Nationalist oligarchies

The recent coming-out of Pierre-Karl Péladeau as a Parti Québécois candidate in the current election campaign has made a lot of people in Quebec very happy, and a lot more people very upset. Péladeau is a media mogul based in Quebec, but with significant holdings in English Canada as well, who has become the only near billionaire to have so far declared his undying support for Quebec independence. As a result, the election campaign has focused on the constitutional issue once again, meaning that the current PQ attempt to form a majority government may have been sabotaged by the notoriously weak support for sovereignty even among the francophone Québécois.

In fact, people have known that Péladeau and his deceased father, the founder of the Québecor media dynasty, were Quebec separatists for quite a long time. But this is the first time that any ultra-rich oligarch has ever come out openly for sovereignty, which raises a lot of questions about the limitations that could be put upon such a person if ever he became a minister in the Quebec government or even, one day, the provincial premier. Those same questions may also become a lot more important even later on if Péladeau’s option ever wins a future referendum and he becomes a minister, or even the president, of an independent republic.

All the turmoil caused by Péladeau’s recent announcement, however, should be tempered by the fact that the Quebec independence movement has never really been about complete separation from Canada. Because of the large anglophone minority in Quebec, and the now equally large allophone community, it would take about 65% support for Quebec sovereignty among the francophone population just to achieve 50% plus one vote in a general referendum. Since that type of support has never been achieved, the PQ has always had to scale back its objective to sovereignty-association, or hyphenated sovereignty, meaning that an economic association with English Canada has always been part of their message. No one really knows if English Canadians would ever envisage a merely economic association with Quebec, however, since the PQ did not win the two referendum campaigns already held, even though it came a lot closer in 1995 than it did in 1980.

Nationalist movements all over the world have always been based on the premise of national liberation from foreign control. By removing politically or economically oppressive foreign control over the nation’s vital forces, the argument is that independence will lead to a much better life for the majority of the population. All the social components of the nation are supposed to put aside their differences and pull together toward a common goal of national development, that becoming possible for the first time because the people are no longer oppressed or exploited by a foreign empire.  

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, English Canada also went through a national liberation phase of sorts, many people feeling that Canada as a whole had become nothing but a US satellite country, both politically and economically. Paradoxically, the Liberal governments back then that tried so hard to silence the Quebec separatists, were also the same governments that adopted economic nationalism to free the Canadian economy from US control, as well as taking decidedly anti-American stances in foreign policy. National liberation for Canada was supposed to have been focused in particular on ending the old reliance on exporting natural resources, in order to develop a more industrialized and therefore more independent nation.

On a world scale, however, the national liberation promise has been vehemently criticized over the last several decades because of the obvious failure of many liberated countries to achieve most of their goals. As a result, the majority of the people in most of those countries do not seem to be much better off now than they were before independence. National pride may have grown tremendously, but economic or social development has often lagged far behind. The national liberation of places like India, Algeria, or South Africa, for example, only seems to have replaced one group of foreign oppressors with a new group of national oppressors, the national bourgeoisie taking the place of the imperial bourgeoisie but refusing to pass on any of the liberating effects of independence to any of the socially inferior classes.

In many cases, colonialism has been replaced by neocolonialism, with the former empires abandoning outright political control but substituting arms-length economic control instead. The same multinational corporations from the same countries as before simply operate through the compradore bourgeoisie, which is to say local politicians and investors who take a small cut of the profits for themselves before transferring most of the loot to the real bosses in the former “mother country”, or some other foreign empire that has taken its place.

Putting those two situations together means that ordinary people all over the world are now being exploited by a combination of local and foreign big shots, the percentage of national or imperial control varying greatly from one place to another. The only element of the equation that has not changed at all is the way that the majority of the people are being treated. No national liberation at all for most of them, including in Canada, where a recent succession of mostly Conservative prime ministers have brought the country back into its old pattern of resource extraction for the benefit of foreign empires.

In the Quebec case, the sovereignty movement used to characterize the Canadian federation as nothing more than a political extension of the former British empire. One of the more radical members of that movement, Pierre Vallières, accused the Canadian sub-empire of treating the francophone Québécois like “white niggers of America”, exploiting them in the same way as the Black minority in the USA were being exploited by the White majority. Former Quebec premier René Lévesque also referred to rich English Canadian minority leaders within Quebec as “white Rhodesians”, who treated the French-speaking population in Quebec the same way that Ian Smith’s government (1965-1980) treated the Black majority in Zimbabwe.

All of this was initially based on the fact that Quebec used to be what Chicago sociologist Everett Hughes called a folk society, in which most of the employers were anglophones, while most of the industrial workers were francophones. That meant that for quite a long time the Québécois were indeed both politically and economically subordinate to the English-Canadian majority in the rest of Canada.

This neocolonial situation began to change, however, during the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, when the provincial government began actively subsidizing the development of a much larger Québécois bourgeoisie than the one that used to exist for a century and a half before that. Francophone investors like Pierre Péladeau and his son, Pierre-Karl, started becoming a lot richer and a lot more powerful than their predecessors ever were in days gone by. Although anglophone investment in Quebec (from the USA, the UK, English Canada and the anglophone minority within Quebec) undoubtedly remained dominant, for the first time francophone Québécois investors became a significant minority in the overall community of big-time capitalists operating within that province. The folk society was kaput.

Back in 1987, I remember talking briefly to Pierre-Karl Péladeau when I was attending a conference on nationalism organized by a conservative magazine called L’Analyste. Much of the debate going on during that meeting concerned the influence of neoliberalism, that had just recently become a popular ideology after the election and re-election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I had published an article in that magazine claiming that the debate between which institution should control economic development, the state or private enterprise, was a false debate since no large modern economy seemed able to function properly without involving both of them. Right after that, I also published a two-part series in the same magazine about the history of economic nationalism in Quebec.

The Québecor empire went on to become a perfect example of a private enterprise profiting from state intervention, especially in 2000 when the Quebec government prevailed upon the Caisse de dépôt pension fund, to join with Péladeau to keep the Vidéotron cable network from falling into the hands of a rival, English-Canadian, media empire. More recently, Québecor has also profited from the Conservative federal government’s desire to help it become a major player on the much larger pan-Canadian media scene, in order to break up the current price-fixing oligopoly of three English-Canadian conglomerates.

Unfortunately, on a number of other fronts, Pierre-Karl Péladeau has adopted a much more neoliberal style than his father had developed initially. For one thing, Péladeau fils  became a case study in bad industrial relations, using lock-outs on 14 different occasions, not in order to reach any kind of compromise with the rambunctious unions within his sprawling empire, but to eliminate them altogether. He also managed to circumvent the Parti Québécois government’s anti-scab law during those conflicts and, more recently, seems to have prevailed upon the party to cancel a resolution that was to have become part of its electoral program, aimed at updating that law so as to include electronic media. The journalists association in Quebec is also upset at what they call Péladeau’s micro-management of his newspapers, according to them constantly intervening in editorial decisions in spite of the fact that he has always claimed to be against that sort of thing.

This has led a large number of critics to fear that if Péladeau gets elected, and becomes an important minister in the PQ government, he will use the same style of neoliberal management in whatever presumably economic portfolio he inherits. Critics are concerned that recruiting him right now fits in very well with the PQ’s drift to the right over the past few years. Instead of sticking with the interventionist, social-democratic, pro-union profile that used to characterize that party, the PQ seems intent nowadays on cozying up to the business class instead. Their drift to the right has notably included much lower taxes on mining companies than they used to advocate, as well as ignoring any environmental disasters that those companies leave behind. The PQ has also decided to play along with the federal government’s endorsement of importing petroleum into Quebec from the Alberta tar sands, another policy area in which they are now advocating what they used to oppose.

Those fears about Péladeau may turn out to be entirely justified. Someone who made a lot of money with the help of the government may one day turn against using state intervention for social programs. Most people with a neoliberal frame of mind think that Quebec spends far too much money on such things as health care, education, welfare and daycare, especially given the fact that the Quebec debt is already quite a bit higher than that of any of the other Canadian provinces. What happens when the provincial government, or  a future sovereign state, has to choose between helping Quebec businesses succeed against ferocious competition from outside Quebec, or continue developing social democracy for the rest of the population?

Even more importantly, what happens to the whole national liberation movement within Quebec if its leaders adopt exactly the same pro-business, libertarian stance that every other government in the world has already endorsed? If the only people who get liberated are the billionaires, why should the rest of the population go along with the gag? If the Quebec population cannot afford social democracy any more, how can they afford to help their oligarchs compete against much richer countries, or against poorer countries using low production costs as a bargaining chip? The same question also applies to the Canadian government as well.

In today’s world, the various national governments have to compete not so much with each other, but more importantly with the world’s most powerful banking corporations. Those people now spend most of the world’s available capital on several different kinds of speculation, but particularly on monetary speculation, which has increased 500 times over since 1970. Most of the government debt in today’s world comes from speculation rather than from social programs, as we all found out following the 2008 debacle. What kind of sovereignty, or independence, can countries have from each other, if all of them are totally dependent on geographically disembodied pools of capital for their survival? Even the USA is totally dependent on foreign bondholders who control most of its increasingly colossal debt. What does national liberation mean in a world like this?