Many are the groups, organizations and parties supposedly dedicated to the struggle for socialism in Canada. As the months pass and as the crisis takes on an air of permanence, the aspirations for socialism grow within the working-class movement – and we seem to be hearing more and more from all these groups and parties. Even the tendencies that had been almost completely silent for years have surfaced again with their same old bastardized solutions for things.
In answer to all the dream peddlers who sing about “homegrown socialism”, “democratic socialism”, “socialism by stages”, and “socialism after national independence”, it is essential to reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist positions on the transition from capitalism to socialism and then to communism. This is essential because if you combine words of the above-mentioned groups with the recent anti-communist campaign undertaken by bourgeois propagandists, the real aim of all their actions becomes clear indeed.
The basic elements of Marxism-Leninism are relatively simple once you have eliminated all the “false science” that some like to smother it with in order to destroy its real meaning. The teachings of Marxism-Leninism, based on a scientific analysis of capitalism and confirmed by the last hundred years of history, affirm that capitalist society is founded on the existence of two fundamental classes whose interests are irreconcilably opposed, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is the class of the future, of progress, while the bourgeoisie is the reactionary class condemned to disappear. Socialism is the only way to put an end to capitalist exploitation and oppression.
But to build socialism, bourgeois power must first be overthrown, for the bourgeoisie will never voluntarily give up power. Socialism will be built under the dictatorship of the proletariat whose role will be to ensure that power stays in the hands of the working class.
As well, Marxism-Leninism teaches – and this too has been confirmed by history – that to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and set up the dictatorship of the proletariat to build socialism, the working class must be led by its own party, the communist party that will apply Marxism-Leninism to all aspects of the proletariat’s class struggle in order to lead this class towards revolution, towards the constitution of the camp of the revolution, those forces that will win out over the forces of reaction, the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie.
All the various shades of opportunists have come out in opposition to the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. Out-and-out simplism, childish dogmatism, they all clamour: “Marx lived back in the nineteenth century, the revolution in the USSR has ended up in fascism, Marxist-Leninists are Stalinists, they’re just a bunch of idealists who cannot fathom the complexity of Canadian reality, which isn’t the same as in Russia or Albania or China...” Yes, the chorus is well-known to all, or at least it should be, because it was sung unendingly during the 1950’s when anti-communism was at its peak.
If all these twisted words sometimes end up fooling a certain number of honest workers it is because they are usually accompanied by some undeniable truth and they hide what is really essential under a welter of details that are often quite superficial. But to understand reality and to transform it, it is important to look at it as it is and not deform it.
And the reality of the situation in Canada is that the bourgeoisie, the bankers, the industrialists and the big businessmen are in power. They have complete control over the State apparatus and the role of the State is to maintain the rules of the game as they are today. And the rules of the game as they are today consist of exploiting the proletariat in order to make profits. The reality of the situation is that the Canadian bourgeoisie has no interest whatsoever in giving up power, either to the proletariat or to another bourgeoisie. The Canadian bourgeoisie, like bourgeoisies elsewhere, represses the proletariat and the masses, with savage brutality when necessary, any time its power is threatened from within. If the danger is external, if another bourgeoisie is threatening its power, the bourgeoisie will go to war to defend that power.
After all, it wasn’t Marxist-Leninists who invented the two world wars fought by the imperialist powers to settle their rivalries in dividing up the world. It wasn’t Marxist-Leninists who invented Vietnam, Israel and Rhodesia. It wasn’t Marxist-Leninists who invented the armaments of the type the imperialist and social-imperialist powers have in their arsenals today. Nor was it Marxist-Leninists who invented unemployment, inflation and layoffs. It wasn’t Marxist-Leninists who invented the imperialist crisis. Or repression, the police, the army, guns, and workers wounded and killed at work. They didn’t invent contempt for senior citizens, or the collective degradation of youth. They didn’t invent the deportation of immigrants who are suddenly no longer needed. They also didn’t invent the savage and continuous dispossession of the Native peoples and Inuits in the North, nor the national oppression of Quebecois and other French Canadians.
The reformists say that capitalism isn’t what it used to be. Marx was no doubt right in his time, they say... but that was a century ago. But can these people tell us what exactly has changed in terms of the exploitation of the working class and the masses since the emergence of capitalism? Has capitalism lost its fundamentally reactionary character since it reached its imperialist stage? Doesn’t imperialism always lead to the oppression of peoples, to reactionary wars and to the repression of all progressive and revolutionary movements through violence and blood-baths?
True, there are colour televisions, superhighways and spaceships in 1977. But there is still the exploitative capitalist system, and the imperialist oppression of peoples, and growing social and economic inequities. There is still war and police armed against the people. So what has really changed in the class relationships that came in with the bourgeoisie and have been maintained through its State of dictatorship? That’s the question we have for those rather pathetic people who claim that Marxism-Leninism is passe.
There can be only one conclusion. Today, like yesterday, to build socialism we must first make revolution. We must first overthrow the State power of the bourgeoisie that maintains capitalist exploitation. No more evidence is needed to prove that the bourgeoisie will not give up its power. In fact, on the contrary, it has demonstrated its firm intention of holding on to power indefinitely by any means necessary and it has proven many times in the past that it knows how to turn its intentions into concrete actions.
Since the proletariat has begun struggling to destroy the bourgeoisie, it has regularly found itself face to face with the so-called socialists with their moralizing to the working-class movement and their admonitions against Marxism-Leninism. The story of their activities speaks for itself. One need only look at what they have done once in power, either in Germany or Great Britain, or here at home, with the NDP in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia. The path of socialism without revolution leads only one place: to total and utter collaboration to maintain the capitalist system. And Marxist-Leninists didn’t invent that either. It was history that proved that all those who claim to attain socialism without proletarian revolution are imposters.
Fifteen years ago, profiting from the complete degeneration of the Communist Party – which it had fought tooth and nail side by side with the bourgeoisie during the 1940’s and 1950’s – the labour bosses of the Canadian Labour Congress decided to take in hand the social-democratic heritage of the CCF, and founded the New Democratic Party, the NDP, which still claims to be socialist. In Quebec, after the failure of the Parti Socialiste du Quebec (P.S.Q.) founded in the late 1950’s with the rebirth of nationalism, the corrupt leaders at the head of the working-class movement turned towards the Parti Quebecois; after all, even if the PQ wasn’t a workers’ party, like the NDP(!), independence would still be a step forward. The labour bosses of the CLC and the Quebec Federation of Labour are still leading the way in ardently defending the NDP and the PQ respectively. But it so happens that the “socialism” of these parties only fools those who want to be fooled. The experience of their years in power in several provinces has only confirmed that they in no way represent the interests of the working class. Moreover, this is becoming clearer and clearer in that they no longer represent what they call “social groups”.
Instead, they now say that these various “social groups” should collaborate with the State. What they mean is the tripartism of the CLC and the NDP, and the economic summits of the QFL and the PQ.
But just because it is increasingly obvious that the NDP and the PQ will not succeed in fooling the working-class movement much longer, and that they have proven that they are essentially bourgeois parties, this does not mean that reformism is about to disappear.
On the contrary, taking advantage of the radicalization of the working-class movement, other opportunists have arrived on the scene with the same revisionist slop that allowed the NDP, and the PQ at a lesser degree, to appear, when they were first formed, like parties that could bring people social democracy, that is democratic socialism, a socialism without revolution, socialism adapted to the concrete conditions of North America; socialism that has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism, nor with Stalin, nor with those foreign revolutions, that were no doubt good in other circumstances and conditions.
This pamphlet is not the place to go into a detailed analysis of all the groups and parties that swear by socialism but are in fact agents of revisionism, Trotskyism and social democracy within the working-class movement. But we will still delineate some of their major characteristics.
It is worth nothing that in various places across the country a number of groups have popped up in the more or less recent past that all have in common seeing themselves as left of the NDP and the PQ while at the same time adamantly opposing Marxism-Leninism. Some of them, like the Socialist Organizing Committee (SOC) in Vancouver, call themselves Marxist and advocate violent revolution... probably. The Trotskyists, like the Revolutionary Workers League (a result of the merger of the RMG and the YSL which had split in two several years ago) also call themselves Marxist. The same goes for the Saskatchewan Waffle (SW), which is experiencing a comeback. In Quebec, the Rassemblements des militants syndicaux (RMS) and the Parti des travailleurs du Quebec (P.T.Q.), which support an independent and socialist Quebec, fall into the same category.
It is interesting to note that with the exception of the (official) Trotskyists of the RSL, these groups all developed in regions where the NDP or the PQ exercised or still exercise power: in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Quebec! This is easily explicable once the aim of these groups is clear: recuperate those who have been completely disgusted by social democracy, and lead them down the path of reformism.
The first characteristic common to all these groups is the important place they accord to national independence, conceived principally as independence from the American monopolies in English Canada and from English Canadian capital in Quebec. The SW, for example, has taken up the exact same rallying cry as that used by the Progressive Workers’ Movement in the 1960’s: “independence and socialism”. The RMS applies the same thing to Quebec... leaving it up to the NDP to accomplish the task in English Canada.
A second characteristic common to almost all these groups is their enormous interest in union struggles and in transforming unions. Some even completely subordinate the struggle for the party to the struggle for what the SW terms “class-struggle unions”, and what others simply qualify as more democratic, militant, Canadian unions.
Anti-monopolism, petty-bourgeois nationalism, economism and pacifism are all characteristics of these so-called partisans of socialism. And it is important not to be fooled by the way some of them lace their speech with radical words: just remember that Louis Laberge, that notorious anti-communist from the 1950’s, still speaks about “breaking” the power of the bosses and their State. His aim is identical to that of all reformists: recuperate the anger of the masses and divert it away from the revolution.
Ultimately it is practice that determines the correctness of any political line. The social democrats, the Trotskyists and the revisionists long ago demonstrated the reactionary nature of their politics. These anti-communists, who today are busy attacking the Marxist-Leninists and denouncing their line, are revisionists, no matter what they call themselves.
As surprising as it might seem, the Communist Party of Canada (CP) must be counted among the anti-communists. This degenerate party has totally abandoned Marxism-Leninism, and the only reason it has recently been trying to polish up its communist image is to counter the penetration of Marxism-Leninism in the working-class movement.
In fact, there is no real difference between the politics of the CP and the NDP, with which the former wants to make an alliance in order to set up a so-called anti-monopolist regime that will lead (without revolution, they hope) to socialism. The Chileans experienced this type of anti-monopolist regime under Allende. They also experienced the onslaught of the bourgeois army, prison, torture and blood-baths. Chilean socialists were also pacifists. The line of the Communist Party of Chile has nothing whatsoever to do with the revolutionary line of the proletariat; its line is no different from that of all the anti-communists mentioned earlier.
To all those who come before the working-class movement to denounce the “dogmatists”, as they call them, “who want to impose a foreign Soviet, Chinese or Albanian model of the socialist revolution in Canada”, the workers must reply, “you and your ilk have been worming your way into the working-class movement for years You always use the same language, telling us not to trust those ’copiers of foreign models’. For over thirty years you’ve been trying to make Stalin out as a hangman and a butcher. You grimaced every time someone talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the same people who were spouting language like that ten, twenty and thirty years ago are today in power in many countries, or at the head of the labour movement. There is ample proof that all these elements are traitors to the cause of the revolution. Yet here you are today, proposing the exact same things.”
The socialists in words of the SOC, the SW, the RMS, etc., and the Trotskyists of the RSL, and the phoney communists of the CP are all the legitimate heirs of the revisionists who for the last century have deformed Marxism, and then Leninism. Despite what they might have learned from history and reality, they insist on keeping their eyes shut and making the exact same errors.
In fact, the only orientation that these phoney partisans of socialism have ever put forward in the working-class movement is collaboration with the bourgeoisie. This orientation denies the reality of the class struggle and, rejects proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Today they are still proposing the same line, in total contempt for history which has clearly shown that where socialism has succeeded, the proletariat led the revolutionary struggle against bourgeois State power and overthrew it, setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism does not exist in the countries where this path was not taken.
As for the Soviet Union, suffice it to say that the restoration of capitalism in that country basically springs from the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat under that traitor Khrushchev, and its replacement with “the power of all the people”. This is none other than the dictatorship of a new bourgeoisie just like in other capitalist countries where bourgeois democracy is in fact the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
What conclusions can be drawn from all this? The evident conclusion is that any group or party whose program does not include the essential elements of revolutionary struggle, seizure of State power and the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is not revolutionary and that the orientation of such a group or party is not in accordance with the interests of the proletariat, that it cannot lead to socialism, and that its line is fundamentally revisionist, revising or twisting Marxism-Leninism.
The Canadian working-class movement must understand how to resist the facile and misleading mirages that the revisionists dangle before its eyes. It must become involved in building the revolutionary party of the working class, the Marxist-Leninist Party.