Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Organization of Communist Workers (Marxist-Leninist)

The Movement for the Party


VI. En Lutte!

D. STUNNED AND HURT: FIRST REACTION TO THE LEAGUE’S FORMATION

En Lutte!’s reaction to the declaration of the CCL(ML) was impossible to guage for the first several months. It noted the formation of the League in its November 1975 pamphlet Against Economism, but only to the effect that this merging of groups had “changed somewhat” the forms taken by Economism in Quebec. En Lutte! acted as if the formation of this organization would have absolutely no effect on its own position and ’unity’ plan. En Lutte!, after all, had been propounding its ’unity’ plan for some time, and if one more ’small’ formation took place, such as the CCL(ML), En Lutte! would surely incorporate it in good time. En Lutte! did not at first realize that the formation of the CCL(ML) was a ’major event’ in the movement’s history, or that the League had grabbed the ’unity’ momentum from En Lutte!’s hands and was rapidly expanding its influence as a ’leading centre’ within the movement. It was not until early March 1976 that En Lutte! began to take up the ’two-line struggle’ with the League in earnest. The exchange of letters and positions around the organization of activities for International Working Women’s Day was the first evidence in any detail of what attitude En Lutte! would adopt towards the League. As would be expected, the ’unity’ position En Lutte! put forward at that time was in full conformity with its “fundamental line” and the outline laid out in the Spring/Summer of 1975, and was in all essentials the first draft of its present, more elaborated and ’polished’, position.

That En Lutte! had begun to feel a rather painful pinch from the League’s activities was readily apparent throughout the IWWD exchanges. Having’had its ’innocent’ assumptions somewhat shaken, En Lutte! responded very much as if it felt betrayed by the League’s founders, fellow ’Marxist-Leninists’ who had rejected the only ’sensible’ plan for building ’unity’. In a tone of anguished disbelief, En Lutte! plaintively moaned that, though it had fulfilled its usual duty in trying to rally as many ’Marxist-Leninists’ as possible, it found “...especially regrettable the fact that there are two marxist-leninist celebrations...” for IWWD (English Digest, March 1976 p.1). En Lutte! found this fact so unpleasant, so “regrettable”, not only because it would allegedly “...weaken the scope and the weight of the intervention of communists (ml) among the masses...”, a difficult problem to grasp considering the state of the movement, but even more importantly because it “...confirms and deepens the divisions amid the marxist-leninist movement itself...” (Ibid). What, in En Lutte!’s view, could be worse? At a time when the conditions were “ripe” for En Lutte!’s ’unity’, here a situation had emerged which ’confirmed and deepened divisions’. En Lutte!’s precious ’plan’ was going awry. Not only did the League go ahead and form their own ’organization of struggle for the Party’, leaving En Lutte! out in the cold to fend for itself, but on top of that it refused to participate in a “united front of Marxist-Leninists” for a common action. This proved to be too much for En Lutte! Though retaining the diplomatic manner of its past ’comradely’ relations with the League groups, En Lutte! warned that the League’s refusal to unite for IWWD, no matter on what basis, constituted one of the most heinous of crimes since it “...expresses, we believe, a dogmatic and leftist point of view on the unity of the Canadian ml...”(Ibid). En Lutte! thus found that its ’heroic struggle’ against “dogmatism and sectarianism” had to be widened to the utmost. The ’two-line struggle’ with its counterpart had begun.

En Lutte!’s ’struggle against sectarianism’ is inseparable from its peculiar conception of who constitutes the ’Marxist-Leninist movement’ and the steps necessary to consolidate it. Its view of the movement is its starting point and guideline for determining what and who is ’sectarian’, and where this was implicit in its earlier statements, the events around March 8th brought forward En Lutte!’s position with remarkable clarity. According to En Lutte!’s line of reasoning, the CCL(ML)’s refusal to ’unite’ around IWWD amounted to a denial of the very existence of the Marxist-Leninist movement in Canada and Quebec. Since En Lutte!’s entire frame of reference is ’unity’ above all, any division in the movement, for whatever reason, must mean a lowering of its level.

And, if the differences are so great as to preclude ’unity’ in action to “counter revisionism and trotskyism! well! let’s call things by their names, or better, let us not give any name to that which does not exist...” (English Digest March 1976 p.8). That is, if the CCL(ML) cannot see its way clear to ’unity’ with En Lutte!, then let’s not pretend there is a movement at all. In En Lutte!’s view, the CCL’s refusal to cooperate with its ’sensible’ plans only shows that the “political coherence” of the movement is so low as to negate its existence entirely. But having liquidated, on the basis of its own false premises, the existence of the movement, En Lutte! is determined not to let the CCL(ML) off the hook so easily. En Lutte! thus courageously declares that “there is a marxist-leninist movement in Canada” (Ibid), and En Lutte! will insure that this movement endures in ’unity’, despite the doings of the ’dogmatic sectarians’.

How is this movement defined? The movement consists of all those who “put forward” a series of positions outlined by En Lutte!: 1) proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the “road towards socialism in Canada”; 2) “support the struggle against the superpowers’ hegemonism, the struggles for national liberation, for the peoples’ independence, for the denunciation of the inter-imperialist war and for proletarian revolution”; 3) the need for a communist Party; 4) that the central task of Marxist-Leninists is party-building; 5) that the immediate tasks are to “spread widely” Marxism-Leninism, win the “advanced elements”; and 6) that the woman question must be “linked to the socialist revolution” (ED March 76 p.8). In this brief listing of the criteria for the movement, En Lutte! makes no mention whatever of the concrete application of these extremely broad positions. It makes no mention of concrete application simply because it is in applying these general positions that ’differences’ appear, and En Lutte! wants nothing to do with ’differences’. It is, after all, striving with its utmost for ’unity’. It is a small matter to En Lutte! that even the most hardened opportunists could subscribe to the positions it lists, or that as long as the movement is defined only according to strictly ’formal’ positions, the opportunists are still given a free hand. It is a small matter to En Lutte! simply because it would like such a free hand for its own opportunism, and thus has no intention of setting standards it itself cannot meet. Thus it is perfectly content to define the movement on the basis of generalities alone, and in addition declare that these formal pronouncements themselves constitute the principled and “...fundamental grounds of unity of the Canadian marxist-leninist movement and also what characterizes it principally, what distinguishes it from the reformist current and in particular from revisionism and trotskyism.” (English Digest March 1976 p.8)

Formerly we had thought that according to Marxism-Leninism we should look, not at what political formations say about themselves or only formally uphold, but what they uphold in practice, whose class interests they actually, and not merely ’officially’, represent. And with such a view, it is clearly nonsense to talk about political trends being ’distinguished’ from reformists, revisionists or Trotskyites simply on the grounds of ’formal’ declarations of good intentions. Every bit as nonsensical is En Lutte!’s use of such ’putting forward’ of strictly formal positions as the “fundamental grounds of unity”. With such a superficial and opportunist view of ’unity’, En Lutte! can in fact ’unite’ with about anyone, providing, of course, such trends are ’sophisticated’ enough to know the ’right’ things to say.

It is on such “fundamental grounds” that En Lutte! envisions such things as fusion with the “advanced elements” and the formation of the ’Party’. With such opportunist “rigor” we can well imagine whose class interests such a ’party’ would advance. But En Lutte! cannot simply declare itself the ’Party’, no more than the League can. It must first group together all those who are ’putting forward’ similar opportunist ambitions, resolve the “line struggle” via “democratic centralism” and only then put the stamp of officialdom on itself.

En Lutte!’s peculiar formulation on the question of “line struggle” is developed on the premise that bourgeois ideology within the workers’ movement and within the communist movement are two entirely separate things, and that our major emphasis must fall on combating bourgeois outlook within the working class. Thus the question of ’line struggle’ within the communist movement is given only secondary importance. En Lutte!’s articles in 1975 spoke, on the one hand, of the domination of the “working class and labouring masses...by all sorts of bourgeois streams of thought” and of the struggle to demarcate “from bourgeois ideology in the midst of the working class movement”. En Lutte! not only lumps together the working class and the petty bourgeoisie (“labouring masses”), but equates the role of bourgeois ideology for each. But in fact the “labouring masses”, i.e. strata of the petty bourgeoisie, are not ’dominated’ by bourgeois outlook, but spontaneously generate that outlook themselves. On the other hand, En Lutte! spoke of the communist movement only as “still strongly subject to its youth and to its petit bourgeois class composition” and called for the “struggle against opportunism within the Marxist-Leninist movement” as if this were an entirely separate task. The working class, in En Lutte!’s view, is dominated “by all sorts of bourgeois streams”, whereas the communist movement is simply “strongly subject” to such things as ’youth’ and a ’minor’ matter of petty bourgeois background. By the time of IWWD, En Lutte! had “put forward” a further elaboration of its ’struggle on two fronts’. In struggling against the League, En Lutte! skimmed over the CCL’s actual sectarianism in order to deliver the main blow against Marxism-Leninism. En Lutte! opposes the view that resolving differences within the communist movement, i.e. the struggle against opportunism, is of equal importance to defeating it in the workers’ movement:

We do not share the League’s point of view on this topic because it leads us to ignore the line struggle in the whole of the workers movement, e.g. what is principal, the victory of proletarian ideology, the victory of marxism-leninism in the workers’ movement, for it is that which must unite communists (ml) and it is that which effectively unites them.

In the present conjuncture, when the building of a communist party (ml) is the central pre-occupation of Marxist-Leninists, when the creation of the party (single) requires the unity of all authentic communists throughout Canada, the position the League puts forward is to give as much importance, if not more, to the divergences in the marxist-leninist movement, than to the contradictions that oppose this one to the political bourgeois forces, revisionists, Trotskyists and reformists in general in the workers’ movement. This is radically wrong... English Digest March 1976 p.7-8.

The CCL(ML), it should be remembered, was not advocating ideological struggle within in communist movement out of any desire for principled unity. Not at all. It advocated ideological struggle, that is, struggle against En Lutte!, simply because En Lutte! had set itself up as a sitting duck. With such transparently opportunist positions, the League could, through ’struggle’, knock En Lutte! from its influential seat in the movement and claim En Lutte!s title for itself. Thus it was to the CCL(ML)’s benefit to attempt to draw out as sharply as possible its ’differences’ with En Lutte! En Lutte!, on the other hand, had no intention of fully exposing itself on the League’s behalf, and so attempted to divert the “line struggle” from questions of substance to a question of whether or not they should be ’struggling’ in the first place. After all, in En Lutte!’s view, we should not be quibbling over our ’minor’ differences, when, Lord knows, the working class is teeming with “bourgeois streams”. Would it not be better to simply set aside our ’differences’ for the time being, resolve them quietly within the “M-L organization of struggle for the Party”, and devote our present energies to combating all these rampant bourgeois influences within the working class? Given all our “fundamental grounds of unity”, would it not be more ’sensible’ to struggle, shoulder-to-shoulder, against those “bourgeois streams” and thus build even more “effective” unity? So asks En Lutte! of the League, in its moment of desperation. Thus while the League is busily consolidating its opportunist effort to ’forge’ yet another petty bourgeois ’ML’ party, En Lutte! pleads with all its Centrist might lest the League inadvertantly expose them both. Isn’t there some means, En Lutte! cries in effect, to join our opportunism together for the ’common good’? Wouldn’t it be better to ’hold off’ on line struggle within the communist movement until we are sure no one will expose us?

En Lutte! is driven to such pleas simply because the League’s brazen doings do in fact threaten to expose petty bourgeois opportunism which has thus far comfortably concealed itself behind ’ML’. It is a small matter to En Lutte! if, in the process of defending its Centrism, it is ’forced’ to portray the working class as a swamp of bourgeois influences. But it is only by laying so much emphasis on the ’horrible’ conditions of bourgeois outlook within the working class that En Lutte! can rationalize laying so little emphasis on the opportunist composition of the movement. En Lutte!, like the League, must attempt to make it appear that all one needs to be principled is to have ’good intentions’, be dedicated to ’unity’, want to ’help’ the workers, and so on. And if our movement is populated by such ’swell’ people, how could we possibly expect that “line struggle” would play a predominant role? It would be better, from En Lutte!’s point of view, to concentrate on all those misled workers. And if it is absolutely necessary to wage a struggle against “anti-Marxist” influences within the communist movement, then please do not separate this from, but in fact subordinate it to, the struggle against “bourgeois streams” which flood the workers:

To wage this struggle” (i.e. against opportunism amongst ’ML’s) “separately would mean to conceive the struggle for the triumph of marxism-leninism over revisionism and trotskyism as unavoidably including the expression of divergences between different marxist-leninist groups; this is equal to put foreground the struggle between different trends, to nourish the ’circle spirit’ and ’competition spirit’ which leads to prestige struggle; to lead this struggle separately would be an error. English Digest March 1976 p.9.

Our champion of “ideological struggle” has, it turns out, effectively yielded that struggle altogether. Not only would it be a diversion of forces to make struggle within the movement an equal or predominant task, it would be an expression of the “circle spirit”! Thus, in En Lutte!’s view, any element in the movement that puts primary or even equal emphasis on rooting out opportunism in our own ranks is automatically guilty of the basest ’splittism’, ’circle mentality’, and ’prestige-seeking’. But while En Lutte! has raised this as a word of warning against any possible opposition, it has in fact only revealed its fear of exposure and its unwillingness to cease the “prestige struggle” it has been waging for some time. In reality, there is nothing at all incorrect about circles of Marxist-Leninists attempting to defeat circles of Centrists and opportunists, about Marxist-Leninists competing with and ousting petty bourgeois deviations in the movement, or in Marxist-Leninists attempting to establish the prestige of the working class over the petty narrowness typified by En Lutte! or the League. It is in fact En Lutte! which is caught up in the “circle spirit”, since it cannot conceive of a principled struggle within the movement except as something to be scorned and dreaded.

This division of the struggle against opportunism into ’two fronts’, in which the struggle against “bourgeois streams” in the working class takes precedence over the struggle in the movement – or vice versa – is nothing but a fabrication En Lutte! has created in order to justify its refusal to engage in principled polemic. En Lutte! has ’overlooked’ a few relevant facts. Given that we are only in the earliest stages of Party-building, our main task is to win the advanced workers to communism. This cannot be done without drawing them into the life of the movement, without posing all the questions our movement has yet to resolve, without training them to independently assess the interests of all social classes and strata and how those interests are masked and defended. Those class interests express themselves in every conceivable way, behind the most diverse fronts, and at different levels of sophistication. They are expressed not only within the workers’ movement and communist movement, but in every walk of life. By narrowing its focus to a simple choice between the workers’ or communist movement, En Lutte! is in fact obscuring what is most essential in combating opportunism, i.e. its continuity, its ability to adapt itself to any sphere and any form, its penetration into every facet of social existence. It is in fact impossible to win the advanced workers to communism unless our propaganda make this point clear. Petty bourgeois narrowness takes specific forms within the workers’ movement, other forms within the communist movement, and yet other forms amongst different strata of the petty bourgeoisie, labour aristocracy, intelligentsia, and so on. The advanced workers must come to understand all these peculiar expressions, must understand the class basis which gives rise to them, and how those forms differ from the forms taken by other class interests. It is therefore stupid nonsense to contrast the ’struggle against opportunism within the workers’ movement’ to the ’struggle against opportunism within the communist movement’. That En Lutte! and the League are able to conduct an entire debate over which is ’primary’ only testifies to the narrowness which drives each. The League places emphasis on the struggle amongst Marxist-Leninists only because it hopes to outdo En Lutte! and build a ’party’ in its own image. En Lutte! places emphasis on struggling against “bourgeois streams” only because it hopes to thereby maintain its Centrist position as the movement’s ’peace-keeper’ and raise a ’party’ umbrella over all opportunists. In reality, neither one struggles against petty bourgeois opportunism, since to do so would be political suicide. They would simply have no reason for being. It is far better, then, to simply ’debate’ where one should struggle against opportunism, and in the process avoid the actual struggle altogether.

En Lutte!’s down-playing of the “struggle between different trends” is an essential facet of its own existence as a ’different trend’. It is quite willing to take up the struggle against the revisionists, Trotskyites, and reformers who busy themselves in the workers’ movement, since this poses no immediate threat to its own existence. So long as En Lutte!’s targets are outside the communist movement, so long as they are well known and long identified “bourgeois streams”, then En Lutte! can wage a comfortable struggle against them without fear of exposure. But when the “struggle between different trends” within the communist movement takes shape, En Lutte! must be more careful. Combating revisionism in the form of the CP Canada is a piece of cake; but to have a struggle going against revisionist trends within the ’anti-revisionist communist movement’, that is something else. Combating opportunism or Trotskyism on the ’outside’, within the workers’ movement, is one thing; but to bring that struggle home, into the ranks of the communist movement, is enough to send En Lutte! crying about the “circle spirit”, “competition” and so on. En Lutte! suspects, and quite rightly, that when the “struggle between different trends” begins in earnest, it will find itself one of the first ’victims’. Hence its effort to achieve ’unity’ and the security of ’democratic centralism’ as soon as possible. And should En Lutte! begin to be exposed before it has achieved its dreams, it can always howl that it has been the ’victim’, not of principled exposure, but of the “circle spirit”.

All of this would seem to contradict En Lutte!’s earlier ’recognition’ that “real unity demands above all that we clarify differences” {CR #1 p.18) and its pretense at being in the forefront of “ideological struggle”. But in fact there is no contradiction at all. En Lutte!’s “fundamental line” has not been premised on what is objectively necessary for the movement’s principled development, but simply on what was subjectively necessary for En Lutte! to pass itself off as a viable trend. At a time when the ’clarification of differences’ was restricted to a catch-phrase, En Lutte! could easily support such a demand. But now that the CCL(ML) has begun to “clarify differences” at En Lutte!’s expense, En Lutte! has no intention of clinging to such an ’outworn’ phrase. Instead En Lutte! raises a new catch-phrase, speaking against an ’untimely’ clarification of differences, and for ’unity’ above all.

En Lutte! accomplishes this turn-about on the plea of ’concrete conditions’ and, of course, ’dialectics’. It must somehow liquidate the importance of ideological struggle while at the same time ’upholding’ it. It must show that struggle within the movement is not at all of ’secondary importance’, and yet at the same time be able to accuse those who “put foreground” such struggle as being guilty of “circle spirit”. As to the prevailing “divergence of opinion”, En Lutte! accepts this not simply as a status quo, but as a “fundamental basis” for ’unity’. It is not so pessimistic as to think that all the opportunist fallings-out that have occurred in our movement amounts to so much muck, muck that we need first of all to completely eliminate. Not at all. En Lutte! in fact cherishes this ’muck’, for it is the very stuff that “M-L organizations of struggle” are made of. This, it declares, is the only “materialist” approach, taking “into account the concrete reality of our country”. That is to say, En Lutte! simply resigns itself to the opportunist state of the movement and attempts to ’collectivize’ it. It would not do, in En Lutte!’s view, to actually raise our movement to principle, since that would no doubt put into question the ’authenticity’ of the ’leading’ trends. No, En Lutte! will simply be “materialist” and take into account the “actual”, very low and very opportunist “concrete reality” the movement has developed in. It can then play the role of the grand arbiter, “using Marxism-Leninism” to smooth out any peculiarities amongst the opportunists it has attracted, urge that all and sundry forge ’unity’ through common action, and simply merge into a single organizational form. En Lutte! has much historical precedent for such a view, for this is precisely the path followed by Canadian Revolution and proposed by the CPC(ML) in its program , “Unity In Action”. From this basic approach is follows ’logically’ that any attempt to unite the movement through intensification of ideological struggle, the full and detailed exposure of such opportunism as the League and En Lutte! so boldly exhibit, is ’dogmatic’ and ’sectarian’. As the CPC(ML) put it so succinctly:

It is altogether wrong to elevate the question of ’ideological struggle’ to the level of principle and use it to cause splits in the struggle against the main enemy. PCDN January 7, 1975.

En Lutte! will of course protest that it is not at all opposed to ’ideological struggle’, but only to “circle spirit”, and that the seeming similarity between its line and the CPC(ML)’s is sheer coincidence. It will protest vigorously that far from denying the necessity of political line struggle in the communist movement, it specifically supports and promotes that struggle. After all, in its writings around IWWD, En Lutte! itself posed the question of whether its line would amount to “...considering secondary the internal line struggle of the marxist-leninist movement...” and assurred us:

Not at all. The ’line struggle’ amid the Marxist-Leninist movement consists in effect in this dialectical movement whose first pole is the development of Marxist-Leninists’ unity in the struggle against revisionism, reformism and all other forms of the bourgeois ideology present in the workers’ movement and the other pole lies in the struggle against erroneous conceptions amid the Marxist-Leninist movement, in the criticism of errors, deviations and eventually in polemics between groups diverging in opinion on fundamental points of the application of marxism-leninism to the reality of our country. English Digest March 1976 p.8

Very ’dialectical’ indeed. “Line struggle”, it turns out, is not struggle at all. It has, in En Lutte!’s view, nothing to do with two world outlooks at work in the communist movement, nothing at all related to revisionism, reformism, or “all other forms” of opportunism amongst the self-proclaimed ’Marxist-Leninists’. These things only exist in the workers’ movement. In the communist movement, however, there exists only “erroneous conceptions”, “errors”, and “divergences in opinion”. Should these ’minor’ differences ever get out of hand, then maybe, perhaps there will “eventually”, much later on, be “polemics between some groups”. Such is En Lutte!’s ’principled’ adherence to the importance of “ideological struggle” within the movement. In fact, this amounts to the complete liquidation of principled struggle, since if En Lutte! views the differences within the movement only as “erroneous conceptions”, then it puts itself on ’comradely’ terms with “all other forms” of opportunism in our movement, and having done that attempts to create a “common front” against the only force which can break and expose such opportunism, i.e. sets itself against Marxism-Leninism. And knowing that it cannot withstand a principled struggle, En Lutte! has prepared for one with the cheap ammunition of all Centrists: “circle spirit”, “dogmatists”, and “sectarians”.

It should be clear that if En Lutte! were to admit that differences in our movement include not only “erroneous conceptions” but outright petty bourgeois trends, then it would have to completely abandon its ’unity’ schemes and take up a principled struggle against opportunism. But En Lutte! has no intention of drawing any sort of line between itself and petty bourgeois opportunism, since it is precisely petty bourgeois opportunism that gave it its raison d’etre. It has no wish to ’demarcate’ against itself. Thus while chewing the cud over “erroneous conceptions”, “errors” and “diverging in opinion”, and while even going so far as to allow for polemics should there be differences “on fundamental points of the application of marxism-leninism to the reality of our country”, En Lutte! at the same time issues a call for ’unity’ to all those who “...to its knowledge, completely rally the fundamental principles of marxism-leninism on the road for revolution in our country even if differences exist in the concrete application of these principles to the reality of our country.” (Ibid. p.9)

Thus even these paltry “eventual” polemics, polemics which En Lutte! has qualified as being on the “fundamental points of the application of marxism-leninism to the reality of our country”, even these are supposed to occur within the confines of En Lutte!’s ’unity’. It must automatically suppose that these “divergences in opinion” will not be so great, after all. What are principles, mere principles, when ’unity’ is at stake?

However desperately En Lutte! may attempt to assure us of its good intentions, the fact remains that its “fundamental line” is fundamentally opportunist. It would have us grasp a cheap ’organizational’ solution as the “key link”, since it is only through such grasping at straws that En Lutte! can maintain its ’prestige’ and ’leadership’ role. Only, do not expose us, En Lutte! begs, do not attempt to portray “erroneous conceptions” that we have as overt opportunist maneuvers. We mean well, after all. It may comes as a surprise to En Lutte!, but those of us in the rank and file of the movement could care less for its ’good intentions’, since it is such ’good’ but thoroughly opportunist ’intentions’ that has led our movement to its present disarray. Unlike En Lutte!, we have no investment in maintaining that disarray, nor do we search for ’leadership’ a la the League or En Lutte!. We have no investment in glad-handing every two-bit petty bourgeois opportunist who has taken it in his head to proclaim himself a ’Marxist-Leninist’. We have no intention of stooping to the dregs of our movement in the name of ’unity’. The consistent communists in our movement know that a truly Marxist-Leninist Party cannot be built from such muck. And while we cannot stop the likes of En Lutte! from following the path of least resistance, we can and do refuse to enter the marsh with it, and will certainly devote ourselves to the concrete task of seeing to it that they take as few others with them as possible.