First Published: Spartacist Canada, No. 5, March 1976
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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On February 8 about 35 goons from the Maoist Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) physically assaulted members of the Trotskyist League, Revolutionary Marxist Group and the League for Socialist Action who were selling newspapers outside a CPC (M-L)-sponsored public forum on Angola at the University of Toronto. One Spartacist Canada salesperson had her nose bloodied in the attack, while others among the dozen or so newspaper sellers narrowly escaped injury at the hands of the Maoist thugs.
This totally unprovoked, frenzied attack is no isolated incident of hooliganism on the part of the CPC (M-L) Stalinists, who have a long history of cowardly violence in the service of reformist politics against opponent tendencies within the workers movement. Last spring, for example, members of CPC (M-L)’s front group, the “Anti-Imperialist Alliance,” at the University of Waterloo attempted to physically break up a forum given by the Canadian Committee of the international Spartacist tendency (predecessor of the TL), while only last month CPC (M-L)ers publicly threatened to “break both legs” of a member of the Ligue Socialiste Ouvriere at the University du Quebec in Montreal.
CPC (M-L) felt the need to “protect” its Angola forum from left-wing criticism for reasons which are obvious. Defending China’s explicit alliance with U. S. imperialism and the racist South African regime to support the anti-communist National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) against the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) is no easy task for ostensible communists.
The Chinese deformed workers state has repeatedly denounced “Soviet social imperialism” as the “main enemy” in Angola, and Peking Review (9 January 1976) has gone so far as to claim that the Soviets, by their military support to the MPLA, “are the arch-criminals responsible for the intervention by the South African racist regime in Angola”! This policy has concretely translated into Chinese shipments of tanks and heavy artillery to both the FNLA and UNITA, as well as a team of Chinese military advisers to train FNLA units.
As Peking’s loyal running-dog lackeys in Canada, CPC (M-L) must attempt to swallow whole and convincingly regurgitate the counterrevolutionary Chinese line – a difficult task indeed, even for those as adept at the technique of the “big lie” as the camp followers of “Chairman” Bains.
The featured speaker at the Toronto meeting was none other than Jeremiah Chitunda, the representative of UNITA to the United Nations(!), who sought to convince the gullible that “the present fight in Angola has nothing to do with communism or anti-communism” (The Varsity, 11 February 1976). The TL certainly has no illusions that the victory of the MPLA, FNLA or UNITA, all petty bourgeois-nationalist formations hostile to the independent interests of the working class, would lead to the formation of a communist Angola, or of a workers state of any kind. However, the war in Angola today is not limited to a narrow, fratricidal conflict between these three movements – it has become an internationalized war-by-proxy between the forces of U. S. imperialism and the degenerated workers state in the USSR. In this context communists must call for the military victory of the Soviet-backed MPLA against the imperialist-led forces.
Yet the pages of CPC (M-L)’s People’s Canada Daily News are adorned with homages to the UNITA-FNLA “alliance” and bourgeois states in the right wing of the Organization of African Unity, along with giant pictures of UNITA leader “Comrade” Jonas Savimbi, recently praised by the white racist Johannesburg Star as Angola’s “man of the hour.” These are the reactionary politics CPC (M-L) seeks to cover with vicious and cowardly gangsterism.
The TL upholds the democratic right of all tendencies within the workers movement to express their political viewpoint – gangsterism and exclusionism a la CPC (M-L) is a policy which can never contribute to the achievement of Marxist programmatic clarity, and ultimately serves only the interests of the bourgeoisie. The TL, however, is by no means a pacifist organization – its members are quite prepared to defend their rights against Stalinist thugs, in order to continue exposing renegades and revisionists by counterposing the proletarianrevolutionary program of Trotskyism. Stop the Stalinist. gangster attacks – for full democratic rights within the workers movement!