Pierre Beaudet, co-founder of New notebooks of socialism, died on March 8, 2022, leaves a considerable intellectual, political and militant legacy. He founded and led organizations like Alternatives, which structured what the Quebec left is today. He contributed to making known ideas, struggles, people that Quebec did not know or refused to know. He worked tirelessly to build “another world”, which for him involved leading a “battle of ideas”. In this battle, words and texts are gestures, actions.
It all starts with reading the magazine bias while Pierre follows his classical course with the Jesuits. “Much more than a simple publication, bias is an incubator. It is a provocation, the demonstration of a new way of thinking,” he later wrote.
The discovery of such a magazine, and simultaneously the awakening of such a relationship to writing and ideas, is not secondary. Devouring, young, words that excite curiosity, dissipate confusion and make you want to act, all of a sudden, that’s what structures a relationship to ideas and their role.
Mobilization
In the early 1970s, Beaudet and his comrades took over a Maoist bookshop, which they opened to a wider public, while remaining camped on the left. The team of this new Progressive Bookstore is involved in the review Mobilization. Pierre describes himself as the “coordinator without the title” of the magazine and of the group around him.
Beaudet then develops his relationship to the battle of ideas, and there is no question of making the journal a simple receptacle for debates without a clear political tendency. On the other hand, he does not want to make it an official ideological organ either, which the newspaper will be for example. In fight!. According to Beaudet and his team, the review and debate based on workers’ experiences can serve as a basis for building the organization that becomes Mobilization. The ideological struggle is not an “importation” of Marxist analyzes within the working class, but a reciprocal influence between intellectuals and workers, where some transform others.
SUCO and CIDMAA
In the mid-1970s, Pierre’s interest in international issues pushed him towards international solidarity, notably with SUCO. This transition also brought with it an evolution in his conception of the battle of ideas.
He then ceased to believe in the imminence of the revolution and rejected the project of founding an organization that would lead it. In the absence of hand-to-hand combat with the dominants, more space can be given to nuances, debates and disagreements.
It then takes a turn towards information as such. The problem with traditional media is not only their truncated analysis, but also their silence, a lack of accurate information on certain subjects. Choosing to speak intelligently, precisely and measuredly about a side issue constitutes a valid participation in the battle of ideas. Thus Pierre Beaudet worked on setting up research centers critical of imperialism, such as the Center for Information and Documentation on Mozambique and Southern Africa (CIDMAA).
This shift can be explained, among other things, by the aversion that Pierre developed towards the international positions taken by the Quebec Marxist-Leninists of the time, who took up the official Chinese positions. His adventure in international solidarity also leads Pierre to participate in strategies that go beyond the scene of the extreme left in Quebec. When he helps to bring Jane Fonda to Quebec to talk about Vietnam or Desmond Tutu and Thabo Mbeki to talk about the South African situation, he participates in forcing the Quebec and Canadian governments to modify their action.
Alternatives
We can also see this strategy for the general public at work during the creation of Alternatives and the publication of its newspaper inserted in The duty from 1994. This new approach to the battle of ideas participated in renewing the left. Alternatives and other organizations set up subsequently structured an intellectual proposal which notably formed the basis of a coherent political program beyond the centrism of the Parti Québécois. The relative successes of the left at the start of the 21st centurye century were made possible thanks to this common base built in the 1990s.
By participating in the creation of the Quebec Social Forum and then in that of La Grande Transition, he contributed to building spaces where people on the left recognize each other, exchange, debate and define our political family in Quebec. Thanks to these commonplaces, we know that we are together, despite our squabbles and our differences.
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