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ABSTRACT
This paper examines a situation in which finance is perceived as imperialist – as immanent to, and serving the interests of, a single ‘culture’ in the colloquial sense. The analysis centres on the long-forgotten 1969 bombing of the trading floor of la Bourse de Montréal (the Montréal Stock Exchange), a moment in an intense phase of the Québécois movement for independence from Canada. Because of the way in which the bombers framed the attack, and its political-economic and discursive contexts, the bombing presents an opportunity to think about key features of the relation between finance and cultural domination or imperialism. These features relate to finance’s specific articulation to the future, uncertainty, and, in the words of the séparatistes of the time, cultural ‘destiny’. The paper has three parts. The first describes the bombing of la Bourse and the public, media, and state responses, linking it to Québécois cultural-political geographies at several scales. Part two places the bombing in the longer-run cultural-politicization of finance in the francophone independence movement, to outline a specifically Québecois critique of finance capital. The third part considers finance’s perceived and real connection to, and thus capacity to shape or constrain, the cultural-political construction of collective possibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Geoff Mann teaches political economy and economic geography at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. His latest book is In the Long Run We are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy & Revolution (Verso).
Notes
1. All of the details in this account of the day of the bombing have been gleaned from various issues of Montréal’s four daily newspapers – the francophone La Presse, Le Devoir, and Le Journal de Montréal, and the anglophone Gazette – and, to a much lesser extent, from Toronto's Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Throughout, translations from French sources are mine.
2. When the tracks his train was meant to run were bombed in one of the FLQ’s earliest attacks on 1 April 1963, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker asked ‘Is this Ireland?’ (Fournier Citation1982, p. 38).
3. A translation with the hyperbolic title White Niggers of America was published in 1971 (Nègres is more commonly rendered as ‘Negroes’ – as it is, for example, in most English translations of Fanon – with the notable exception of the more contextually nuanced translation in the most recent edition of The Wretched of the Earth Citation2004). The hyperbole was nonetheless intentional: as Charles Gagnon put it in February 1970, to the FLQ there was ‘no difference between the struggle here and the liberation of Palestine, of Vietnam, of Black Power’ (quoted in Stewart Citation1970, p. 52).
4. See, for example, the 1963 Message du FLQ à la Nation (quoted in Savoie Citation1963, pp. 43–46).
5. Phrases in « » in English in the original.
6. The FLQ originated as a RIN splinter group.
7. In Québec, the PQ is colloquially given the adjectival form péquiste, mimicking the French pronunciation of its acronym (pé-ku), just as the FLQ was adjectivized as felquiste.
8. These sociétés d’États operated a huge segment of the Québec economy for decades. In the 1960s alone, they included the Société générale de financement (industrial investment, established in 1962), Hydro-Québec (electricity, 1963), Sidérurgie du Québec (steel, 1964), la Caisse de Depot et Placements du Quebec (pension funds, 1965), Société québécoise d'exploration minière (mining, 1965), Société d'habitation du Québec (housing, 1967). More were established in the years that followed.
9. Indeed, the PQ governments of the 1970s and 1980s, under Lévesque and others, arguably played a key role in the deregulation of Canadian finance (Majury Citation2007).
10. These dynamics are of course part of a much larger struggle concerning the influence of mobile international financial capital, sovereign debt markets, and the sustainability of contemporary democracy. For recent considerations, see Harmes (Citation1998); Sinclair (Citation2005); and Varoufakis (Citation2011).
11. When the PQ was founded in 1968, Québec provincial bonds ‘normally’ yielded about half a percent higher return than those of Ontario, and about 1% higher than debt issued by the federal government (Lévesque Citation1968, p. 162). Almost 50 years later, those spreads have shrunk, but the hierarchy has remained basically fixed: in 2014, Québec yields exceed those of Ontario by approximately one-tenth of a percent, and those of Canada by around a quarter of a percent (Hazaveh Citation2014).