Political scientist Jean-Marc Piotte died of cardiac arrest overnight from Thursday to Friday at the age of 81. Trade union theorist who was part of the founding committee of the journal bias in 1963, he was hailed for his sensitivity to “social changes” and his unifying approach.
Jean-Marc Piotte was also professor and director of the Department of Political Science at UQAM, in addition to being president of the union of professors at the same university. He participated in the founding of the journals Chronicles and, more recently, To port!.
Always anchored on the left, the thought of Jean-Marc Piotte has evolved over the decades, comments the chronicler of the Duty Louis Cornellier, who wrote a review of Piotte’s book in 2013, Democracy of the ballot boxes and democracy of the streets. Piotte defined himself there, writes Cornellier, as a “revisionist Marxist”.
Without abandoning his desire to fight for a fairer society, the political scientist admitted to dreaming now of social transformations favoring the “better” to the detriment of the “worse”.
For the essayist and columnist at Duty Normand Baillargeon, who worked with him a lot and who co-signed some of his works, Jean-Marc Piotte distinguished himself by his openness to the debate of ideas.
“He never remained locked into a dogmatic reading” of society, he says. “He is someone who has remained very attentive to social changes. In 2011, the two men co-edited a book titled Quebec in search of secularism. They also gathered together life stories of people on the left who have taken different paths. “There are people who expressed various points of view”, and Jean-Marc Piotte was “open-minded enough” to listen to them.
This openness to different ideas has however earned Jean-Marc Piotte some criticism, including that of Louis Gill, who in 2015 signed a book entitled Autopsy of a myth. Reflections on the political thought of Jean-Marc Piotte.
Combat Syndicalist
Still, Jean-Marc Piotte remains a major figure in Quebec political thought, notes Louis Cornellier. An active unionist and former president of the teachers’ union at UQAM, Piotte practiced a “combat” unionism, which aimed much higher than the simple working conditions of its members, he comments.
It was the Guérin affair, which shook the École Normale Jacques-Cartier in the early 1960s, which led to the founding of the journal bias, says Gérald Mckenzie, who rubbed shoulders with Jean-Marc Piotte at that time. “We supported the teachers who were kicked out,” he recalls. Later the group bias will celebrate “independence, socialism and secularism”, he summarizes.
“Afterwards, he became a teacher and had a lot of influence,” says Gérald Mckenzie. Professor at the University of Ottawa, Jean-Pierre Couture was a student of Jean-Marc Piotte. “He was a situation definer,” he says, adding that Piotte took a critical look at these situations while practicing committed activism.
Maintaining this critical spirit, Jean-Marc Piotte then distanced himself from “right-wing nationalism”, adds Mr. McKenzie. “He was quite hard on identity and conservative nationalism”, which had “nothing to do” with what “socialist and decolonizing” independence was at the time of biasadds Jean-Pierre Couture.
For the latter, the success of Jean-Marc Piotte’s book on The Great Thinkers of the Western World bears witness to the influence of the political scientist. “He was very unifying,” he says.