RÊVE / CAUCHEMAR: Allende's Chile and the Polarization of the Québec
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RÊVE / CAUCHEMAR: Allende’s Chile and the Polarization of the Québec Left, 1968-1974 by Nikolas Barry-Shaw A thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts Queen‘s University Kingston, ON Canada September 2014 © Nikolas Barry-Shaw 2014 ABSTRACT Chile‘s ill-fated attempt to build a democratic socialism (1970-1973) was a defining moment for the global New Left. Nowhere was this truer than in Québec. During the Allende years and after, Chile exercised a decisive influence on the political imagination of Québécois radicals, as they searched for a path to socialisme et indépendance. Prior to the 11 September 1973 coup d‘état, countless activists travelled to the South American nation to witness – and to learn from – the ―Chilean road to socialism.‖ Arguments about Allende‘s socialist government and the subsequent U.S.-backed coup that overthrew him were woven into left political discourse in the province, influencing labour movement debates over the formation of a parti des travailleurs, colouring campaign rhetoric during the October 1973 provincial elections, and serving as a trump card in post-election struggles within the Parti québécois (PQ) over the strategy of étapisme. Allende‘s fate even lingered on in the minds of René Lévesque and many other party leaders after the election of the first PQ government in 1976. The Québec left‘s deep engagement with Chile was a major factor in the rise of the Marxist-Leninist movement, convincing many activists that attaining socialism by parliamentary means was impossible in a U.S.-dominated world. Allende‘s rise and tragic fall was key to the process of polarization that occurred on the Québec left from 1968 to 1974. As this thesis demonstrates, our understanding of Québec‘s politics in these years is enriched greatly through a combined transnational and imperial approach. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT . ii . LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . iv . INTRODUCTION RÊVE/CAUCHEMAR: Allende‘s Chile and the Polarization of the Québec Left, 1968-1974 . 1 . PROLOGUE Nixon‘s Nightmare . 12 . CHAPTER 3 Searching for a New Revolutionary Model: The Québec Left in 1970 . 18 . CHAPTER 4 Many Dreams: Allende‘s Victory and the Rise of the PQ Left . 30 . CHAPTER 5 Implacable Dialectics: Chile Solidarity and the Genesis of Québec‘s Marxist-Leninist Movement . 75 . CHAPTER 6 The ―Terrifying Muse‖: The Chilean Coup and the Triumph of Étapisme in the Parti québécois . 93 . CONCLUSION Allende‘s Ghost: U.S. Hegemony and the International Reverberations of the Coup . 145 . BIBLIOGRAPHY . 159 . iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CAP Comité d‘action politique CEQ Corporation des enseignants du Québec CCSNM Conseil central des syndicats nationaux de Montréal CFP Centre de formation populaire CIA Central Intelligence Agency CIDOC Centro Intercultural de Documentación CSN Confédération des syndicats nationaux CQC Comité Québec-Chili CUT Central Unica de Trabajadores FLASCO Facultad Latino americana de Ciencias Sociales FLQ Front de libération du Québec FRAP Front d‘action politique des salariés FTQ Fédération des travailleurs du Québec GMR Groupe Marxiste Révolutionnaire ITT International Telephone and Telegraph JOC Jeunesse ouvrière catholique MAPU Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario MIR Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria MNA Member of the National Assembly MSA Mouvement Souveraineté-Association MTC Mouvement des travailleurs chrétiens NSC National Security Council PCI Partido Communista d’Italia PQ Parti québécois RIN Rassemblement pour l‘indépendance nationale RN Ralliement national UN Union nationale UP Unidad Popular iv INTRODUCTION RÊVE/CAUCHEMAR: Allende’s Chile and the Polarization of the Québec Left, 1968-1974 The Popular Unity government and the coup that overthrew it were defining events of the early 1970s, and most political people alive at the time know something about the coup and have their opinions about why it came about. - Victor Figueroa Clark1 In The Empire Within, Sean Mills demonstrates how over the course of the 1960s, diverse Montréal leftists developed an understanding of the plight of poor and working-class people as symptomatic of Québec‘s colonial condition. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Aimé Cesaire, Albert Memmi and other anti-colonial theorists, leftists recast the province‘s popular struggles as strands of a larger, global fight against colonialism and imperialism. Québécois were the ―white niggers of America,‖ dominated politically and culturally by a conquering power (the Canadian state) and exploited economically by foreign interests (U.S. imperialism). By the late 1960s, these ideas had become hegemonic on the left and were spilling over into the city‘s rapidly radicalizing labour movement.2 The Québec left, perhaps more than any New Left movement of the industrialized countries, epitomized the oppositional, Third World-oriented ―global consciousness‖ spawned by the sixties.3 1 Victor Figueroa Clark, ―Salvador Allende – 40 years on,‖ Lefthistory (Personal blog of Victor Figueroa Clark), 15 July 2013, http://lefthistory.com/post/55505551797/salvador-allende-40-years-on. 2 Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen‘s Press, 2010), especially Chapters 7 and 8. 3 See Karen Dubinsky, Sean Mills, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, and Scott Rutherford, eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009); A possible rival for the honour of ―most global consciousness‖ would be the Black Panther Party and the wider Black Power movement in the U.S. See Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2003), Chapter 3, ―Roaring from the East. ‖ 1 Yet, as Mills notes in his conclusion, the hegemonic moment lasted only a few brief years.4 Québec‘s diverse, broad-based but loosely-organized movement for national liberation rapidly bifurcated in the early 1970s, its anti-colonial ―grammar of dissent‖ decomposing into two competing, mutually incomprehensible towers of Babel. Comrades once united by the cry of ‗socialisme et indépendance!‘ increasingly parted ways and chose one of two hostile camps, each of which sought to represent only one pole of the slogan. The landscape of the Québec left was soon starkly divided between a dominant Parti québécois (PQ) increasingly distant from the socialist ideals of many of its members and a subaltern galaxy of Marxist-Leninist groups, whose activists renounced their former commitment to independence and instead embraced the dictatorship of the proletariat. With the PQ exercising political leadership over the tamed ―social democratic‖ parliamentary left and the Marxist-Leninist movement over the more radical socialist and communist extra-parliamentary left, the 1970s have been aptly described as marked by a ―PQ/ML double hegemony.‖5 The short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) in Chile was key to this polarization of the Québec left. The novelty of the world‘s first democratically-elected Marxist president naturally aroused interest, not only in Québec, but all around the world. ―Chile provided a laboratory test,‖ Thomas Wright and Rody Oñate explain, ―for a question that heretofore had remained hypothetical: Is there a peaceful road to socialism?‖6 The political conjuncture of the early 1970s made Chile the object of a particularly close scrutiny, at a time when much of the left globally was seeking new roads to socialism after the upheavals of 1968. This was true of the global New Left, as it searched for an alternative to the grey bureaucracy of 4 Mills, The Empire Within, 209–214. 5 Pierre Vallières, Paroles d’un nègre blanc, ed. Jacques Jourdain and Mélanie Mailhot (Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 2002), 141. In this and all future cases, unless otherwise identified, translations from French-language sources are by the author. 6 Thomas C. Wright and Rody Oñate, Flight from Chile: Voices of Exile (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 1. 2 ―obsolete Communism‖ and reformist social democracy and looked to the Third World for political inspiration. This was true even of Western European Communist Parties, which were trying to rethink socialist strategy and objectives as they distanced themselves from the Soviet Bloc in the wake of the crushing of Prague Spring.7 The ―Chilean experiment‖ launched by Allende‘s 4 September 1970 election and the U.S.-backed coup d‘état that ended it in 1973 were defining events for the post-1968 left. Nowhere was this truer than in Québec. For a left that was so resolutely internationalist, that went to such great lengths to situate Québec's social and political struggles in the wider context of a world marked by national liberation movements and U.S. imperialism, Chile‘s attempt to realize a ‗second independence‘ and build a democratic socialism could not but have a tremendous impact. The pages of Québec‘s labour newspapers, progressive Catholic and indépendantiste magazines, felquiste broadsheets, and Marxist-Leninist journals overflowed with news and commentary about Chile. Many Québécois radicals were not content merely to admire and theorize about the ―Chilean road to socialism‖ from afar. Assisted by a network of Québécois missionaries sympathetic to Allende‘s Unidad Popular (UP) government, a growing number of activists