short, it would condemn the .people to the defensive, to withdrawal and fear. It would in fact guarantee what it pre tended to fight: repression. Worse yet, it would condemn the entire population to lose any formmof initia- tive, to undergo passively the counter- attack of those in power and to

depend upon the good-will of the.

authorities.

The army of the established power should not be provoked in the name of the people when one does not oneself have an army in which a people can recognize itself, be consciously inte- grated, and by a collective fight be led toward the conquest of political power and the realization of its social objec- tives. And for such a people’s army to organize, develop, and conquer, the people must first objectively have no other choice but to take up arms, must be conscious of it, and must have developed within themselves a politi- cal and military leadership fully cap- able of assuming the heavy historical responsibility of guiding the entire people toward certain victory.

THE ELECTORAL PROCESS

In Revolutionary warfare: methods (1961), Che Quevarastresses that it should never be excluded a priori that a revolutionary change in a given society can be started by an electoral process. All the better, it should be added, if this change can be achieved totally by this process. Armed struggle as a revolutionary strategy and mode of mass political action cannot be ini- tiated or developed if the masses think they can achieve their aspirations by a given electoral process. The revolu- tionary is he who can find a strategy ' and tactics adequate for the existing objective situation and who is capable 'of foreseeing those that will be appro- priate when a change in the objective situation radically modifies the bal- ance of forces facing each other and, at the same time, imposes new modes ,of action upon the masses, be it to take hold of political power or to defend what they have already conquered.

In the present situation it would be an impardonable error for the par- tisans of a real social revolution in

Quebec to underestimate or, worse, to .

deny what the Quebec people can gain by the strategy which has been . defined by the Parti Quebecois and which, for the first time in Quebec, allowed broad sectors of the popu- lation to participate directly in a process aiming for the conquest of , power and by this collective practice . to understand the mechanisms, impli- cations, limits, dangers and possibili- ties of it: briefly, to become aware of 3 the strengths and weaknesses of their means of action, and of the impor- j tance of their unity and solidarity in the face of what threatens them indis- tinctly and seeks to divide them to better dominate and exploit them. Who will deny the merit of Rene Levesque's assertion that in Quebec ‘the struggle for national emancipa- ‘ tion must be carried on in the classic I disorder of a social revolution’ and that we must consequently find the : means of leading the national liber- i ation struggle and the social liberation struggle ‘while not forgetting that without national freedom we shall have neither the maturity nor the in- struments needed to carry through any social, economic or cultural , .renovation which is not illusory or truncated"? (Le Devoir, 29-11-71). If it is not in the interest of the majority of Quebecois that the trade

. method of political action, guerrilla strategy which requires of g ‘ them the greatest sacrifices at the

unions now set up a second mass party which would distinguish itself from the PQ only by its phraseology and which. moreover, by its opposition to

' the PQ would constitute a brake to the

political and social emancipation of the Quebec collectivity and to the his- torical process that is taking place, is it in the interest of the Quebec people that the FLQ continue the action undertaken since 1963‘which served as a detonator in October 1970 to the crisis we all know of?

Is it in the interest of the Quebec people that the armed agitation of the FLQ as practised in Quebec for the past eight years, continue to affirm itself mythically as armed struggle when in reality it has none of the fundamental characteristics of a real armed struggle, and objective condi- tions do not permit and do not require the development of such a struggle in ' the current scheme of things?

The answer is a categorical no.

WHY THE FLQ SHOULD NOT EXIST

The intellectual conviction that an armed confrontation will be inevitable one day or another (even if it kw upon a very profound analysis, e total situation) can justify recourse to armed agitation a method of revolu- tionary political action in the present situation, modified by the October crisis. If ever it was justified in the past, as a revealer of a condition of domination and of a resoluted will to get out of it, armed agitation, just like the unarmed agitation of those who confuse the breaking of a window with

a conscientious, positive, and mobil- '

izing political action, is today counter- revolutionary.

Now that the balance of forces appears to us such as it is objectively, armed agitation, far more than a

simple political error or a simple

"aberration’ has become an ideal means of ‘trapping’ and of sabotaging the development of the liberation‘ struggle:

1) by denying the objectively liberat— ing character of the electoral process

:that the Parti Quebecois practises

(and not as it is practised by the par- ties of the dominating class) at this stage of the liberation struggle;

2) by removing the mass struggle content from the armed struggle that the Quebec people may one day be constrained by the adversary to join in. collectiver to defend their freedom, and by caricaturing their mode» of

' political actionlwhich becomes indis- ' pensable for a people or a majority;

only when the peaceful processes of’ the conquest of power are forbiddem by dictatorship, military occupationp and total repression;

' 3) by denying the necessity for the

masses to exhaust all democratic means before passing to an armed to a

same time as a very high degree of political consciousness and comba- tivity (see on this subject the first pages of Guerrilla warfare by Che Guevara, hardly suspected of oppor- tunism!

4) by hiding the character of pro- longed struggle ,of any liberation pro- cess by a romantic presentation of a possibility or an imaginary outlook of

revolution or of short-term victory; f 5) by dividing the efforts of those who ; are fighting the same enemies and,

who can hope to conquer only by con- stantly strengthening, their unity;

6) by substituting any longer strate- gic vision with the incoherence of an agitation practised for itself and for the ‘kicks’ it givesthe delinquent who lies dormant in each of us;

7) 'finally, and crowning the rest with an incalculable irresponsibility, by furnishing the established authorities the chance they seek to promulgate the War Measures Act so as to apply a strategy of force (of armed force) against the Quebec liberation move- ment as a whole, through the expe- dient of a decisive countemffensive ostensibly led against the FLQ ‘revolutionary war', if possible before the Parti Quebecois acquires the legi- timacy which would render it poli- tically invulnerable not only through the widespread electoral support it could gather from the Quebec masses these next years, but also and above all by the conscious. integration of these masses to a daily struggle on all fronts: political, economic, social and cultural.

,For all these reasons, which are founded neither upon opportunism nor‘upon sentimentalism and still less upon fear of action, but only upon an objective analysis of a concrete situa-‘ tion, there is no need to fear the clear

‘ and vigorous affirmation that the FLQ, ‘symbol’ rather than liberation organization and guerrilla V‘myth’ rather than popular resistance, no longer has any reason to exist today.

NATURE OF ARMED STRUGGLE

No one has, or has ever had any real power of decision within the FLQ, since the FLQ has always been only a gathering. of groups or cells having little or no communication between them and having in common only the choice of the three letters FLQ. There were in the sixties efforts to build an FLQ organization. They all failed, not because of the FLQers themselves, but because of the objective conditions .uwhich, while favouring armed agita-

tion, did not allow and still do not

allow the setting off, implantation and development of that form of mass struggle that armed struggle is.

The confusion between armed struggle (which is a mass struggle requiring a certain number of con- ditions which do not currently exist in

Quebec for its birth and development) '

and armed agitation has led to these ‘ abortive efforts to structure the FLQ ' and all these contradictions painfully fought by those within FLQ who, while rejecting anarchism and indivi- dual terrorism, have long believed than an armed struggle could develop from a highly structured ‘core’ of revolutionaries, independently of the particular objective conditions that

this path to. aimed struggle imposes

uebeCois muSt choose

when, by other means, it has no chance of developing or of "achieving ' its political and social objectives or even of existing. ‘ g

It took them a long time, a very

long time, to realize, at the very hear_t_ . of their practices) and of their con-

tradictions, that an armed struggle can only be a mass struggle conducted by means other than elector lism when the latter cannot function normally or cannot function at all, when the masses can gain nothing from is, when they are fully aware of this and when they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by engag- ing in a revolutionary war. We are not yet at that stage in Quebec and no FLQer, I think, would say the con-

‘trary.

But every FLQer has often believed, on the other hand, that although Quebec was not in a revolu- tionary situation, an organization of armed struggle could, all the same, form and implant itself while ex- pecting that the situation, once it became revolutionary, would mechanicallyallow it to develop. They were forgetting that an organization is not only born from the revolutionary will of those who dedicate themselves to the task of building it but above all from a real need of the masses in a given situation and not in just any situation.

And that is why there has never been an FLQ organization as such,

‘ but only cells or little groups, limited

in number, personnel and means, without organic linkslbetween them, without a‘directing‘ ‘core’ and withdut real strategy. 'Cells' "or groups, products of the Quebec soil and products, of the first stage of 'the liberation struggle, from 1962 to 1968 (year of creation of the Par-ti Que- becois). during which the first phase of the rapid development of the poli- tical consciousness of the Quebec masses expressed itself chiefly in and by agitation.

Since 1968, thiscont'inual develop- ment of political consciousness has overtaken the stage of agitation to engage in that of mass organization within a structured party, the Parti - Quebecois, which has become today (but not necessarily for eternity) the main political expression of the Quebec masses and at the same time its strategic political force. It is thus to the PQ that comes, at this stage of the struggle and perhaps for several years, the responsibility of political leader- ship of the mass struggle for the in- terests and aspirations of the masses which have created it" and without whose support it could’neither develop nor last as a mass party.

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