12. Related to this issue is a second problem: the state-centered versions of socialism that have dominated the 20th century. Across a whole historic period most of the left presented state ownership as the social and economic essence of socialism. Marx had put the entire emphasis of his critique of capitalism on what he called the social relations of production, by which he meant the relationships of domination, control, alienation and exploitation that dictate how wealth is produced in a capitalist society.
What followed from this emphasis was the idea that socialism entails the development of new social relations of production based upon dis-alienated forms of control and self-management of production by working people. Workers’ control of production and new institutions of popular self-government are at the heart of such a perspective.
Especially during the era in which the Stalinized Communist Parties dominated the socialist left (1925-1980 or so), these commitments were lost. State ownership of the means of production and a “planned economy” were said to be the essence of the new society. Despite their best intentions, many trotskyists also placed the emphasis here. As a result, the idea that state ownership is inherently progressive, indeed that it is inherently socialist, became very widespread on the left. This contributed to the “state-centered” politics in which the ideas of state regulation and state planning were elevated to a prime position in socialist propaganda. One consequence of this was that the inherently oppressive nature of the nation-state was rarely broached. In fact, to this day, many on the left continue to push such a view, seemingly oblivious to the mass hostility to centralized state bureaucracies that has developed—for good reason—among working class people in huge parts of the world.
What is entirely lost in such “state-centered” socialist politics (what we would call socialism from above ) is that the nation-state arose with the development of capitalism as bourgeois classes sought integrated national markets with a uniform system of laws and taxes, a common language, a unified government, and a national army to defend and advance their claims against “foreign” capitalists (and to put down domestic revolts when necessary). Also lost is a strong sense of the inherently bureaucratic form of bourgeois democracy (emphasized by Marx in The Civil War in France ).
Finally, state-centered versions of socialism tend to lose sight of the fact that as national structures and institutions nation-states perpetuate the division of the world into “us” (who belong to a given nation) and “them (foreigners, outsiders, etc). The consequence of state-centered socialism, then, has been to reinforce nationalism at the expense of internationalism.
13. This brings me to a third issue: the politics of space. Marxists have been curiously indifferent to questions of space, especially to the way in which peoples’ identities have spatial and geographic points of reference. Yet, personal memories invariably have spatial dimensions: we think of ourselves as having been born in a certain place, having lived, grown up, worked, gone to school in various places, and so on. Now, for most of human history, relationships to space have had nothing to do with belonging to a nation. But capitalism has stamped our sense of belonging, our need for community with others, with national forms. In truth, people belong to groups with both smaller and larger spaces. But capitalism constructed what Benedict Anderson has described as “imagined communities.” Nations are thus in part imaginary constructions—organized around symbols like flags, anthems, national colours, and largely artifical myths and histories—which connect with administrative units called nation-states. But it would be naive to think that these imagined communities do not exercise a real power of attraction for people. We need only observe phenomena like the Olympic Games to realize the attractive power of these imagined communities. Millions of people who have never met Silken Laumann or Donovan Bailey nevertheless act as if they are “their own flesh and blood,” glorying in their victories, agonizing in their defeats.
I say this not because I think there is anything inevitable about national identifications; on the contrary. But unless revolutionary socialists understand that such identifications speak to a real need—the desire to belong to a community with others, to have some sense of common purpose—- then we will underestimate the sense in which mass socialist movements of the future will have to help develop truly internationalist feelings of community that connect with both local and global experiences. It will not be enough to have a “vanguard” which tells people that nationalism is their enemy; it will be necessary to create new experiences of space based upon forms of organization that create new solidarities and new identifications, forged in common struggle, that go beyond the nation-state.
14. And this brings me to my fourth point: the rise of nationalism in the age of globalization. Economic globalization is all the rage; barely any corner of the globe has been untouched by the dramatic ascendancy of transnational corporations (TNCs) and global financial markets. Most nation-states are economically smaller than the world’s largest TNCs; and world money markets move sums around every day that massively exceed the holdings of any central bank (see my article “The End of the Nation State?”, New Socialist 3, May-June 1996). Yet these global economic entities are wreaking havoc on peoples lives: factories close, whole communities are destroyed, social services are savaged as communities’ hospitals, schools, post offices and so on disappear, all in the name of globalization.
In such circumstances, nationalism often becomes the first and most accessible means for understanding and resisting these forces. However remote a national government might appear, it’s a lot closer and a lot more tangible than some TNC or an electronic global money market centered in cyberspace. And it’s more likely to listen to a group of angry farmers or laid-off miners than is the head of the World Bank or one of the world’s most powerful corporate executives. Yet, demanding that the national state protect “us” against global capital slides almost inevitably into seeing the problem in national terms. Foreigners and things foreign become the enemies of our security and well-being. Nasty and unscrupulous politicians quickly become adept at fuelling and manipulating such sentiments. So, US autoworkers engage in bashing Japanese cars, disaffected youth in Germany get pulled into firebombing hostels full of Turkish migrant labourers, people in California support propositions cracking down on “illegals” from Mexico, English-speaking Canadians denounce “greedy” Quebeckers, Serbs, Croats and Muslims are pitted against one another in the former Yugoslavia, Hutus and Tutsis find themselves in bloody conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi—the list goes on.
It’s no accident then, that in a period of fierce global restructuring of capital, old and new nationalisms are rearing their heads—and many of them in a most virulent and violent fashion. Rarely do we hear the clarion cry of the anti-colonial nationalisms of the 1950s and ‘60s since most of these have been thoroughly discredited by their failures to meet hopes for development. Instead, nasty, divisive, increasingly ethnic nationalisms are being promoted in one part of the world after another. And in a context of anger and despair, especially where the left and the labour movement appear to be spent forces, right-wing ethnic nationalisms quite often seize the political initiative. Again, there is nothing inevitable about any of this.
But it would be foolhardy to underestimate the upsurge of nationalism we are witnessing in this era of globalization. And it should remind us that the need for socialists to underline their internationalist commitments is perhaps more pressing than at any time since the bulk of the left embraced nationalism in 1914. To do so, we will need to take up the important insights offered by the tradition of socialist internationalism and develop them more thoroughly in relation to questions like the politics of space, nation-states and economic globalization, and the critique of the form of the bourgeois nation-state from the perspective of socialism from below.
Part Four: National Questions in Canada Today
15. Canada is a product of the imperialist expansion of the European powers. Established as a British “colonial settler state,” Canada is based upon the domination, oppression and subordination of aboriginal peoples and of the French settlers who populated New France and other parts of the Canadas conquered by Britain in 1759. Canada was founded upon the oppression of these groups; for this reason Canadian politics is shaped by two main national struggles, those of native peoples (or the “First Nations”) and of the Quebecois.
16. Because native peoples were economically marginalized, politically disenfranchised, and horribly oppressed by the apartheid policies of the Indian Act, they have had a difficult time finding levers by which to exercise political pressure. It was largely in the midst of the explosion of social protest in the 1960s and early 1970s that politically organized native movements began to make their mark. Inspired in part by groups like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement in the US, native activists began to engage in much more militant and concerted forms of struggle (see “Red Power,” an interview with Howard Adams in New Socialist 2, March-April 1996).
Since the upheavals of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, there has been an effort to professionalize the native movement, to make it a more conventional lobbying effort. At the forefront of this shift has been the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations. Much of the focus of the AFN has been on constitutional change, in particular the attempt to get recognition of the “inherent right to self-government” of native peoples enshrined in the Constitution Act. It is vital that socialists support this demand. Given that native peoples never consented to being governed by the Canadian state, their inherent right to choose whatever form of self-government they desire must be acknowledged and defended.
At the same time, we must recognize that a whole layer of native activists (many of them of a younger generation than the AFN leaders) rejects the focus on constitutional change and land claims through the courts that dominates mainstream native politics. These activists have been in the forefront of direct action forms of civil disobedience like road and highway blockades and occupations of historic native lands of the sort that we’ve seen at Oka, Gustafsen Lake and Ipperwash. It is vital that socialists, while defending the demands of a group like the AFN, also try to organize solidarity with these more militant forms of native struggle. We must make it clear that we support militant native self-organization and self-activity and that we blame the colonialist practices of the Canadian state for any violence which occurs.
16. The national question which has dominated official politics in Canada is that of the Quebecois. This has to do with the fact that, wanting to profit from the agricultural and commercial development of New France, and wanting French farmers to continue working their land, the British colonizers were not interested in displacing the people of the colony. While native peoples were increasingly pushed to the margins of economic life, things were more complicated with the French settlers. Initially, the British tried to suppress the Catholic Church and the French language. They soon realized, however, that they would need an alliance with the French elite—landlords, clergy, and a few capitalists—if they were to govern the area effectively. As a result, while locking New France into a relationship of colonial domination by British-appointed authorities, they also made concessions: tolerance of the French language, the Catholic Church and the French legal code. When the push came in the 1860s to integrate the British colonies in North America, Quebec was granted a further concession: restoration of its own provincial legislative assembly. As a result, a political entity was created (the province of Quebec) which housed the second largest provincial population in the country, a vast majority of whom were francophone, and which was home to some of its most important centers of agriculture, manufacturing and commerce. This meant that grievances from Quebec had usually to be negotiated by the predominantly English-speaking ruling class.
While nationalist pressures regularly emanated from Quebec (and could become quite frustrating for them at times of war), so long as the Catholic Church dominated cultural and political life, Quebec nationalism did not seem especially threatening to Canada’s ruling class. That changed in the 1960s as the rise of a secular middle class and a new labour movement broke the stranglehold of the Church and launched a new kind of nationalist movement (which crystallized ultimatedly in the creation of the Parti Quebecois). The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the October crisis of October 1970 (in which the Trudeau government used the army and police state measures to crush the Front de la Liberation du Quebec), the militant general strike of 1972, and the election of a PQ government under Rene Levesque in 1976 all combined to move the “Quebec question” to the forefront of political debate. And there it has remained for a period of thirty years. Moreover, the alleged “obsession” of federal politicians with resolving the Quebec question has been exploited by right-wing politicians to suggest that in the midst of hardship for most, Quebeckers are getting “special treatment.”
17. In the first instance, the attitude of socialists should be clear enough. Quebec is an oppressed nation within the Canadian state. Initially conquered by British imperialism, it continues to be denied the democratic right to determine its own future. Socialists thus defend Quebec’s right to self-determination including its right to secede from the Canadian confederation (this does not mean that we accept the right of the Quebec government to deny that same right to the native peoples in its midst). But from here, things get more complicated. For, as I pointed out above, there is no general rule or universal law which instructs socialists as to whether we should advocate or oppose separation or secession. To sort that out, we need a concrete analysis.
Basically, the socialist attitude should probably be something like Marx’s was on Ireland. If a powerful, united workers’ movement shows the capacity to address problems of national oppression, then national separation is unnecessary. Marx thought this was the case in Britain during the period of Chartism which peaked in 1848. But, if chauvinism towards the oppressed nation becomes a continual means of blocking the development of independent working class politics, then it makes sense to advocate independence as a way of removing a national antagonism that holds back left-wing politics.
Whatever one might say about the past, I believe a good case can now be made that in the aftermath of the debate over Bills 101 and 172 (Quebec’s recent language laws), over the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, and with the enormous hostility that has been generated in much of the country to the idea of granting Quebec recognition as a “distinct society,” anti-Quebec chauvinism now functions in much the same way anti-Irish chauvinism did in the 1860s: as a way of binding English-speaking workers into an identification with their rulers and the traditions of the English-Canadian state. All attempts to deal with national demands coming from Quebec are soon met with a powerful chorus of opposition from a considerable portion of ordinary English-speaking people. In the midst of such anti-Quebec outcries, a national identity uniting working people with the traditions of the Canadian state is affirmed. For these reasons, it probably makes sense for socialists in the Canadian state to advocate the secession of Quebec. We can address questions like advocating a new “equal and free confederation”—which Marx proposed in the case of England and Ireland—once we sort out our stand on the first issue.
I should make clear at this point that my suggestion that socialists should probably advocate Quebec independence has nothing to do with thinking that a new Quebec state would be inherently progressive, or that the struggle for it would inevitably unleash a radical social movement. On the contrary, unlike some of the comrades in Gauche socialiste, I think that an independent bourgeois Quebec achieved without a massive social upheaval is very much a possibility. As a result, an independent Quebec state with immigration controls, racist practices and hostility towards native peoples seems to me quite possible. Indeed, I think that Gs comrades err when they suggest that the bourgeois nationalists in Quebec (like Lucien Bouchard) don’t really want a sovereign state and that socialists can and should try to outflank them by being more sovereigntist than the “sovereigntists”. I think, in fact, that such a position runs the risk of being insufficiently critical of Quebec nationalism and of the nation-state as a political form.
18. One further point should be made with respect to national questions in Canada. Much of the left which addresses these issues came up in an era when immigrants and people of colour had not yet organized politically. Often, socialists talked as if there was an homogenous entity called “English Canada” in a way which seemed blind to the multi-ethnic, multi-racial character of the country. As a result, the systematically racist character of the Canadian state was often underplayed or ignored. This is something that should be redressed. Socialists should not “privilege” the native and Quebec questions in a way that seems to ignore the racial oppression of Canada’s peoples of colour. For this reason, a consistent commitment to anti-racism must go hand in hand with a principled commitment to the rights of aboriginal peoples and the Quebecois to self-determination.
19. National questions are likely to be of even greater importance in world politics in the years ahead. Revolutionary socialists have an obligation to try to find ways of dealing with the debates and crises that these create. This will not always be easy. While using some of the historic contributions of past marxists to guide our analyses, we must be on guard against dogmatic and simple-minded responses which fail to do justice to the complexity of the issues involved. And while supporting the right of oppressed nations to determine their future, we must never lose sight of one of the vital features of socialism from below: its commitment to a world community without nation-states.
