One important point should be clarified first of all. Unless one wants to stick one’s head in the sand like the ostrich, everyone should recognize that the present debate on the C.S.L.O. leads to this statement: the majority of the member groups of this so-called “mass” organization, including the local Comites de Solidarite (Support Committees)(C.S.) are Marxist-Leninist, or identify themselves with Marxism-Leninism. Moreover, both the local C.S. and the C.S.L.O. were set up, from beginning to end, by groups identifying with Marxism-Leninism, in order to accomplish some of their Marxist-Leninist tasks.
Today some members of the C.S.L.O. come along and state, from a supremely formalist point of view, that the debate on the C.S.L.O. must be limited to the question of “how to organize popular support for workers struggles”, since, as they say, the C.S.L.O. was set up to support workers struggles.’ To adopt such a point of view in the debates over the C.S.L.O. could only lead to one result: the liquidation of the fundamental debate within the Marxist-Leninist movement about the tactics to use to accomplish the present central task, bringing about the merger of Marxism-Leninism with the workers movement, and building the Party.
To isolate support for workers’ struggles from other Marxist-Leninist activities, is already an aberration; for Marxist-Leninists, support for workers struggles is a form of agitation which, like all other forms of agitation, must lead to closer and closer links between the communist movement and the workers’ movement, and must have as its principal characteristic the raising of workers consciousness. Criticizing the C.S.L.O. is thus not opposing support for workers’ struggles, but is opposing this particular form of “support” which tends not to raise workers’ consciousness, but to lower the political level of communists work.
One will never understand the place of the C.S.L.O. in the present situation if one persists in examining its activities separately from all other communist tasks. In other words, we cannot seriously study the question of the C.S.L.O. without centering our attention on the strategy and tactics of Canadian communists. Confronted with the question of the C.S.L.O., coherent Marxist-Leninists have no other choice but to ask, in the light of Marxist-Leninist principles and taking into account present conditions, whether this organization really advances the purpose of revolution in our country.
Moreover, the tactics of certain groups consisting in “compartmentalizing” all questions facing Marxist-Leninists, are beginning to be well known, along with their effect of eliminating any real debate on the correct line between Marxist-Leninists. These Marxist-Leninists will say that in the C.S.L.O., which is a non-communist organization (even if everyone round the table claims identification with Marxism-Leninism (!), one should only discuss support for workers’ struggles; that in a committee organizing the Day of Women one should only discuss the organization of the Day; and that in “official” meetings of the group on the question of unification, one should speak only then of “universal principles”.
Thus in its latest document. Contribution du Comite de Coordination pour le Congres du C.S.L.O., the C.C. of the C.S.L.O. states that EN LUTTE!’s position on the C.S.L.O. demonstrates a “incorrect conception of the creation of the Party”, and hastens to add: “But we do not have to get involved in these questions”; And the members of the C.C. come from a communist group which claims that the struggle for the Party is the central task. Who can understand this bizarre dialectic, the dialectics of “water-tight compartments”: each question in its own time, and a time and place for each question? A strange ”dialectic” which strangely recalls the bourgeois manner of dealing with political questions: unemployment is one thing; the domination of underdeveloped countries by rich countries is another; unions are there to negotiate collective agreements, while politics is the business of governments and parties.... The refrain of bourgeois ideology that everything must stay in its own “box” is well known. What communists should know very well is that Dialectical Materialism teaches one to make connections between things, and that Leninism teaches one to formulate tactics by taking strict account of strategy and to always put secondary tasks at a particular stage in correct relation to the central task.
For communists, “not to get involved in the question” of building the Party while it is a matter of deciding on what forms of support for workers struggles to propose, is not to “liquidate the C.S.L.O.” or to “liquidate the mass movement”, but to liquidate the central debate at this particular moment in the Canadian Marxist-Leninist movement on the tasks of communists, whose main objective is precisely the struggle for the Party.
And what is the result of “compartmentalizing” the debate, of refusing to examine each particular question in the light of the requirements of revolutionary strategy? The political line, i.e., the concrete application of Marxist-Leninist principles, on the question of communist intervention in economic struggles, in women’s struggle against their particular oppression, on the question of Marxist-Leninist unity...; in short, the political line is in practice set aside... and opportunism goes to work!
Just as one cannot satisfactorily complete a critical analyses of the C.S.L.O.’s past activities unless one does so in the light of the Marxist-Leninist political line at the present stage, in the same way one will not be able to determine the correct forms of Communist intervention in workers’ and peoples’ struggles unless one has made sure that these forms of intervention help to carry out the present central task of communists: the merger of Marxism-Leninism with the workers’ movement (we shall do this in Chapter III of this pamphlet).
This analysis leads to the conclusion that the C.S.L.O.’s activities demonstrate an incorrect idea of support for workers’ struggles, and this derives from a mistaken idea of the leading role of the working class in the revolutionary struggle. These deviations have led the communists in the C.S.L.O. to adopt passive and piece-meal attitudes in their work with workers, and to leftism with respect to the struggles of other groups among the people, and, lastly, progressively to abandon the present communist central task: the struggle for the Party. This over-all situation which makes the C.S.L.O. a fundamentally opportunist organization goes back to its beginnings, at the exact moment when it was changed into a so-called permanent “mass organization” to support workers’ struggles according to a so-called “minimal” line, as opposed to the “maximal” line of the Party or the Marxist-Leninist organization.
At the stage of the merger of Marxism-Leninism with the workers’ movement, ail communist activities must be determined by the need to ensure the widest possible spreading of proletarian ideology amongst workers and the working masses with the exact purpose of winning over the most advances elements to Marxism-Leninism. Communists will be able to reach this objective by communist agitation and propaganda (and not by “intermediate” agitation and propaganda).
In this perspective, it is tactically wrong for communists to put their energy into setting up progressive, “intermediate”, etc., organizations, by whatever name they may be called, including “broad-or-narrow-intermediate-mass-organization” (!), whatever may be the precise purpose of these organizations, whether it be support for workers’ struggles, democratic rights in unions, women’s, students’, or social welfare recipients’ democratic rights.
Only narrow-minded people will conclude from this that EN LUTTE! is opposed to struggles for democratizing unions, for the recognition of women’s democratic rights or for supporting workers’ struggles. All struggles of the proletariat and of the masses must hold communists’ attention: their existence is a manifestation of the contradictions of Capitalist society on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the claims that are put forward here give witness to the more or less developed political consciousness of the working masses. The people’s struggles, therefore provide just as much an opportunity for communists to intervene and to make the proletarian point of view triumph. It is mainly only because of their limited strength that Canadian communists cannot intervene in large numbers in these struggles at the present time.
However, to say that communists must intervene in the people’s economic and democratic struggles is not at all the same thing as to advocate setting up various so-called mass organizations, nor to maintain that communists must support all workers’ struggles, including the reformist ones, on the pretext that workers objectively constitute the most revolutionary class. Because for communists, intervening in workers’ and peoples’ struggles means firstly to make proletarian ideology triumph. Concretely, this means demonstrating, by rigorous and active criticism, that bourgeois ideology is false in all its forms, including its reformist and revisionist forms. Demonstrating that bourgeois ideology is false means demolishing the bourgeois point of view on the nature of social conflict as well as on the means for the masses to use in these conflicts.
Communists must not, in the realisation of their activities, try to attain, primarily, immediate economic or democratic objectives, but rather the spreading of Marxism-Leninism, the winning over of workers and other progressive elements to proletarian ideology, and organizing these advanced elements on the basis of that ideology. Bringing about the merger of Marxism-Leninism and the workers’ movement in a struggle, a struggle opposing proletarian and bourgeois ideology, a struggle at the very heart of workers’ and people’s struggles, which are becoming more and more numerous... So the struggle for the merger of Marxism-Leninism and the workers’ movement at the moment in our country constitutes the highest, most revolutionary form of the class struggle. No coherent Marxist-Leninist can accept that this struggle be opportunistically reduced to “support for the sake of support” of workers’ struggles, to the level of “intermediate organizations”, in short, to the level of social-democracy and reformism.
In this perspective one can state that, until now, the C.S.L.O. has been no more than, and could be nothing else than one of these “intermediate-mass-political-organisation, broad-based-rather-than-narrow...” with the results that we now know. During this last year the C.S.L.O. gave no real mass support to any workers’ struggle; it in no way raised the class consciousness of the workers it supported, nor of the individuals or groups it tried to mobilize in support. In spite of long hours spent in debate, it did not help its members to reach a better understanding of communists political tasks at the present stage, since this question (being no doubt too “hot”), had to be kept from the attention of its members on the misleading pretext that the C.S.L.O., being a “mass organization” for the support of workers’ struggles, did not, therefore, have to worry about raising workers’ consciousness:
Since the end of the Firestone struggle in the autumn of 1973, and, to a lesser degree, during “Shellcast” in the winter of 1974, and with the exception of the period leading up to and during the occupation of the Montreal offices of the Ministry of Labor, (three struggles in which members of the C.S.L.O. tried to keep their agitation at its highest level) it can be said that, the activities of this organization have degenerated and are no longer any different from those of militant unions led by social-democrats or left-wing members of the P.Q.
Constituted mainly of students who had recently been won over to communism and wanted to cast off the dogmatism which for such a long time was characteristic of the main Quebec student groups, the C.S.L.O. sank progressively into the worst sort of workerism. In the absence of a workers’ communist vanguard, able to give direction to petty bourgeois elements who want to adopt a proletarian position, workerism is a major danger. Wanting at any price to link up with the masses in order to escape an endless and “pernicious” repetition of “universal principles”, communists of petty-bourgeois origin can often do no better than to “adjust” their intervention according to the level of consciousness which they find normally amongst the most militant workers: present conditions indicate that this is a social-democratic, reformist position. But it is precisely because of the fact that social-democratic ideology plays a dominant role among advanced Canadian workers, that Marxist-Leninists should put their energy into making proletarian ideology triumph.
But for a certain category of Marxist-Leninists, concrete condition have little importance. They have read several times somewhere that workers constitute the leading class of the revolution in any capitalist country (which is true, incidentally). They draw the conclusion that any workers’ struggle is revolutionary and that Marxist-Leninists have nothing better to do than to support them all, or in any case as many as possible, without “getting mixed up in leadership” and avoiding “criticism for criticism’s sake”! and without worrying about the level of consciousness of workers engaged in struggle. This is where dogmatism, the mechanical application of the principles of Marxism-Leninism, leads to: spontaneism and economism.
If these Marxist-Leninists would only give up their tiresome and confused repetition of “universal principles”, and undertake the practice of the concrete analysis of the concrete situation, they would doubtlessly see that in a country like ours, even though all workers’ struggles originate in the fundamental contradiction opposing capital and labor, it is nevertheless the case that most of them are not carried out in a revolutionary perspective with the purpose of attacking bourgeois power to weaken it, but rather in a reformist perspective which hides class contradiction and in this way prevents workers from reading a clear consciousness of their own interests as the exploited and oppressed class.
The incorrect nature of “popular support for workers’ struggles” as conceived by the C.S.L.O. must be unmasked. Because in order for there to be a kind of popular support for workers’ struggles which really serves the revolution, there is an essential condition: that these struggles be carried out in a revolutionary perspective. For this to be the case, those who lead workers’ struggles, the workers’ own leaders, must accept proletarian ideology, communism. But the C.S.L.O. in wanting precisely to obliterate the question of raising workers’ consciousness, puts itself objectively in the service of social-democracy.
So, in order to change the present situation, particularly in this special case, to bring the people to actively support the proletariat revolutionary struggle, there is one fundamental requirement: that the struggles of the proletariat take a more and more revolutionary direction. That will happen when the leading elements in the workers’ movement adopt a revolutionary position. This will not be accomplished in a day. And for it to happen, it is the duty of communists to act in this direction, to put all their energy into the winning over of advanced workers to communism. Without this, the development of popular support for workers’ struggles will do nothing but consolidate the reformist tendencies amongst the masses and working class.
We must not conclude from this that the struggles of non-proletarian groups or even support given by these groups to workers’ struggles have nothing to do with developing the revolutionary struggle as a long-term historical process. But these are secondary factors which only play a role to the extent that they raise the consciousness of the masses, including the working class. This result could not be predicted by chance. That means that in order to produce real effects on the masses’ political consciousness, people’s struggles and support for workers’ struggles must be carried out for this purpose, that is, following a line which is openly and clearly proletarian, a line which, at the present stage, determines the necessity of over throwing bourgeois power, setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat and, in order to do this, the building the revolutionary Party of the proletariat.
The Firestone workers’ struggle in Joliette in 1973-1974 is revealing on this question. It brought to the fore militant and courageous “advanced workers”, real workers’ leaders respected by their comrades. These workers’ leaders led the struggle in a perspective which was clearly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and opposed to national oppression in Quebec; they revealed the connivance of the monopolies with the state, i.e. Ministries, courts, police, and the bourgeois information media. Their struggle drew popular support to the point that it brought about the creation of the C.S.L.O., and the C.S.L.O. really contributed to enlarging popular support in this struggle. How is it that in autumn 1973, the C.S.L.O., badly organized and lacking experience, only just born, was able to carry out this “tour de force”, while in the spring of 1975, with more experience, better structured, led by the best communists of the movement, it did not succeed in supporting any struggle?
The reason is simple: for a workers’ struggle to develop, grow and draw popular support, it must be correctly led. Its leaders must be able to stimulate the working masses’ militancy, to formulate and apply effective strategy and tactics for the struggle, to demonstrate to other workers and to the masses in what way the struggle is their struggle. The Firestone workers succeeded in doing this extraordinarily well: that is mainly why they received such broad support; that is mainly why their struggle has become an example.
There have always been Marxist-Leninists in the C.S.L.O. who get indignant about criticism stated before workers about their way of conceiving and leading the struggle, except when this criticism come from workers themselves, especially Firestone workers. Already at the beginning of 1974 the C.S.L.O. offered fertile ground for the development of workerism, activism and opportunism.
We now know the meaning of all those high-sounding expressions which confused us for a time and which we even helped to spread. “Mass organization” when applied to the C.S.L.O. means “intermediate organization”; “work amongst the masses” means non-communist work, work which is foreign to raising the level of workers’ consciousness, in the C.S.L.O.; for “minimal line”, one must read reformist, social-democrat line; “recognizing the leading role of the proletariat” means on the one hand bowing down to all workers’ struggles while abstaining from getting involved in directing them, and on the other hand, having no particular interest in non-proletarian groups which do not constitute a class. One must clearly understand that the very foundations of the C.S.L.O.’s action rest on affirming the leading role of the working class in the struggle for socialism. Their affirmation is perfectly correct: the working class, due to its place in capitalist relationships (of production), is called to take its place at the head of the struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois power and the building of socialist society. The working class will play this leading role the day when, after its vanguard has merged with communism and formed itself into a Party. It will really assume the leadership of all workers and people’s struggles (including that of social welfare recipients, students and women) to channel them all into one political struggle aiming to destroy bourgeois state power.
In the C.S.L.O., they had another conception of the leading role of the working class, a conception which showed itself concretely in several ways. First of all, workers’ struggles are objectively anti-capitalist (as they put it) and other struggles are by nature purely secondary. This means that a purely economist workers’ struggle is more important than a popular struggle which attacks bourgeois state power in its capacity as an instrument of the power of capital. Furthermore, the non-proletarian masses which do not constitute a class (student in particular) can only organize on corporatist basis if they do not openly and explicitly organize to support the struggles of the revolutionary leading class.
To state that the proletariat constitutes the leading class of socialist revolution in no way means that others have only to get into step behind workers if the workers ask for a salary increase or a reduction in hours of work. It is not by bowing down to workers who undertake strictly economically advantageous struggles that communists will further the building of a proletarian direction in the struggle for socialism, but rather by having workers, advanced workers in particular, not only conduct their own struggles in a revolutionary perspective, but also take the lead in popular struggles in the same perspective.
The proletariat plays its role as the leading force of the revolution when it is found leading all popular struggles against bourgeois power, and when it ensures that these struggles are attacks on the forces of capital, against bourgeois state power, and not simply a few hundred or thousands students following blindly in tow behind the reformist union bosses who lead almost all workers’ struggles. The fact there students claim that, by this, they want to demonstrate their recognition of the leading role of the working class makes no difference: for, despite the fact that their intentions are undeniably correct and show a real development of the class struggle, what they recognize, in practice, is the leadership of the reformist union bosses who have set themselves up as leaders of the workers’ movement in order to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. Which just goes to show that the way to “social-democratic hell” is paved with good intention!
The workerism which is at the root of these conceptions of the leading role of the working class and of popular support for their struggles is fed by the exact opposite of a correct understanding and a true recognition of the leading role of the proletariat. Workerism, when one examines its basis, finds its origin in a total lack of confidence in the proletariat. Why in fact insist so much on pure and simple support for workers engaged in struggle? Why raise to the status of a principle the exclusion of all criticism of the orientation of these struggles? Why insist that one must not get “mixed up in” the leadership of these struggles? Why not if for no other reason that one is convinced that the workers are hardly advanced at all, that they are frightened by communists, that they are bored or driven away by politics. Pushed to the extreme, this lack of confidence in workers, which is only the reverse side of workerism and spontaneism, results in total contempt for workers as we shall see in the next chapter.
It eventually leads to the progressive abandonment of the central task of Marxist-Leninists, i.e. the merger with the workers’ movement by winning over its advanced elements to communism, in favour of activities mainly aimed at other strata of the masses, particularly in the case of the C.S.L.O., directed towards students and teachers. This enabled the C.C. of the C.S.L.O. to state in its document of September 4th:
“While the C.S.’s (comites de solidarite) have stagnated in parts of the city, student C.S.’s have developed and new ones have been set up (Ahuntsic, Vieux-Montreal, etc). To the extent that student C.S.’s have ended up by being the main basis, in members and energy, of the C.S.L.O. at the moment.” (Contribution du Comite de....p.5)
It can be seen, in fact, that during the last year, the main effect of the considerable effort put into the activities of the C.S.L.O. by Marxist-Leninists, has been to offer fertile ground for the struggle against the Association Nationale des Etudiants du Quebec (A.N.E.Q.) to student groups which, like the M.R.E.Q., claim that students, not having any specific class interests, have no choice but to support workers’ struggles and, as their political consciousness develops, to trade in their student jeans for workers’ overalls. The situation of progressive students these days is a painful one: are they not condemned, so to speak, to denouncing corporatist struggles by the students masses, on the one hand, and on the other, to support reformist workers’ struggles with the “same revolutionary ardour”. It would really be too simple if communist students, and progressive elements, had only to associate both with workers’ struggles and student Struggles, not only in the case of the former, to “support” them, or in the case of the latter to convince the students masses that its struggles are corporatist, but to struggle resolutely to make proletarian ideology triumph over reformism in one case, and over corporatism in the other.
This is how communists shall link up with the masses politically by joining their struggles and working, primarily by means of propaganda and agitation, to constantly spread Marxism-Leninism more and more widely.
The largely negative results achieved by the C.S.L.O. are not the product of chance, nor simply of organizational mistakes or of its style of work. Nor do they result from what some people called until recently the C.S.L.O.’s “principal contradiction” which supposedly lay in the opposition between the “Marxist-Leninist line” of the M.R.E.Q., the G.R.I.P. and the C.O.R. on the one hand, and the “opportunist left line” of the Strappe-Virage group which, while advocating that the C.S.L.O. be maintained as a “mass organization”, supporting workers’ struggles, maintains that this “mass organization” should serve as a “cover” so to speak, for communist “vanguard” work amongst advanced workers.
The failure of the C.S.L.O., does not originate in its most recent “principal contradiction”, the contradiction reputedly opposing EN LUTTE!, supposedly opposed to “developing a broad-based support activity (...) before the creation of the revolutionary Party” (see the Contribution du Comite... p.6), to groups which, such as M.R.E.Q., C.O.R., C.M.O. and certainly also Mobilisation, which support “developing broad-based support activity”. Strappe-Virage was the “principal enemy” of the C.S.L.O., EN LUTTE! is the “principal enemy” of “support” or, more exactly, of “mass work”.
The fact, EN LUTTE! is not opposed to “support”, nor to “mass work”, nor to intervention in workers’ and people’s struggles, nor to organizational work, nor to linking up with the masses (we do not want to leave out any of the categories listed by the C.M.O. in De Quelques Questions Brulantes..., except that our group proposes that all these tasks or activities must be accomplished on a Marxist-Leninist basis. In short, communists, whatever they do, must do communist work. The C.C. of the C.S.L.O. forgot one word, only one word. But when the “urgent need to choose” forces us to turn around very quickly, it is quite easy to lose a button, or even a word...
The “principal contradiction” of the C.S.L.O.(stereotypes seem to be quite sound) is its opportunistic orientation, which goes back to its beginnings, more precisely to the moment of its transformation into a permanent, organization for supporting workers’ struggles according to the “minimal line”, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and opposed to national oppression. No one should be surprised then, by the incongruities found in the statements of the student C.S.s or in the “platform-proposal” prepared for the next C.S.L.O. congress. The deviations clearly exposed recently in the C.S.L.O., especially its workerism and its economism, were already at work in the winter of 1973-1974. It is precisely those who accuse EN LUTTE! of “liquidating the mass movement” who get indignant when certain people speak out in the C.S.L.O., criticising the orientation which workers want to give to their struggle, except when those speaking were Firestone workers!
It was subsequently useless to change the C.S.L.O.’s structure, to change its organizational base, to carry out research before supporting a struggle. Nothing worked, because the carrying out of criticism was always forgotten, a Marxist-Leninist criticism of the C.S.L.O.’s line. But two important mistakes dominated the transformation of the C.S.L.O. into a permanent, supposedly “mass”, organization: the first was the leftist outlook on unions, the second was a reformist conception of “mass work”.
Beginning at that time, many members of the C.S.L.O. considered that the work undertaken by the C.S.L.O. should be taken over by the unions...but since this was not the case, it was necessary to take their place. But communists involved in the struggle for the Party, do not have to take the place of unions in order for workers’ economic struggles to be carried out with more militancy. It is rather by intervening on their own terms, in the economic and political struggles of the workers, that they will really make these struggles not only more militant, but also more revolutionary. “Workers’ committees”, and today “intermediate, broad or narrow, higher or lower organizations!”) all originate, it might be said in passing, from this same leftist view of unions.
The reverse side of leftism, as we know, is right opportunism. And one does not correct a an error by its contrary. Starting form a incorrect conception of unions, a leftist conception, the communists of the C.S.L.O. (including EN LUTTE!) ended up with an opportunist conception of ”mass work” which they took to be work on the level of “radical reformism”. They tried to apply the “mass line” as if it were a political line at the level of the masses or of the majority of militant workers; they confused “mass line” with social-democrat line.
As one can see, the question of the C.S.L.O., or the “support front” or, in still more general terms, the question of support for workers’ struggles, raises a fundamental question, a question of political line. The contradictions which developed in the C.S.L.O. cannot be kept just within the framework of the debate on the C.S.L.O. or on the question of support for workers’ struggles. For they reveal the existence of a mistaken line in the Marxist-Leninist movement.