Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Documents of the National Conference on the Unity of Canadian Marxist-Leninists

Montreal, October 9, 1976

Speech Of Common Front Woman Worker

(MIA Note – The 1976 Common Front was a coalition formed by three major Quebec unions to negotiate a collective agreement for provincial government employees, and the social services, health, and education sectors.)

Comrade Workers, Comrades,

“Why don’t you start by getting together”. “Unite among yourselves”. How many times have we all heard these phrases which express the advanced workers’desire for unity. But it’s not because these expressions are continually repeated that we are always conscience of them in practise. The necessity to struggle for unity shouldn’t remain an abstract theory, but rather, should be a constant everyday preoccupation.

The working class knows by experience that only unity will strengthen us and that in order to resist the unified attack of the bourgeois dictatorship, we must ripost with an even larger unity.

At the present time, capitalism in crisis is savagely attacking our living and work conditions. The urgency to unite the revolutionary forces is growing.

Women of the proletariat are seriously affected by this capitalist race for profits. In the Common Front struggle, women’s demands were ignored. The right to day care centers in workplace and to fully paid maternity leave were refused.

Women workers, housewives, women on welfare, we must work side by side with our class brothers against our common enemy, the Canadian bourgeois State.

We should become involved in this struggle for unity, which alone can guarantee the victory of socialism, and the end of our exploitation.

In the daily struggle to defend our rights, the proletariat lacks a revolutionary leadership. The intervention of the Marxist-Leninists in the unions and in the masses lacks unity of action. Their disunity retards the rallying of advanced workers and blocks the penetration of communist ideas among the masses.

The agents of the bourgeoisie profit from the current divisions in order to present their false solutions and to propagate their anti-communism.

Despite this weakness, this dispersion, we see the working class resistance increasing in scope all across Canada. The struggle on October 14 is an example of this increasing resistance.

We must tell the masses and the advanced elements in the context of October 14, to take part in politics. Don’t leave your interests in the hands of all kinds of traitors. The only way to destroy the reaction is to overthrow the bourgeois dictatorship, by working, from today on, to unite the Marxist-Leninists.

But unity, which is the urgent task of the movement, will happen when the groups will be veritably concerned with passing the fundamental interests of the proletariat, before the interests of their group. We must eliminate the competitive spirit, a vestige of bourgeois ideology and undertake discussion on points of divergence, in the spirit of unity.

By posing the condition of complete agreement on all points of the political line before uniting, we retard the party’s creation, we oppose the proletariat’s interest in our country.

As Stalin said, complete identity of all point of view can only be found in the cemetery. The two line struggle must be constantly led within the party in order to help the correct viewpoint triumph. We must’n look at the political line in a static, but rather in an evolutive way.

Comrade working Men and Women,

It is an urgent task for the proletarian men and women to engage in the struggle for unity. We must instill this wish for unity in the entire M-L movement, and this unite all Canadian Marxist-Leninists within the same organization.

Seeing Marxist-Leninists from our two nations united in the conference is an important step in the struggle for the construction of the Party.

FOR THE UNITY OF THE CANADIAN PROLETARIAT, STRUGGLE TOGETHER, ALL OF US, FOR THE UNITY OF CANADIAN MARXIST-LENINISTS
CREATE THE CANADIAN ORGANIZATION OF STRUGGLE FOR THE PARTY!