti-party views would reject any proposal to move quickly towards forming a party.
To address this situation, Pierre Dubuc, editor of l'Aut'journal, suggested that RAP form an electoral coalition this autumn, and call another assembly to put this resolution into practice. This compromise proposal gained a strong majority... It moved the RAP forward, even if the political basis of this coalition is not entirely clear. Democracy misused...
The political discussion in the RAP has from the outset been buried in conflicts between different currents. This is not in itself negative, so long as mechanisms are in place to manage this situation. But in fact, there were no Differences had to be expressed thro fights over the agenda and on pr whose differences were not immed obvious and which often depended the intentions attributed to the prope
As a result, we wasted an entr amount of time on minor prope while the most essential differences m left to be expressed by unspe accusations.
All this fed a factional climate w discouraged some participants. The wa the election was held is a clear example of this case. Lists were drawn up in small caucuses. There was no collective discussion of criteria for who should be represented on the leadership. How would women be represented? How to ensure that voices from different regions and activists in unions or popular movements were included? Would the different political currents present be represented?
Most on the Québec left call for proportional representation in elections organised by the bourgeois state. But for some reason, not inside RAP!
The macho character of the machinations around the electoral lists added to the very weak feminist awareness of the organisers, who had not even taken the trouble to use gender neutral language in their texts.
In the end, the election was no less democratic than those in the union and popular movements, whose democracy is already more developed than bourgeois democracy, but it was obviously not enough for a movement which aims to transform politics.
The convention allowed an important, if minimal, strategic clarification on the national question. The proposal to launch an electoral coalition of progressive and sovereigntist forces counts as an important step forward. The question democratic functioning is withou an essential challenge for the RAP i to develop and go forward. This ques should be at the centre of the c
JOURNAL A RAP C* est the new leadership. It is not a luxury, it is a crucial question for any development of the coalition. ...but still essential
Building the Electoral Coalition called by the RAP should be the left's first priority.
We must find ways to bring together all the tendencies seen and heard at the founding convention. This has a political aspect (a common platform, a common name on the ballot) and an organisational aspect (how will candidates be allocated specific electoral constituencies)?
It will only be possible to build unity if the meeting to establish the Electoral Coalition is preceded by open discussion at both national and regional levels to permit the democratic elaboration of the Coalition platform.
The main task of the new RAP leadership, then, is to create a democratic process for developing a platform. Hopefully, the new co-ordinating committee will produce an initial draft platform and then redraft it on basis of amendments from the regions. Unfortunately, this did not happen after the regional preparations for the founding convention.
Contentious amendments should be set aside for later, when the reformulated platform can be discussed in workshops and then in the plenary, on the basis of a new synthesis prepared by the coordinating committee.
To facilitate a unitary and democratic development, the discussion process should involve contributions from political parties like the [far left] Parti de la Democratie Socialiste (Party for Socialist Democracy) and other forces we hope will make up the Coalition.
A democratic process will allow a maximum of mobilisation. The electoral organisation will be strengthened in so far as the development of the platform is fully democratic. * Source: La Gauche, Summer 1998, #59. Translated by Tom Patterson and edited by Alan Sears for republication in New Socialist.
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