The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) ran fifty-four candidates all across Canada in the federal elections in October 1972. Why did we participate in the elections? The question is being seriously asked of us. It is a question of historic significance. There are in the main, two kinds of people asking these question: 1) Our real friends – those working people comprising eighty percent of the population and their advanced section, the genuinely progressive and democratic section; 2) Our sworn enemies – the tiny minority comprising the monopoly capitalist class and its most backward section, the genuinely anti-democratic, social fascist and national chauvinist elements.
We are addressing our real friends. We would like to have their support and arm them against the slanders and rumours spread by our real enemies.
Our real friends ask: Why do you fight the elections? Do you think that the system can be changed through elections? They are genuinely interested in knowing why it is progressive to run in the elections. Our enemies of different varieties under various sign-boards chide: “So you have changed your line! You are becoming sensible,” or, CPC(M-L) has become revisionist, etc.
We answer our real friends that CPC(M-L) was never against elections per se. We were never ashamed of participating in a process to advance the cause of revolution. The basic point is that the capitalists have decided the battleground. It is the elections. They use the elections to do vicious propaganda against the working people, and we cannot stand on the sidelines and let them harm the cause of the working people.
When the capitalists choose this form of struggle we have to give them a good fight. Without fighting the enemy in the field he has chosen we will become sideline gesticulators.
In the past we have pursued a consistent line of tit-for-tat. We have actively participated in upholding the proletarian point of view and serving our class. During the period of relative weakness, 1968 and onwards, we presented the slogan: Don’t vote for the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, Socreds, NDP and revisionists, they’re all the same! Vote for CPC(M-L). Our election platform is that the capitalist system should be replaced by the socialist system and the monopoly capitalist class by the working class as the ruling class.
You can see we have not changed. We have advanced. Our organisation has developed to the stage when we can fight elections and present our point of view to the masses.
If we don’t do this, then what will be our alternative? The blind alley of reformism and terrorism! The revisionists and opportunists peddle reformism and terrorism to strangle the anti-imperialist revolution. We oppose both. We neither support reformism, nor do we advocate terrorism. We say: Organise the working class as the ruling class of Canada!
For some people this is not concrete enough. For them it is more “concrete” to serve coffee and doughnuts to unemployed and poor workers than to mobilise them for anti-imperialist revolution. We say this is all counter-revolution. It is the line of our class enemy which would liquidate our revolution. The enemy would like to embroil us in diversionary issues so that we don’t sharpen our sword, whilst all the time he is sharpening his. We say: Down with the counter-revolutionary line of reformism and terrorism!
Does it follow that we won’t participate in the actual struggles of the masses? No. What it does mean is that we should prepare to lead the struggles of the masses. Without building public opinion, establishing working class propaganda centres and arming the masses of the workers ideologically, we will not be able to lead the revolution and instead would defuse it. Our enemies would like us to do just that.
The working class in Canada is astir, looking for direction. Elections provide ample opportunity to go amongst the working people to raise the basic issues: socialism versus capitalism, the working class as the ruling class or the monopoly capitalist class as the ruling class. These are the issues. This is the reason that we fight elections.
Comrade Lenin instructed the communists:
Even it not ’millions’ and ’legions’, but only a fairly large minority of industrial workers follow the Cathloc priests – and a similar minority of rural workers follow landlords and kulaks (Grossbauern) – it undoubtedly follows that parlimentarism in Germany is not yet politically obsolete, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory for the party of the revolutionary proletariat precisely for the.purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, precisely for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden, ignorant rural masses. As long as you are unable to disperse the bourgeois parliament and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work inside them precisely because there you will find workers who are doped by the priests and the dreariness of rural life; otherwise you risk becoming mere babblers. (“Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder, Peking,Foreign Languages Press, p. 52)
We call on all genuinely progressive and democratic people to come forward and present themselves as candidates in all the elections. Present the proletarian view to the masses. The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) will staunchly sympathise with and encourage those who take up the banner of the working class and fight. The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all progressive and democratic people to support CPC(M-L), oppose all the capitalist parties, especially the NDP and the Revisionist Party of Canada, who speak in the name of socialism to oppose it in practice. Create material conditions of mutual confidence, unity and solidarity amongst the progressive people. Denounce the sectarians who refuse to unite on the basis of principle! Denounce the opportunists who use the elections to oppose the working class principles.
The 1972 federal election brought the class struggle in Canada to the objective and scientific level among the masses. This has never happened before. No political party ever spoke before in the name of the working class and called for the overthrow of the monopoly capitalist class as the ruling class. No political party ever questioned the very existence of the British North America Act and all the legislation stemming there from. No political party ever before presented the people of Canada with a genuine solution to the domination of the country by foreign imperialists. Only the political party of the proletariat has brought about this situation, and this new situation is bound to advance in the months and years to come.
The capitalist press and news media showed their utter contempt for our Party and our Party programme, They hated us. They tried their best to conceal our political programme and to confuse us with the revisionist party, treacherously calling itself “Communist”. They had great difficulty in determining our political programme, the names of our candidates and even the name of our Party. They did everything to hide the fact that we were fighting the elections.
While the news media had one attitude towards us they had the entirely opposite view to their own parties. Trudeau, Stanfield, Lewis, Caouette and Kashtan were followed all across Canada, and extensive news reporting was given to them in order to mystify the issues and popularise the personalities. The main aim of this propaganda is to say that there is no way out of the capitalist system and that the masses should take it or leave the country and that the overthrow of the capitalist system is not the real alternative. These news media people have become so reactionary, backward and committed to the capitalist class that they take pride in concocting lies about the capitalist system and how to prettify it as the “best in the world”, etc. At the same time they malign our Party and the communist system and deliberately compare it with the social imperialist system of the Soviet Union.
When the news media and the propaganda organs do not have the desired effect, the capitalist class brings their armed force into the struggle and uses them against the people. During the election campaign, there were over forty arrests of our comrades in various cities, including four of the Party’s candidates. The RCMP joined the elections in October 1972, and deliberately tried to suggest that we were running in the elections incognito and that an “RCMP informant” had some secret information which he was divulging to the masses.
The behaviour of the news media and the RCMP during the elections is a despicable self-exposure of the monopoly capitalist class and shows how much they conspire against the people. It also exposes the fraud of “bourgeois democracy” that the people have a real “choice” and that everyone has the right to participate in the elections and present their view. The federal elections have clearly shown that the monopoly capitalist class holds elections purely to ask the people which set of oppressors should rule next. All the capitalist candidates prepare public opinion against the working class and immigrants, and all their fighting with one another is merely to sort out contradictions in their own camp. They use, money and guns to achieve their aims.
The 1972 elections were a great victory for our Party. We nominated 52 candidates as representatives of the working class. The capitalists thought, in their ill-conceived arrogance, that this could not be accomplished. Our victory is that we have shown the working class that we are capable of representing their interests. The monopoly of the capitalists over the politics in Canada is broken. The monopoly of the revisionists and reformists is also broken. Our Party has advanced to the scale of vigorously opposing the capitalist political line on many fronts. As far as the support of the working people is concerned, we have already received tremendous support. Look at the facts: We raised over $20 000 from our own comrades and close supporters to run in the elections. The majority of our candidates are actual workers. Capitalists, in order to keep their facade of democracy, will have to call elections within the next four years. By that time we will nominate candidates in all the ridings in big, medium-sized and small cities, and we will certainly fight to win. We will use this period to give the capitalists tit-for-tat struggle on several fronts.
During the election campaign we have learned many lessons. Some of them are enumerated below:
1) All the capitalist parties are advocating further dependance on foreign investments. They oppose revolutionary self-reliance. With the developing economic crisis the working people of this country will be saddled with the increasing economic burden which U.S. imperialism is turning over to other countries. Just examine the solutions: the Liberal Party will maintain the status quo in relation to the U.S. imperialists., They will import more resources; the Progressive Conservatives will increase U.S. imperialist investment by their emphasis on building secondary industries and tying these to U.S. imperialist manufacturers. They are against curbs on any U.S. imperialist enterprises. They advocate developing so-called Canadian enterprises and fattening them for takeover. This is the same policy which the Liberals advocated but the Conservatives promise that they can do better. They will establish wage and price controls for the purpose of eliminating small enterprises further exploiting labour and helping the big monopoly enterprices. The New Democratic Party’s economic policy is no different from the Liberals and Conservatives, and the same is true of the Social Credit and the Revisionist Party. Nationalisation slogans given by the revisionists and the NDP and the clap-trap about “corporate welfare bums” are merely a smokescreen to make working people pay for those enterprises which are no longer profitable to private capital but which must continue to provide services to the monopoly capitalists at a cheaper rate (eg., the proposed nationalisation of B.C. Telephone by the NDP and all the nationalisations of the British Labour Party which were to streamline and consolidate the capitalist system). All of these parties, apart from basing themselves on foreign monopoly capital, are totally committed to finance capital. They have no programme of basing the economy on the real value of labour, land and the growth of the national productive forces and on the basis of generating an internal market plus international trade based on mutual benefit. They have pledged themselves to be anti-labour, anti-Canada and against the development of Canadian technique and know-how. Because they are building their economy on foreign dependency, they are presenting programmes on the basis of which international economic group they can ally with. From this we draw our first lesson: Only our Party is genuinely nationalist, genuinely pro-labour and genuinely internationalist.
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all our members to deepen and broaden the above general analysis and popularise it widely. It is extremely important that we prepare public opinion against comprador economic theories.
2) The capitalist parties are exploiters and oppressors of the Quebec people and the Native Indian people. None of the capitalist parties disagree on their general policy towards the British North America Act. The so-called “socialist” NDP and the revisionist party are more eager to defend this colonial act than the traditional colonial parties themselves.
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all our members and supporters to deepen and broaden this general line against the BNA Act and expose the nature of all the capitalist parties as being anti-Quebec and anti-Native people.
3) The capitalist parties are the strongest defenders of the U.S. imperialist policies of war and aggression. None of these parties, including the revisionist party, has come forward consistently to oppose wars cf aggression by imperialism and social-imperialism. Liberals and Conservatives, NDP and Socreds, all sympathise, support, finance and provide manpower to prop up the U.S. imperialist puppet state of Israel which is based on racism and whose leaders are stubborn anti-semites (all Arab people are semitic people). These parties have not yet denounced the U.S. imperialists for their crimes against humanity. The revisionist party, although they oppose U.S. imperialism in words and even call, from time to time, for peace on earth, supported the Soviet social-imperialist invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Indian reactionary invasion of Pakistan. Their anti-imperialist facade is daily being exposed: The capitalist parties, including the revisionists, fully support the superpower politics of the U.S. imperialists and the Soviet social-imperialists in their world-wide contention and collusion, Each of these parties supports one superpower or the other.
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all its members and supporters to popularise this basic analysis and mobilise the masses against the superpowers and their politics.
4) The working people want to oppose the judiciary system. They are becoming conscious of the class nature of the state, and they are asking for assistance in carrying out day-to-day struggles against the judiciary system. The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all its members and supporters to pay close attention to this problem and strive to integrate with the working people especially in their struggle at the place of work, and to show how the judiciary system is used to suppress them and increase their exploitation and how to develop the fight against it.
5) Immigrant workers, brought to Canada to be exploited for increased profits of the monopoly capitalists, are increasingly hostile to the policies of racial discrimination and political repression of the Immigration Department. The Department disenfranchises progressive immigrants and prevents their full participation in the political affairs of the country, while at the same time denials of citizenship to immigrants who support the CPC(M-L) are increasingly frequent. Lucio Appolloni, the Liberal candidate in York South Riding in Toronto came to Canada in 1965 and was awarded his citizenship, while Comrade Hardial Bains, the leader of our Party, came to Canada as a landed immigrant on November 30, 1959, and has been officially denied citizenship because of his political beliefs.
These policies are aimed especially against immigrant workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America and against unskilled working people from Western Europe such as Italians, Portuguese and Greeks.
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all of its members and supporters to pay special attention to the problems of the immigrant workers and provide them with every assistance possible. The Party calls upon all to engage in vigorous struggle against the racist and anti-communist policies of the Immigration Department, and engage in preparing large scale public opinion in support of the just struggles of the immigrant workers and national minority people.
6) The working people are extremely interested in learning about and opposing land speculation especially in the big cities. Working people live in bad housing quarters and are the worst affected by pollution. They are also the victims of slum landlords and loan sharks. On this front also, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all of its members and supporters to pay close attention and develop the work on a long range basis.
7) The working people are extremely hostile to the slanders of the monopoly capitalists, especially on the front of “welfare”. While they are angry and will oppose the capitalists, they are confused about the “welfare” system and, in a way, consider it a “humanitarian” act on the part of the capitalists. Our members and supporters should pay immediate attention to clarifying the “welfare” system and increasing the level of understanding of the working people. There are several other economic questions working people want to know about the origin of and the solution for inflation, unemployment, and the rising cost of living. The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all of its members and supporters to pay special attention to clarifying these basic questions among the working people.
8) The working people do not yet see that in order to have economic power and a society based on the liberation of labour and its dictatorship over capital, it is necessary to seize political power. In the seizure of political power they are also confuses about the question of “violence”. The establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the opposition to the violence of the bourgeois dictatorship must be explained and discussed in great detail all the time.
In Canada, the bourgeoisie is attempting to equate the just resistance of the people with individual terrorism and then is trying to promote itself as an international champion of the “fight against terrorism”.
In this way, knowing full well that the people do not like terrorism, they are attempting to hide the fact that the capitalist system is the most violent system and the capitalist class is the most violent class.
In Canada and Quebec, the bourgeoisie established itself through violence and since that time has never ceased using violence against the Quebec people, the Native Indian people and the working people.
During the election, when confronted with the facts of political deportations and the violence of the capitalist class, the capitalist politicians first tried to suppress the issue with bourgeois legality (Sharp held that Indian immigrants were being deported because they “entered the country illegally”) and then, when further confronted, they protected this legality by openly advocating force (Liberal Charles Caccia, Davenport, stated that CPC(M-L) supporters were justly deported because they “violated the Immigration Act” and were a “threat to Canada’s security”).
While CPC(M-L) has never supported terrorism, it will definitely retaliate against any attack made against the Party’s members and supporters. This is not terrorism. We will never be cowed down by the violent attacks and slanders of the police. The monopoly capitalist class, not the oppressed people, decides whether we will have a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism or a violent one.
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls on all of its members and supporters to clarify these issues among the masses and to continue the work against the RCMP and all the other violent institutions of the bourgeois state machine.
10) The capitalist parties, especially the revisionists, have created confusion about the Party’s policies towards the American people and the U.S. imperialists. They have been doing counter-revolutionary propaganda that CPC(M-L) is “preparing for an invasion of the U.S.”. This is the lowest level to which these boot-lickers of imperialism and social-imperialism can go. We must explain to the people that asking a thief to leave the house is not a declaration of war on the house of the thief but a declaration of war against thievery. It is just to oppose the thievery of the imperialists and the social-imperialists. It is also just to oppose the thievery of the enemy if he invades by force of arms, just like it is just for the Vietnamese people to end armed aggression by the U.S. with the force of their own arms. Lastly the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) calls upon all our members and supporters to never forget class struggle inside or outside the Party. Oppose class collaboration outside as well as inside.
To win victory over the monopoly capitalist class and the foreign imperialists, it is most urgent to:
1) Strengthen Party leadership on all levels of work,
2) Arouse the masses in support of the Party’s programme.
3) Sympathise with and support the thirteen revolutionary movements,
4) Build unity among all Marxist-Leninist groups and individuals,
5) Oppose both reformism and terrorism, and
6) Oppose capitulation to the state machine and march gloriously along the path to victory!