In the past few months a number of organisations have attacked CPC(M-L), denounced it for being “counter-revolutionary”, and called for “revolutionaries” to isolate the Party. Chief among them is Jack Scott who writes in a pamphlet published by the Mouvement revolutionnaire des etudiants du Quebec that CPC(M-L) wanted to use him as a “passport to China” and other slanderous nonsense. The organisation which printed Scott’s concoctions says in the same pamphlet, “CPC(ml)’s line is nothing but an insidious witches’ brew of opportunism and (it) is a fundamentally counter-revolutionary organization...a group which has denigrated and slandered the image of communism in the eyes of the masses, misled struggles, ruined the lives of many potentially good militants, and generally acted as splitters and wreckers of the mass and vanguard movements. ... Thus, CPC(ml) must be strenuously exposed, attacked and denounced all along the line... This is not a struggle between MREQ and CPC(ml), but between the latter and the whole revolutionary movement.” (“Impotent Shrills of an Organisation Called MREQ”, Mass Line, Vol. 6 & 7, No. 56, Section 2, p. 2)
MREQ is joined by another French-language paper, En Lutte! In a recent issue they say: “it is not enough to stay away from CPC(ML) and to occasionally throw darts at it...it is necessary to expose and denounce it... The so-called CPC(ML) is nothing but a well-organised detachment of the bourgeoisie within the Marxist-Leninist movement. It is the principal representative of one of the most subtle and most pernicious forms of bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the proletarian revolutionaries –that of neo-revisionism, younger brother of modern revisionism. It is therefore part of the counter-revolutionary camp. Between it and the genuine Marxist-Leninist movement; the contradiction is antagonistic. It must also be combatted as an enemy of the Canadian proletariat and people.” (“Opportunist Machinations of a Newspaper Named En Lutte!”, Mass Line, Vol. 6 & 7, No. 56, Section 2, p. 25)
A third man, Dave Paterson, from Toronto, who supports the two in Montreal and whose mutual friend and supporter is Jack Scott and his circle in Vancouver, also launched an attack on CPC(M-L).
The following is an example:
“CPC(M-L) must be recognised as thoroughly opportunist, incapable of leading the working class and progressive forward to socialism. To unite with these opportunists on the basis they propose is to sink with them to their own level of opportunism.... (...)
“Many of the rank and file members and ’supporters’ of CPC(M-L) are honest and sincere fighters for the Canadian revolution. But until that party is reduced to ashes, until its thoroughly opportunist line is defeated, and until its leaders are banished and stripped of any thread of legitimacy, their energies will be dissipated, their dedication wasted, their political development retarded, and the struggle for a socialist Canada held back.” (“Ravings of a Man Named Dave Paterson”, Mass Line, Vol. 6 & 7, No. 56, Section 2, p. 22.
These kinds of attacks against the Party are not new. The revisionist party, the “Communist” Party of Canada, in March 7, 1973 issue of the Canadian Tribune, carried an article by William Stewart headlined: “Canadian Maoists –agents of imperialism.” This article attacked the comrades of CPC(M-L) as being “home-bred Maoists” who are “open agents of state-monopoly capitalism essentially counter-revolutionaries designed to perform the same counter-revolutionary splitting role in the working class and democratic movements as the Trotskyites have for many years.” He concludes his article with the same call as the present day opportunists: “how much damage will they do in their shameful splitting anti-working class activities? To assure this damage is minimized requires a stepped-up exposure in the working class and democratic movements of the anti-Soviet, anti-unity, anti-Marxist, divisive line and tactics of the Canadian Maoists, to isolate them from these bodies.” (Canadian Tribune, March 7, 1973)
In November 1971, a group of Afro-Asians split from the Party and did as much gossiping and slander mongering as they could to discredit the Party, and in this vain manner tried to isolate the Party from the masses. Before this group, another bunch under the leadership of an Iranian split the Afro-Asians on the issue of supporting Soviet social-imperialism.
In 1969 Jack Scott slandered the Canadian Communist Movement (M-L) and publicly denounced them, singling out Comrade Bains for special attack: “We feel, therefore, that in practice the CCM is making a negative contribution in the struggle for socialism and in helping the Canadian people to accept Marxism-Leninism. ...It is on Hardial Bains, by far the dominant figure in the CCM, that the blame must fall for the fostering of this style of work.” (BC Newsletter, No. 5, Dec. 1969)
Earlier that year Jack Scott and his few remaining members of Progressive Workers Movement (PWM), four or five students who had originally split from the Internationalists, organised a student group to oppose the Vancouver Student Movement. Their group, Campus Left Action Movement (CLAM), liquidated itself a year later, as did PWM.
In June 1967 those who later joined Scott and floated CLAM, had themselves split from the Internationalists because they refused to come under the discipline of that organisation and had floated “New Group” with old anti-communist fervour in the fall of that year. In fact Jack Scott and the Progressive Workers Movement continuously tried to split the Internationalists. They were joined in this activity by the modern revisionists themselves. In 1965 Nigel Morgan, B.C. provincial secretary of the “Communist” Party of Canada, pronounced to his party cadre at the UBC campus that Hardial Bains was a CIA agent!
Thus these present attacks on CPC(M-L) by Jack Scott and various opportunist groups in Canada are not new. They are as old as the Internationalists, and as old as my acquaintance with Comrade Bains. That is why, although I have no leading position in the Party, and have been only a candidate for membership in the Party since I applied to join on September 11, 1973, I asked the Party to let me make some initial comments on these teachers by negative example.
Opportunism is no stranger to me. All my life I have learnt from teachers by negative example. Chairman Mao Tsetung wisely teaches: ”The Chinese revolution would not have been victorious if there had beers only positive teachers and no teachers by negative example. Those who belittle the role of teachers by negative example are not thoroughgoing dialectical materialists.” This profound statement by Chairman Mao is universally applicable.
I met Comrade Bains at the University of British Columbia in 1963. I always admired his work, and spoke highly of it as a contribution to revolutionary politics in Canada even though I was frequently denounced by my former comrades in the revisionist party, and by various friends and political circles. I regarded Comrade Bains as a teacher by positive example since our days together at UBC campus. But I would never have advanced to join the Party and worked for proletarian revolution if I had not learned some painful and profound lessons from teachers by negative example. I know a lot of teachers by negative example in Canada, in fact I estimate that I know almost every teacher by negative example in the revolutionary and communist movement in Canada, quite a few from the U.S., a few from Europe and even one or two from Australia. Bear in mind I’ve never left the country except to go to the U.S. once or twice. They have all been teachers by negative example, and whatever progress I have made I owe to them, and I deeply express my gratitude and thanks to each of them. Without actually having sought their leadership, without having actually followed their leadership, I would never have known such charlatans and base characters could possibly exist, all under the signboard of being “communists”, “Marxists”, “progressives”. If someone had tried to tell me about the nature of such characters, I would never have believed them. One must actually have direct experience with such types to know what these monsters are like and how they operate.
I therefore write this as a soldier of the Party and based on my own experience with teachers by negative example. I am convinced this experience and the general experience of the international communist movement with the negative line constitutes strong proof as to the validity of my conclusions and of the Party’s line. I know from my own experience and primarily from that of the international movement that such slanders and gossips as are being promoted at the present time by the opportunists can only assist the straight-forward anti-communists, including the agents of Soviet social-imperialism, as well as the state apparatus.
I grew up in a workers’ family in Vancouver, B.C. during the 1950’s and 1960’s. My parents were both active members of the “Communist” Party of Canada, and had been militant activists in both the communist and trade union movement in the United States and Canada since the 1930’s. I myself joined the “Communist” Party youth section, then called the Socialist Youth League, when I was fourteen, and attended the convention of the League in 1960 when it renamed itself the Young ”Communist” League. In 1960 I began my studies at the University of British Columbia, and joined the “Communist” Party of Canada UBC Student Club when I was 17. The following year I became the spokesman for the club and remained so until I left UBC in the summer of 1967 for Toronto to become the editor of Scan, the revisionist youth magazine.
In addition to being party spokesman at UBC, I had been a member of the BC youth commission of the party, elected to its provincial committee, and elected as a member of the Central Committee in May 1966, as well as its Central Youth Commission. In December 1968 I, together with a number of others in Vancouver led by the Vancouver City Secretary of the party, left the party to oppose the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the CPC’s support for the Soviet social-imperialists, and for a number of other reasons having to do with the CPC’s political line. After we failed to organise this group into any sort of political organisation, I became a teacher in Prince George, returned to Vancouver a year later, took up activism with various groups mainly around a newspaper, New Leaf, and some of the leaders of the present paper, Western Voice, and various trade union personalities. Between 1971 and 1973 I taught at a community college in Edmonton and formed an alliance with some friends of Jack Scott and ex-revisionists to organise a “Marxist” study group. As well I participated in general left politics, including some experience with Waffle in the NDP. When I returned to Vancouver I lived in a New Left commune and learned another thing or two. In September 1973 I applied to join CPC(M-L), and have participated in various political activities with the Party since then. This experience has been opposite from my former experience with the various teachers by negative example, all of which has confirmed my view of Comrade Bains as a teacher by positive example who is making a good contribution to revolution in Canada.
It took me a long time to correlate that my own outlook, as well as that of our family, had not been communist, but rather, that our method, style and political line had been moulded by the modern revisionists who had seized control of the “Communist” Party of Canada and had turned it into an instrument for advancing their personal fortune; i.e., had converted a revolutionary party into a capitalist party, and introduced capitalist social relations as the norm within the party itself.
While I was the spokesman for the revisionists at UBC I enthusiastically upheld the revisionist methods and norms of social relations, and implemented the revisionist political line. Their political line can be summed up in two slogans: “BE A GOOD BOURGEOIS STUDENT AND GET A CAREER”, and “STAND ON THE SIDELINES, REVEL IN YOUR PRIVILEGED POSITION AS A COMMUNIST, AND BE AS IRRELEVANT AS POSSIBLE TO THE MASSES OF STUDENTS.” In short practice so-called “revolutionary” politics, and live in and through the imperialist culture. For several years as an agent of the revisionists I regularly denounced students for being bourgeois, and always lectured them very self-righteously about how the working class was going to bring about socialism, how I had come from a working class and communist family and so on. On many occasions the revisionists used me to mobilise the students and to march on workers’ picket lines, and for their “ban the bomb” pacificist demonstrations. Thus within a short time, despite the ultra-leftist verbiage I engaged in, my fellow students soon came to know me as the “nice, i.e. liberal, communist.” This was the leading aspect of my role on UBC campus; that is, I was in the main the agent or embodiment of the revisionist method and style of work, “left” and “revolutionary” in name, but rightist in political practise.
In February 1963, in my capacity as the “communist on campus”, I attended the Academic Symposium at Parksville on Vancouver Island. This was a prestigious event at UBC intended by the bourgeoisie to show its academic excellence, and its democratic nature. In fact it was an elitist forum for the bourgeoisie to carry on their ideological and cultural aggression against the youth in the interests of U.S. imperialism which was then expanding very rapidly into B.C. and the rest of Canada.
On my way to the Academic Symposium in February 1963, an Indian student named Hardial Bains introduced himself to me, and we had a long political discussion. I remember the discussion well because I had heard from student circles that Hardial Bains was progressive, and I was a bit shocked when he strongly opposed Khrushchov and the political line of the Soviet Union, I naturally rebuked him for attacking the socialist motherland, and said no one could be progressive if they were anti-Soviet. He persisted in arguing against Khrushchov’s political line, and upheld the position of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao. I was even more surprised by his position in support of China, and his warning if I followed Khrushchov’s line I would come to no good end, because the Indian invasion of China had just occurred, and I knew that the Communist Party of India supported the Indian government and opposed China as being “communist imperialism.” So naturally I upheld this line which Comrade Bains quite vigorously opposed. But at no time did he denounce me, excommunicate me for being a revisionist, or anything of the sort. Thus began a long association with Comrade Bains, first on UBC campus, then off and on between 1965 and 1973 and finally in the past two years as a militant supporter of CPC(M-L) which Comrade Bains leads. During this whole period when I went through many stages of development. Comrade Bains on the one hand consistently opposed my political line and ideological stance as a modern revisionist, and on the other hand united with me to oppose outright reactionaries.
A month after we met, Comrade Bains led a number of students in organising the Internationalists at UBC. No one who was a student at UBC in that period can ignore the impact the Internationalists had on campus; the whole atmosphere changed, and left politics greatly advanced. The key to that advance was the implementation of a political line that what was needed in those concrete historical circumstances –a discussion group, some forum that could break the monopoly of ideas which the reactionaries, with the active collusion of the revisionists, had imposed on the campus. All the “leftists” including myself wanted activism but no serious discussion of ideas. The discussion group was the key link, and by grasping this link, the whole political and cultural situation on campus changed, advanced a step to a higher stage.
No one in the 1960’s who was active anywhere on campus across Canada had any doubt that Vancouver, more specifically, UBC, was where the action was. The new left across Canada had made a myth about Vancouver and UBC because it was the centre of political activism as well as a centre of ideological life, vitality, freshness. There was an atmosphere on campus that had as its first principle, unity of the students and faculty against the cultural aggression of U.S. imperialism.
I remember an incident at UBC in this period with a deep, burning sense of shame. The Internationalists had organised a very big fall symposium in 1964; the whole activist core of students and faculty were invited and Comrade Bains had organised that I should be on the panel of speakers. The topic was “Individualism and Collectivism”, and at the heart of this topic raged class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between bourgeois metaphysics and idealism and dialectical and historical materialism. Needless to say the revisionists had done nothing to train their youth with Marxist-Leninist theory, and the pablum of social democratic ideas they fed us was anti-Marxist. One of my comrades, in the UBC student club, a worker who had gone back to school to advance his position in life, and who considered himself something of a philosopher, handed me a book by a Christian named John Lewis. He’s touted by the revisionist party in Great Britain as a “Marxist” theoretician, is a member of their party, and one of those who promoted bourgeois humanism as a part of the revisionist school of thought. So I studied this book all night before the symposium in order to defend my class in front of the bourgeoisie, for despite revisionism the young militants of the revisionist party had a deep class hatred for capitalism, and a deep aspiration to participate in revolution. But we were disarmed. Here was my chance to defend my class, to wage a battle on its behalf, and what had the revisionists put in my hands, a Christian book! Fortunately the book made absolutely no sense to me, just oppressed my spirits and negated my instincts to fight even on a crude basis against the bourgeoisie. When my turn came to speak I had nothing, literally that, nothing to say. I thrashed about completely impotent in front of the enemy, and in front of the leading student and faculty activists at UBC campus.
It was a disaster, not for communism, but for modern revisionism. It was exposed as having nothing to say through its leading cadre on campus. Of course some revisionist can personalise the situation, but the fact is revisionism was bankrupt on that front of class struggle. Only a Pakistani and an Indian, two foreigners, two proletarian internationalists, stood up that weekend and waged a tit-for-tat struggle for communist ideas against the representatives of imperialism. Again some pure spirit like Jack Scott might descend from a cloud and say well this formulation used here, or that sentence over there was not really Marxism-Leninism... But in those days, in those concrete circumstances, right in the thick of the masses, Comrade Bains and his allies in the Internationalists built their discussion group, fought imperialist ideas, organised an academic atmosphere on the campus, united the students to fight in various activities, marches, sit-ins, picket-lines and so on, and changed the politics of the UBC campus. Had the Internationalists not organised around the central question at that time, nothing would have moved forward. That after all is the essence of practising Marxism, to change the world, to revolutionise it, move it forward. In any case my own negative experience taught me that the revisionists had nothing to say on the front of theory, that their main motivation for going to university was to promote their careers. All this had nothing to do with Communism, and thanks to the organising of the Internationalists and later CCM(M-L) and CPC(M-L) the revisionists remain a side-line force amongst the youth and students. And all the activists knew that at the heart of this whole motion were the Internationalists, and that the embodiment of the spirit of this motion, this line of unity and struggle was Comrade Bains. The issue of ”leader”, or ”official” never existed. His method and style were in fact opposite to all the bureaucrats in student government, all the self-proclaimed elected officials and bureaucrats, including those who lorded it over their fellow students as experts, communists, ideologues and so on. Although I was never a member of the Internationalists because I had my own sectarian clique of modern revisionists to organise, most of whom remained for the most part on the side-lines of campus politics unless I promoted them through the mass movement to some position or office, I always was attracted to them. Comrade Bains always opposed my modern revisionist line, but I knew that their style, their method of organising and sorting out problems, had created the energy at their weekly evening sessions, the various symposia, meetings, forums, campus soap-boxing and so on which gave the campus its life and its reputation in this period.
Such was my enthusiasm for the internationalist’s method of work, and my respect for Hardial Bains as an organiser of the youth, that I even tried to get the revisionist party to recruit him as a youth organiser. What a bargain thought I, even if Bains did support Chairman Mao. A good liberal is always prepared to make a few concessions over such minor matters if the overall business of politics is enhanced. However, my comrades in the revisionist party did not see matters the same way. Nor did Hardial Bains. A small matter of class struggle. He had no intention of joining them.
On the question of Hardial Bains I was given my second lesson in revisionist method, style and political line in dealing with a progressive trend. For years in the revisionist party we had been trained that the trotskyists were CIA agents, police spies and so forth. From their practise and their lines no serious militant in the revisionists could doubt this was true; trotskyists acted and spoke like CIA agents, police spies and so on. But I was a bit shocked to hear Nigel Morgan tell me in the spring of 1965 that Hardial Bains was a CIA agent!
Now how Morgan arrived at this conclusion is most instructive in understanding the mentality of a reactionary. When I asked how he knew this, Morgan said that he had just been in Moscow and his contacts there provided him with this information. Now every charlatan has an inside track leading somewhere, usually a dead end. But Morgan is one of the political classics of Canada, a model par excellence of modern revisionism. He knows everything, has contacts everywhere, and can pull a fact from his left ear, flip it in the air and turn it into a theory right before your unbelieving eyes. Now the explanation for Morgan’s mysterious contacts, inside track, and so on with regards to Comrade Bains is very simple and clear.
The facts about this event are as follows. Comrade Bains had returned to India in March 1965 to visit his family which he had left at the age of nineteen in 1959 to emigrate to earn his living. He had been sponsored by his sister and brother-in-law resident in Vancouver. On his way back to Vancouver from his visit to India, he stopped over in Moscow as a tourist to visit the tomb of Lenin, and to investigate for himself something of the social relations imposed by the modern revisionists. While in Moscow he looked up an old friend of his, who I also knew quite well, a former exchange student at UBC, who as I recall was the first Russian to attend UBC.
This Russian was happy to see his old friend, and they had a number of discussions. At the last meeting between the two the Russian attacked the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao on essentially racist and anti-communist grounds thus revealing the true nature of his Russian social chauvinism. Comrade Bains strongly opposed this man’s line, and opposed the whole revisionist line of the CPSU. Now it so happens that Nigel Morgan was in Moscow at the same time. Morgan, like Kashtan and other revisionist chieftains, is a frequent visitor to Moscow and Eastern European capitals, where deals are made, bargains struck and political business is transacted. One of the goods picked up by Morgan on this particular trip was the story about Hardial’s visit with this former Russian student, and his ”anti-Soviet” line.
With this piece of “detailed research” Morgan returned to Vancouver armed with all the facts necessary to prove the conclusion he had researched on an apriori basis a year before, namely, Hardial Bains is a CIA agent. I have been to Moscow and comrades there... end debate. Thus the rumour that Hardial Bains was a CIA agent owes its origin to Nigel Morgan, and it dates from Comrade Bains’ visit to Moscow in March 1965 on his way back to Vancouver from India. That rumour was circulated by revisionists and other backward elements through the revisionist grapevine from one country to another, from one circle to another for a number of years. It did not matter to the revisionists that they knew Bains was from a long-standing communist family in India, that his father had spent many years in British colonial prisons for his political activity, and that Hardial himself had been a political activist there. Nor did it matter that in 1959 when as a 19 year old youth Comrade Bains presented himself to the spokesman for the revisionists in Victoria, B.C. and that this “communist” told Comrade Bains to join the NDP! This is their advice to pro-communist immigrants from India.
The question is why would Morgan invent such a story? Even though Morgan is notorious among Vancouver left circles as a chronic liar, and his own party comrades smirk behind his back as he churns out one fantasy after another, there has to be some explanation for his behaviour. The answer is also straightforward and clear cut. In the summer of 1964 the Internationalists organised a summer symposium called, “Russia, China and the West”. I had been asked by the Internationalists to organise a spokesman from the revisionists to speak on behalf of the Soviet Union. Morgan was very enthusiastic to display his intellectual prowess in front of the students and faculty, so he became and made a nauseating revisionist speech full of platitudes about “peaceful co-existence”, good will, democracy and humanism. He accused China of being adventurist, and lauded Khrushchov’s goulash communism to the skies. Hardial Bains also spoke that day and utterly exposed the bankruptcy of Morgan’s ideological stance and political line. Even though I was a revisionist, and agreed with most of Morgan’s lines, I was delighted to see my friend and comrade from the student movement devastate that revisionist wind-bag. He showed in precise terms how there was absolutely no difference between Nigel Morgan’s outlook and political line and that of a Christian priest who had at least never pretended to be a communist. It was here at UBC campus at International House in front of a couple of hundred students and faculty that Morgan concluded that Bains was a CIA agent! Who else but a CIA agent could have the affrontery to expose as a sham and charlatan the High Priest of revisionism in B.C.? What Morgan needed was ”detailed research” to prove his apriori conclusion. His trip to Moscow provided him with that, and thus a rumour and slander was hatched out of Morgan’s wounded ego. And even if the other revisionists knew Morgan to be a liar and a slanderer, each of them has separate interests to protect; they are part of a class, the labour aristocracy, and the agency of Soviet social-imperialism. In order to protect their interests they make their bargains, alliances and carry on their lives like any wolves in the bourgeois world do. When someone stands up to them, rebels against their reactionary authoritarianism, they simply go wild with rumours, gossips, stories, and so on, including of course open collusion with the state apparatus.
Of course such methods do not stop revolutionaries from organising; nor do they stop the masses. Just as internationally the Soviet modern revisionists concocted all sorts of lies and slanders against Comrades Mao Tsetung and Enver Hoxha, and did their utmost to isolate the great Communist Party of China and Albanian Party of Labour from the world revolutionary forces, so too did the revisionists in each country follow the same method and style against the Marxist-Leninists struggling against this revisionism around the world.
Another example of how the revisionists used slanders, gossips and other reactionary styles of work to exercise hegemony in the mass movement was the case of the youth and student demonstration which sat down in front of Prime Minister Pearson and stopped the Pacific National Exhibition parade in August 1965. The revisionist in charge of the B.C. youth section suggested to me that it would be a good idea to mobilise the students at UBC to protest against Pearson’s collaboration with the U.S. imperialist aggression against Vietnam. I was frequently called upon to ’deliver’ the youth and students. Of course for me this simply meant bringing yet another idea for some sort of activism to the Internationalists, and if the idea was all right the students would mobilise and carry on.
In any case a demonstration was organised. A banner a hundred feet long and forty feet wide was laid out in the Pender Auditorium and a mammoth revisionist slogan, “Mr. Pearson, speak out against the War in Vietnam” was painted on it. Secret arrangements were made for the participants to meet and sit down in front of the parade, under the banner which was strung across Hastings Street just as the parade pulled into sight.
But before any of this action got under way the revisionist leader tried to split the youth. And over what issue? Hardial Bains. For while Comrade Bains agreed to participate in the action, and mobilized his comrades and friends, he insisted on opposing the revisionist political line which was pure pacificism. There was a huge fight, if you can believe it, over the word “demand”, with the revisionists insisting that it be amended to “request”; i.e., ”We request Mr. Pearson please if you don’t mind... speak out against the war in Vietnam.”
The revisionists consciously blocked political discussion, fights over line, and so on, all in the name of “unity”. So when Comrade Bains went to present his views to the meeting of the youth who were participating in the demonstration, the revisionist leader tried to have me throw Comrade Hardial out of the meeting! He used the most clumsy manoeuver –he whispered in my ear that, listen, I was the real leader on campus, and why should I let this Indian rant and rave. Furthermore, didn’t I know he was a CIA agent and so forth.
I was very embarrassed for this man; his spirit and style were the opposite of what had been generated among the students, and of course I would never split from my student comrades. Comrade Hardial made his speech even though we revisionists thought he was a bit screwy.
Remember this was 1965, and here was an Indian lecturing us about why the Canadian youth and students should actually support the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and stop all this nonsense about pleading to the reactionaries for some sort of Christian charity.
Of course in 1975, a decade later, all this sounds perfectly sensible. But at that time just to say those things meant waging a vicious tit-for-tat struggle against the modern revisionists, who together with the social democrats and other reactionary elements tried to monopolise left-wing politics in BC and stop precisely such ideological struggle from taking place in the mass movement.
For example, this revisionist youth commander had just returned from a two year posting with the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest. He had been around the world; met with revolutionaries, government delegations, revisionist party bureaucrats from the four corners of the globe. Was he therefore not an authority on communism? on the United Front? on who was a revolutionary and who was a CIA agent? One must never underestimate how various people turn their connections, and their social relations into capital, into currency as the bourgeois political jargon has it.
So the revisionists with their international connections, their trade union posts, their university professors, had quite a bit of capital. And of course their social democratic allies had even more capital. To defy them meant to stand against the tide, to be denounced, vilified, slandered. This is inevitable and this is what in fact happened. But this did not stop the youth and student movement from developing; nor did it stop the revisionist flower from falling off. Shortly after his huffing and puffing in 1965, this revisionist youth commander was also denounced by the revisionists, called all sorts of names, and dropped out of communist politics.
I left the revisionists in December 1968 so I was never in their circles to hear how their rumours and gossips developed about the Internationalists after that time. In fact, I myself was now grist in their rumour mills. The revisionists of course preferred to limit their attacks on the Marxist-Leninists to the underground network of gossips and slanders. This is a safer method for a reactionary than coming out into the open and taking on the communists in a straight-forward fight.
From 1968 to 1970 the Internationalists had built their internal organisation to the point where they could enter the political world as a proletarian party. By 1972 the Party had reached a stage where it could contest the revisionists in a federal election by fielding 51 candidates, and joining in support of the Partisan Organisation candidate in Vancouver. This greatly shook the revisionists, as did the unity of the Partisan and Chulima Collective with CPC(M-L) on November 5,1972. But what made them leap out into print and elevate their slanders and rumours to the level of political literature in their efforts to ruin the name of CPC(M-L) was a series of articles published in People’s Canada Daily News titled “Mr. Kashtan Visits Moscow”. (Vol. 2, Nos.41, 42, 44, 45, January 23 to 26, 1973)
These articles hit the revisionists a hard blow. They exposed the fact that Kashtan’s speech in Moscow in December 1972 was nothing more than a pledge of the revisionists to turn Canada into a neo-colony of Soviet social-imperialism. Every sham argument and pretense of this traitor to communism and the Canadian people was laid bare. Thus independent of its will the revisionist monster leaped out into print.
William Stewart beat his breast in public, announcing to the world: “Canadian Maoists –agents of imperialism”. In his first article written for the revisionist newspaper, Canadian Tribune, Stewart floats the usual subterfuge that the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman Mao are anti-Soviet. The political line of CPC(M-L) is no different from that of arch-anti-communists, he says. Moreover CPC(M-L) are splitters and wreckers in a time when unity above all else is needed for world peace and socialism. Furthermore CPC(M-L)’s use of scientific language in their press is an insult to the Canadian working class, which according to revisionist logic and practice, is capable of digesting only the most philistinic bourgeois pablum. Finally, there is his call “to isolate” the Party from the “working class and democratic movements”.
Encouraged by the Party’s lack of response to his article, and like all reactionaries, overestimating his own strength and underestimating the strength of revolution, Stewart plucked up his courage to elevate his popular journalism into political theory. Thus in the March-April 1973 edition of the Communist Viewpoint (Vol. 5, No. 2), theoretical journal of the revisionists, William Stewart writes his definitive analysis, “Maoism in Canada”.
Now it happens that William Stewart is one of my star teachers by negative example. For years I used to think this rowdy philistine and mad-hat schemer was a communist. He peddled every reactionary revisionist line you can imagine, and foremost, working class chauvinism. Stewart was one of the revisionists who promoted most strongly the reactionary thesis that only communists who were from working class origins were of value.
It was not until he had convinced me to leave UBC and move to Toronto to edit Scan magazine and watch his inner party manoeuvrings at close range that I saw through this charlatan and reactionary pretender. Everything that he did in politics was in the nature of a deal, a business transaction, always cloaked in some concocted theory and passed off with a crude joke.
What is instructive to point out here is that Stewart reveals straightforward reactionary thinking. First he starts with his conclusion: CPC(M-L) is counter-revolutionary. Then he sets out to prove it and so grasps on to some “Marxist” theory, in his case a Bulgarian revisionist article denouncing the Communist Party of China’s analysis of the four contradictions in the world. By caricaturising this analysis and “proving” it to be anti-Marxist, his whole case against CPC(M-L) is made. All he has to do then is simply heap abuse, make charges, denounce, gossip and slander. But two things are important to single out in this slanderous attack on CPC(M-L).
One is that Stewart is forced to concede that after “scores of petty-bourgeois groups have sprung up based on the little red book only to self-destruct” at last a “hard-core Maoist grouping has emerged impertinently naming itself the ’Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)’ ” In other words, pain him as it must, the Party exists as an objective force in Canadian politics and he is reduced to publicly calling for its quarantine from the mass movement, which despite his most ardent wishes precisely the opposite has occurred. Today the revisionists are more isolated than ever and exposed as a bourgeois trend, while the Party has stronger links with the mass movements and is deeply rooted in Marxism-Leninism.
A second aspect to Stewart’s article is his obsession with form, and with his own chauvinism. ”The CPC(M-L)”, he says, ”is a clumsy, brutal, cliche-ridden organisation whose language and policy, created with utter contempt for the Canadian working class, are laid down in China.” All of these are standard charges by the bourgeoisie against communist revolution –clumsy, brutal, cliche-ridden. One can see the bourgeois politicians, landlords, and capitalists, including their Menshevik agents in the working class movement saying these very same things as the poverty-striken hoards of Russian proletarians and poor peasants descended upon their palaces in October 1917.
But Stewart has nothing to say about the Party’s analysis of revisionism, particularly of William Kashtan’s treasonous speech made grovelling in front of his masters in Moscow.
Note too the reversion of every reactionary to national chauvinism. CPC(M-L) is not Canadian! Of course Stewart is too cowardly to come right out and say how is it that a Canadian communist party can be organised by an Indian immigrant. That Tim Buck was an English immigrant is just fine. That both Tim Buck and Hardial Bains came to Canada at 19 years of age is not the point. One came from the white motherland; the other from the brown Indian colony. Scratch any Canadian opportunist and you will find a national chauvinist. For Marxist-Leninists there is only proletarian internationalism, unity between the workers and oppressed nations against a common enemy, imperialism, especially superpower hegemonism, and all reactionaries.
But leave aside Stewart’s racist innuendo, which from my own experience is a common thread in ail opportunist attacks on the Party, and note the big point he makes of his assertion that CPC(M-L) is a creature of China. The assumption is of course that communism and CPC(M-L) are foreign to Canada, a standard anti-communist argument if there ever was one. Stewart in his wildest dreams could never imagine that the youth and student movement which grew up right in front of his eyes, out of the basic masses at UBC campus, and later from other campuses across Canada could actually grow from stage to stage, moving from one historical task to another, to the point where he, William Stewart, veteran worker and communist, would actually have to leap out and make a hopelessly feeble attack on it in print. The twist today of course is that the present opportunists attacking CPC(M-L) reach the same conclusion that Stewart reaches, namely CPC(M-L) is counter-revolutionary, not because CPC(M-L) is “laid down in China”, but because CPC(M-L) is not laid down in China. What unites the two sets of opportunists is that they start with the conclusion that CPC(M-L) is counter-revolutionary and then through “detailed research” prove their apriori conclusion.
In any case, Mr. William Stewart was a thoroughly beaten and dispirited man when I met him in the fall of 1973 and gave him a copy of my statement in support of CPC(M-L). He admitted it was a “mistake” to engage the Party in a polemic; and how changed he was from the bouncy, cocky political wheeler and dealer I had known five years earlier. Of course he could always rationalise in his worker-chauvinist mind that I was a bourgeois intellectual, a fact I would not contest. But that a bourgeois intellectual could be trained in an iron disciplined communist party to become a soldier for revolution has never penetrated the poor man’s skull. Even then how could he rationalise my parents’ support for the Party. There was no doubting their “working class credentials”, and he was their long time family friend during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Hence Stewart was quite shaken when I gave him my father’s message which was “tell that wretched traitor to the working class if he ever steps foot in our communist house again we’ll throw him out the door.” How crude!
When we parted company, this expert on Canadian Maoism was hardly in the mood for beating his breast! All his intellectual and literary efforts to ruin the name of CPC(M-L), to lie, slander and concoct nonsense, had not prevented one of his prize students from moving forward under the discipline of the Party, nor his old family friends, long time working people and former revisionist activists, from also supporting a Party organised by the very youth and student movement towards which Stewart was so contemptuous in the 1960’s. And led by an immigrant from India to boot. How impertinent indeed!
Now those in the revolutionary movement who have seen through the straightforward modern revisionists have come to expect a reactionary method and style from them. We understand that modern revisionism is an international bourgeois ideological trend, and as such will be characterised by bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. But one does not expect this sort of method and style from someone who calls himself a Marxist-Leninist. Yet this was exactly the method Jack Scott used to oppose the Internationalists and later CPC(M-L).
I have also known Jack Scott for many years. In 1963 Jack Scott was expelled from the “Communist” Party of Canada for taking a just stand in support of the People’s Republic of China when India invaded China; and this expulsion was upheld through various kangaroo trials. Scott organised the Progressive Workers’ Movement, the first anti-revisionist organisation in Canada. It was composed mainly of young workers, and a number of other militants from the old revisionist party. They carried out rigorous activities for a time, and I remember that the Internationalists did a lot of propaganda for them at UBC and encouraged their members to associate with PWM. But by 1969-70, when I came across Jack Scott again, the Progressive Workers’ Movement had been liquidated and the Internationalists had advanced to become the Canadian Communist Movement, and later CPC(M-L).
I have stressed earlier that the student movement at UBC led by the Internationalists was non-sectarian and non-dogmatic. At the same time a generally anti-imperialist, anti-revisionist line was advanced and the whole politics and atmosphere of the campus was changed. Central to this whole process was the Internationalists’ struggle to analyse the imperialist cultural aggression against the youth and students, how it affected our outlook, motivations, social relations. This was a period of rapid imperialist expansion in Canada –BC was more or less booming at this time. Yet the youth and students were under very vicious ideological and cultural attack by the imperialists in their efforts to bend us as servants for their imperialist enterprises. Not armed with any sort of analysis to deal with this aggression, many a rebellious student was simply wiped out; either had mental breakdowns, dropped out, or even committed suicide. All of us felt this aggression against ourselves, the dictatorship in the classroom, the dictatorship of social forms that generated loneliness, nausea, endless pursuit of commodities, reducing social relations to commodity relations and so on. It was as a result of actually living through this period, of being right at the centre of this struggle of the students and wrestling with their bourgeois hang-ups that the Internationalists crystalised this experience in an analysis entitled “Necessity for Change”, written in 1967.
Yet here was this “veteran communist militant,” Jack Scott, who proclaimed to the world that he was a Marxist-Leninist and who took up the task of leading the communist movement against revisionism, with nothing whatever to say to us youth and students in the 1960’s. Progressive Workers’ Movement was just that, a “workers’ movement”, not a communist organisation. Scott had the same old hash dished out by the revisionists which amounted to some moralistic lectures, some stories about the 1930’s, some rebukes that we weren’t workers, and so on. I say “we”, because although I was a revisionist militant and followed the sectarian line of never investigating and studying criticism of the Soviet Union and the revisionist party, nevertheless I was also a student militant and part of the student milieu which the Internationalists were organising.
Scott’s attitude towards that milieu was identical to that of the revisionists. He saw some mass motion, and he converted that into political capital. While he was liquidating his proletarian assets through his bourgeois methods and style, he saw in the youth and student movement a reserve from which to refurbish his losses. In practice this meant carrying on the same kind of activity my revisionist youth leaders tried to engage in, splitting the students for sectarian purposes. When I told Comrade Hardial about how this revisionist had whispered in my ear to split our student group, he told me that on many occasions Scott and PWM had tried to do the same thing.
Nor can Scott ever claim that the youth and student movement led by the internationalists in those years didn’t make efforts to unite with PWM. On more than one occasion I had been fired on by the revisionists because my friends at UBC were all Maoists, and supporters of Jack Scott. The point is simply that Comrade Bains had always considered PWM as a Marxist-Leninist organisation, as the Party, and he made every effort to bring Internationalist militants close to the organisation, and promoted it among the students.
But Scott never had a large-minded, communist attitude toward the Internationalists. Instead he always tried to split it, and he promoted all the old revisionist philistinism about not alienating the progressives from the mainstream and so on.
Some of Jack Scott’s proteges actually promoted the thesis that drugs were liberating, and in a quite memorable struggle Comrade Bains thoroughly exposed the bankruptcy of that line and its promoter actually criticised himself and denounced the line. This whole turn in the 1966-67 period included my own tricks as the elected vice-president of the student union using the position to promote revisionist activism without analysis or plan, while others, like Jack Scott and his friends, played theirs.
In 1967 these worthies, all led by Scott, refused to come under the discipline of their own organisation, the Internationalists. Instead they split and formed “New Group”.
You can catch a sense of Scott’s double dealing by reading the July 1969, BC Newsletter edited under his guidance. In the report on student activities he sort of innocently narrates how there are these various organisations; SDU “a very loose alliance of various groups of Marxists, anarchists, progressive liberals, and other politically-minded individuals”, while at UBC there is “Committee for a Progressive Student Union” which has its own ”Marxist caucus”. Then we have this unctuous statement about the Vancouver Student Movement which had been organised by the Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist) the whole motion of which had taken a definite leap at the North American Conference of Anti-Imperialist Youth in Regina May 7-12, 1969. Now Scott himself had promised to go to that conference but at the last minute never showed up. He continued to play his double dealing politics with CCM(M-L) and later the Party for a number of years, in any case we read in July 1969: “The main problem of VSM ... and the reason other students at times would rather organise without them than enter into unity, despite wide agreement on a great number of ideological questions –has been a leftist-sectarian style of work which often raises into antagonistic contradictions those issues that could remain the subject of principled debate. However, the VSM does approach its tasks with great sincerity, and the dedication and energy of its members is something other groups could well emulate. It is to be hoped that they will learn from the mistakes they have committed in their style of work.” (BC Newsletter, Vol. 1, 1969, p. 10) First of all note that Scott concentrates on form; we agree with your content, he says, but you are sectarian. But what Scott doesn’t say is that he himself has been the organiser of the “Marxist caucus” in the UBC “Committee for a Progressive Student Union”, and likewise he and his supporters who split from the Internationalists were in the thick of SDU at Simon Fraser. The whole thing is a subterfuge. Furthermore, the swindler is fishing. What is suggested is that there are some sincere, but misled youth, who Scott remonstrates to “improve their style”. What he is really saying, and this is the line the man has always followed, is that if you split from Hardial Bains, life will be just fine. That’s what this sugar coated bullet is all about.
One has to have experience with political speculators to watch how they play the market. First they hold out the hand of friendship; then they organise behind your back; next thing you know there is a split. One thing is for certain, such characters will never come under the discipline of a party.
Now I first came into contradiction with Scott’s line on CPC(M-L) without fully being conscious of it at the time, at Christmas 1969. During my visit to Vancouver from Prince George where I was teaching in a community college, I had a long discussion with a former comrade of mine from the revisionist party who was also a personal friend. The discussion was about the Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist). Now this friend had at one time been responsible for organising youth in BC for the revisionists (in 1967), the same time I had been appointed Scan editor. Indeed, he had made the proposal that I edit Scan so that he could be BC youth organiser. Everyone in the revisionists agreed with this division of labour, and when I left Vancouver, and in several letters to this comrade, I had urged him to unite with the Internationalists in BC. He had undertaken to organise what was called a Marxist-Oriented Youth Organisation (MOYO). He had visited the U.S., made contact there with a revisionist organiser by the name of Michael Myerson, the first U.S. youth to visit the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam, and wanted to emulate the U.S. revisionist Dubois Clubs.
My attitude had been, fine, Dubois Clubs for the U.S., but here in Canada, particularly in BC, the Internationalists were already organised, they had a mass base among the students, had launched several reform type united fronts such as the B.C Students’ Federation, and at the same time had provided a forum for the discussion of various ideas. In any case this person did make one or two visits with some Internationalists, but he had other interests in his mind and he carried his own line, which amounted to mobilizing some of the children of revisionist party members. Nothing much came of his efforts, as nothing much came of any of our revisionist efforts in the youth and student movement. We were tailing behind it, aping its worst features, always with the idea that we did not want to be sectarian, when in practice we were both sectarian and liberal.
So my friend and I had this difference over the Internationalists, and I suppose in the final analysis over Comrade Hardial, for a long time. The issue in Christmas 1969 was Comrade Bill Shpikula. Now one has to know how the communalism of Vancouver left-wing circles work; this communalism itself grew up after years of revisionist politics and method of work whereby the objectivity of issues, political lines, and so on were always obscured by degenerating everything to the level of bourgeois social relations. As one social democratic woman told me, everyone has their ”franchise” on a particular aspect of the political market place.
Anyhow both my friend and I knew the Canron plant in Vancouver was organised by a revisionist dominated union, and that revisionists had a number of their agents there. Part of the profits of this political “franchise” system is that if you support such and such bourgeois clique, say the revisionists, then you can be dispatched for a job through this or that union hall. I myself got two industrial type jobs in this manner as a summer worker and no one ever questioned the sensibleness of this sort of relationship.
Looking back of course one can see this is all straightforward capitalist social relations; someone has some capital in the form of an office in a union, another has some capital by his party position or family ties; these are exchanged as commodities and everyone but the list work; it communism, truly an international bourgeois trend in the communist movement, which if not opposed on a continuous and relentless basis, turns communist parties into social fascist parties, socialist states into social fascist states.
Anyhow, to prove how “crazy” the Maoists were my friend told me this horror story about how Bill Shpikula had ranted and raved at Canron, beat up some innocent workers, beat up some innocent police, and generally carried on like a maniac. My line was, very good, the man is a maniac, CCM(M-L) is crazy, but we both know who the Vancouver police are, and we both know who those union hacks who have usurped the Canron workers’ union are, do you not think the Vancouver left should unite to oppose the police, and oppose the revisionists. No. Why? It will make the left look stupid; we should have nothing to do with these people; they have brought the state down on their own heads, and if they carry on their madness it will come down on our heads too. I never agreed with this line, but I never organised to oppose it either. I returned to Prince George and carried on my side-line activities.
Now when I investigated the issue I learned the following facts. First of all Comrade Bill and his two other comrades had gone to Canron to give out a leaflet inviting workers to a programme promoting friendship with China. Some pro-China workers warmly invited Comrade Bill and the others inside the plant to give out the leaflets in the cafeteria and to speak with the workers.
Now every revolutionary knows this inner sanctum of the bourgeoisie is inviolate as far as the ruling class is concerned; they are most politically vulnerable when the workers are assembled in the factory lunch rooms and locker rooms, and to say the least, indisposed to see these places turned into arenas for the dispensing of Mao Tsetung Thought! So essentially two things happened: one, the capitalists went into a frenzy, mobilized their own factory police and called the state; and two, a revisionist worker proved himself to be an agent of the boss and state by provoking a fight with Comrade Bill in the following manner: he called him a Maoist so and so and threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. Such is the democratic centralism of the yellow guard in the workers’ movement!
Needless to say the red guard defended his right to speak to the workers and resisted the physical attacks on him by the plant guards as well as the police. And so a new myth, the Bill Shpikula legend, was born m Vancouver –not entirely unlike the Hardial Bains is a CIA agent myth.
We could expect nothing less from modern revisionism. They are the agents of the bourgeoisie, part of the labour aristocracy, and specifically agents of Soviet social-imperialism. But how did jack Scott, the veteran communist militant, react to all this? He knew Canron was part of the revisionist “franchise”. He knew how the particularly traitorous revisionist bureaucrat in that union had called the police to help break up the Canadian iron Workers Union, and actually had organised scabs to cross the picket lines. He knew how the revisionists colluded with the company, the state and the labour aristocracy to liquidate the Lenkurt struggle in 1966. Why then did he not in principle, following the basic communist line of uniting the many against the main enemy, call on the left to denounce the police, denounce the revisionists, investigate the details of the case, and if some sectarian errors had been made, assist the young communists to overcome them in a communist manner?
Did he do anything like this at all? No. He carried on exactly the same line as my revisionist friend. This was simply used as grist for his mill to split the Marxist-Leninist forces, to build his case that Comrade Hardial Bains was some kind of demon force seducing the innocent into the lion’s den and deserting them to perish there. So, to advance his own political capital, he, Jack Scott, not Comrade Hardial, had deserted Comrade Bill Shpikula to the mercy of the state.
And some mercy they showed this defiant young communist worker from Vancouver’s East End! The same mercy they had been showing every young rebellious BC worker, Native Indian, poor person, since British colonialism and U.S. imperialism staked out that province for its private monopoly profits.
They threw him in jail for two and a half years. They threw him into solitary confinement. They kidnapped him the day before the end of his sentence and dragged him off to the psychiatric dungeon at Riverside and tortured him with electric shock “treatments”.
And when the Party mobilised public opinion to denounce this fascism they were ultra-left.
Thus what took place was the revisionist worker made an alliance with the capitalist owner and the police to attack a communist. This is not the first time such an alliance has taken place, nor will it be the last. After all, the political line of William Stewart and his party is “isolate CPC(M-L)”, and what better way to the mind of a reactionary to ”isolate” the party than by colluding with the state, and then doing all kinds of counterrevolutionary public opinion that the Party is ultra-leftist and so on in order to demobilise the general left forces. This is exactly what was done in 1969, and the thing which is most significant is that a supposed Marxist -Leninist was an active participant in that general method and line.
Here is what Scott said publicly at that time: “The Progressive Workers’ Movement wishes to emphasize that it played no part in the December conference in Vancouver of the Canadian Student Movement or the disturbance during the period at the Canron plant in False Creek. We do not wish to make any critical comments about this Incident while certain people involved are still facing court action but we will certainly do so at a later date. (See December B.C. Newsletter for our statement on the Canadian Communist Movement.” (“The Canron Incident”, B.C. Newsletter, Number 6, January 1970) Let us recall that December 1969 Newsletter: “CCM consistently suffers from ... the left-wing error of mistaking contradictions among the people for contradictions between the people and the enemy, U.S. imperialism... the CCM displays a severe sectarianism... people desiring a fuller explanation can talk to PWM members (i.e., Jack Scott and three or four ex-student, ex-Internationalists) or write to us.... It is on Hardial Bains, by far the dominant figure in the CCM, that the blame must fall for the fostering of this style of work.” (“Editorial Statement: On the Canadian Communist Movement” B.C. Newsletter, Number 6, 1969)
All right, let us grant Jack Scott that Comrade Bill Shpikula was an untrained soldier in a crude army of youth and students marching from one end of the country to the other to bring Mao Tsetung Thought to the masses, hacking a trail through the underbrush where no one had ventured before; let us grant Scott that Comrade Bill was naive to have accepted the worker’s invitation to go into the Canron lunchroom, was sectarian in hitting back at some yellow-dog revisionist worker swearing obscenities at Chairman Mao and throwing a hot cup of coffee in Comrade Bill’s face, was ultra-left in denouncing some racist, anti-communist judge as a fascist, was dogmatic in refusing to work without wages in prison, and even unwise to punch and fight every attempt by the guards to kidnap him to the psychiatric dungeon, and certainly histrionic to write the slogan “Long Live the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)!” on the wails of the prison. Grant Scott all these premises. Now, was the principal aspect of the contradiction in January 1970 between himself as a veteran communist militant and Comrade Bill, or between the state and modern revisionists on the one hand, and the people on the other? Did Scott practice what he preached to CCM(M-L) in December 1969, or did he practice exactly what the revisionists themselves practiced – slander, mystification and distortion of the truth in order to isolate CCM(M-L) from the mass movement in a vain attempt to promote his own political capital at the expense of the over-all interests of the communist movement?!
Everyone in Vancouver left circles knows that Scott did everything possible to immobilise the left around Comrade Bill’s case, and did maximum propaganda to the effect that the state was provoked, that the principal aspect of the contradiction was not between the state and the people, but between CCM(M-L)’s sectarianism which brought down the state against the people. In short, the contradiction between CCM(M-L) and the people was an antagonistic contradiction. This was exactly the line peddled by my ex-revisionist friend, who I should add went from revisionism to Waffle to being a lawyer.
In short Scott gave a completely opportunist political line, the essence of which is anti-communism and class collaborationism. History has in fact already vindicated the heroic communist stand of Comrade Bill. While Scott left his legacy of capitulation and collaboration; Comrade Bill left his legacy in prison of staunch rebellion against reaction, of active resistance against fascist repression. On August 7, 1970 about 250 prisoners in his jail staged a sit-in to protest the murder of Wally Brass.
Furthermore if one examines Scott’s method and style in the December 1969 and January 1970 statements one can see the double dealing nature of the man. ”We do not wish to make any critical comments at this time ... we will certainly do so at a later date.” Has not everything been said? What is there to add? The apriori conclusion has been made: Hardial Bains is counter-revolutionary. This new case, which has already been pre-judged, not studied and investigated, simply becomes another fact to prove the case. Everyone is trained to read political signals; PWM did not say “we do not wish to make any comments”; they said “any critical comments”. And in case their supporters are a bit sleepy, he hits them over the head with “we will certainly do so at a later date.” Do what? Investigate? Organise the Left against the state? No. Make “critical comments.” The effect of this reactionary method is all too clear. It creates illusions; it drugs and pacifies potentially revolutionary forces; it takes the heat off the state. Focus is put on some bogey-man character who provokes all this trouble; some devil figure lurking mysteriously in the background leading the innocents to slaughter. This is the very essence of all reactionary children’s stories which are designed to obscure the class nature of evil, and create some devils and bogeymen as the enemy. Scott, one of Canada’s more fanciful children’s story tellers, has created a whole catologue of such devils and bogeymen, ranging from Hardial Bains, to international trade union bureaucrats. Devils, not social classes, are the stuff of his yarns. Of course the origins of such story telling is not hard to trace; they come from the revisionist arsenal. Scott may be more endearing than Nigel Morgan, but his method and style of organising are all the same, only more pernicious.
My first common political practise with Scott’s circle was in the fall of 1970.1 worked for a brief time on a newspaper, The New Leaf, which had been organised by Scott’s remnants from Progressive Workers. I had known these ex-UBC students a long time; they were quite anti-communist in the mid-1960’s, and I never had much unity with them. In fact in our first meeting about the content of New Leaf I asked them why they were promoting the line of Canadian independence without saying anything about communism, about the need for some kind of Marxist leadership. After all these were the so-called “pro-China” Leftists. I myself did not support the Communist Party of China’s political line, nor did I accept Mao Tsetung Thought as the Marxism-Leninism of this era. But anyone from the communist movement knows as an ABC of Marxism the necessity for a Party, for socialism.
The explanation for this strange creature, New Leaf, was that a broad united front for Canadian independence separate and apart from proletarian revolution had to be built first, then a party would grow out of it. My preference was to engage in straightforward trade union reformist politics and so I broke with this circle. But during the War Measures Act period of late 1970 I had some more experience with Scott and his circles, by which I mean those circles who follow his political line, and with whom he makes alliances and pacts. One has to be very careful about these things because all these characters are prima donnas, all individuals and leaders in their own right, with their own particular fiefdom and enterprise.
For example, when I wrote my statement of September 11, 1973 to the Party, immediately after I had heard the news on the radio about Allende’s overthrow by the U.S. sponsored fascists, I described my experience with Scott. I said quite factually that an RCMP political police officer who presented himself as corporal Foxe came to visit my house in February 1972 to ask questions about various people on the left, and to do propaganda about Partisan Organisation, about which I knew nothing at the time anyway, and against Comrade Bains. His investigation was allegedly part of a test to see if I was a good candidate for being a Canadian citizen –I immigrated to Canada at age four and had been turned down for citizenship three times by the state for my membership in the revisionist party. In any case it is a straight-forward factual matter that on the day he visited my home, and several people are witness to this fact, Jack Scott and Homer Stevens, a revisionist and president of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, came to Edmonton to speak at a poverty conference. I in fact had to ask corporal Foxe to leave as I had to meet these two men at the airport. He said quite frankly, yes, I know. I never thought anything of that comment as revisionists had well trained us that the RCMP know everything, that they tap all telephones, and given that they know everything, why try to keep up any kind of security. This has always been their political practise –open and above board with the state! Only later did the Party teach me the obvious lesson to be drawn from the revisionists, namely that their line about no security is simply a way of establishing a bargain with the state, an unwritten contract. You don’t attack us; we for our part won’t organise revolution.
When I met Scott and Stevens at the airport, both of whom I know extremely well, I immediately told them about corporal Foxe’s visit, asked them what experience they had had with the police, what their line was and so on. Stevens told me that he never talked with them; Scott told me that sometimes you could learn something from them. That was the end of the matter.
I recounted this situation in my letter to the Party and drew the lesson that even though corporal Foxe could have no ideological influence on me because he was an RCMP agent, still Scott’s line could and did have an influence on my thinking. Why? Because I still had a self-interest in not making a radical rupture from careerism, from bourgeois individualism, in short, Scott’s role was one of prolonging and assisting the old in my consciousness and habits, and of discouraging the new, growing aspect of rebellion against the old and the desire to participate in revolution.
Now I had an opportunity to have political discussions with Jack Scott in February 1972 and June 1973. In both instances he was strongly opposed to the Party, but it was difficult to pin him down as to why. There were stories about how Comrade Bains was dictatorial, that CPC(M-L) broke promises, was ultra-left etc., but nothing concrete, no overall analysis of a political line or method and style of work. The main impression I received was that if I wanted to keep my freedom, to preserve my critical faculties, i.e. to remain a bourgeois individualist, I had better stay away from CPC(M-L).
But by June 1973 the objective necessity to change and move forward was becoming more urgent for me, and for some of my friends from Edmonton (where I taught college from 1971 to 1973). Four young revolutionaries went to visit Scott at his home in June 1973 to investigate just why PWM failed, what exactly were Scott’s criticisms of the Party, where he thought the revolutionary movement should go from here. We received no straight answers to any questions. We were treated to anecdotes about how Scott gave good advice and nobody listened, how there were too many “drunks” in PWM, how there was no party discipline, and so on. But no analysis, no summation of an extremely important stage of communist history in our country. The same with respect to his views about CPC(M-L). He always had some subterfuge, was always dodging away from the central issue, twisting and turning. As all four of us had long experience with the modern revisionists we easily recognised the method and style.
Scott’s method and style is essentially that of the revisionists. He is part of the old, and it was precisely his old method of apriori thinking, of subterfuge, of protecting some private interest or ego against which the four of us were in active rebellion.
You can’t imagine the sense of liberation the four of us experienced when we left Scott’s place that night. We all jubilantly declared that Scott was part of the old, that was it, the Party was the only real thing. Within a year all four of us were candidates for CPC(M-L) in a federal election.
Thus Scott’s method produced exactly the opposite effect to what he wanted. Like the revisionists he starts with the conclusion that CPC(M-L) is bad or even counter-revolutionary, and then proceeds to do “detailed research” to prove his case. Thus, contrary to his will, Scott’s leadership lead to the liquidation of PWM, and his subsequent self-exposures are leading revolutionary youth to break from his bourgeois style of politics –this man who so shamelessly bandies about his connections with China as some kind of commodity to be sold in the political market place. What is new about this? Naturally those who are opportunists, who want to make bargains, deals, float enterprises of one sort or another can make alliances and partnerships. At best they are risky enterprises, and their unity is that of political entrepreneurs. When one’s advantage is to be found elsewhere, then the old bargain is discarded, and a new one is struck. All of this is part of the old method and style embodied in the revisionist party, and now being emulated by circles calling themselves Marxist-Leninist.
That was the only point I made in my statement; it was a serious criticism of Jack Scott’s influence on some sections of the revolutionary youth who want to make a move, but are encouraged not to do so by this veteran communist who never fails to divert young revolutionaries from central issues and lead them onto the path of anti-communism.
I was considerably surprised therefore to find that a new gossip had been generated in Vancouver circles as a result of my letter to CPC(M-L). Several of my friends demanded of me; why did I call Jack Scott a police agent? I asked how could they possibly come to that conclusion. What I clearly said was that both Scott and the police agent had the same political line on CPC(M-L). So too, as I have shown, does the revisionist party.
Now if Scott were open and above aboard, why not merely say, listen, here are my reasons for opposing CPC(M-L), and if the RCMP happen to agree with it fine, that’s their business. Science is science and it doesn’t change objective reality one iota whether the Pope or the RCMP say yay or nay. Instead Scott had generated a whole yarn about how the Party insists that everyone who wants to join the Party must write a statement that condemns Jack Scott! To say nothing about the sense of his own importance he must feel, let me say that the Party never had a thing to do with my statement; it was written in the heat of a momentous political event, the disasterous collapse of modern revisionism in Chile, and the temporarily successful U.S. imperialist fascist aggression against a small country because of the revisionist illusion about the possibility of peaceful transition. It was this political event which motivated my decision, and pushed me to make a decision to unite with the Party, come under its discipline, and in the process of class struggle remould my outlook, smash up the old revisionist habits and bourgeois individualism, and join together with my comrades in communist co-operation to build the party, and lead revolution in Canada.
Yet this simple matter, which could have been clarified in a straightforward discussion, was festered, interpreted, and concocted into some kind of new monster or demon to scare away people from the Party. Do not go near CPC(M-L) children, they will make you write statements damning old veteran communists and accusing them of being police agents –ad infinitum.
Behind all this old nonsense there is the face of Nigel Morgan tending his bees in his back yard, reeling off one horror story after another about the Maoist agents and their perfidious deeds. All this, let me stress, is part of the old and has nothing to do with communism, with the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, with the method of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Tsetung in building the communist movement from one stage to the next in the epochal struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism.
Now we come to 1975 and what do we find? In Montreal there is a newspaper called En Lutte! which proclaims itself to be Marxist-Leninist. Fine. CPC(M-L) made every effort to engage in private discussions with En Lutte!, to exchange views on a number of subjects, and establish a basis of unity even if on a minimum basis of support for common programs. En Lutte! does meet with CPC(M-L), agrees that CPC(M-L) is a revolutionary organisation, states that talks have just begun and so on, and yet within a few months they publicly attack the Party (December 12, 1974 issue of En Lutte!), and within a further short period have reached complete opposite conclusions. CPC(M-L) is not only not revolutionary, not only not non-revolutionary; it is declared to be positively counter-revolutionary.
Well, yawn, Nigel Morgan told us that in 1965; William Stewart elevated Morgan’s CIA yarn into political theory in 1973; Jack Scott has been peddling his own version of essentially the same old stew since 1969. What is going on in En Lutte!’s head? We can tell you what is going on. Apriori thinking is going on. Start with a conclusion, then build your theories and do your ”detailed investigations” to prove it. Furthermore, we can tell you why En Lutte! jumped to its conclusion. They felt the heat of CPC(M-L)’s political line in the mass movement, and instead of simply dealing with the political line in an open and above board manner using the scientific method taught to the proletariat by Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao, they immediately and subjectively leap to a conclusion, and concoct theories and slanders to protect their private interests.
And this is the heart of the matter. A communist has no private interest; only the interest of revolution. Because a communist has no private interest he struggles to become a thorough-going dialectical materialist completely fearless as to what conclusions he may reach through study and investigation, through summing up social practice, through actually leading the revolution forward. But a bourgeois has a private interest; he has his ego; he has his political capital; he has his social relations based on self-interest. So naturally when a bourgeois is exposed, as Nigel Morgan was by Comrade Bains at the summer symposium at UBC in 1964, he must have an apriori explanation for this. Either a bourgeois defends his private interests, or he throws them up. If he abandons them fine, he can move forward, unite with the Marxist-Leninists, and in the day-to-day struggles over political line, over theoretical questions and so forth, following the tested revolutionary organisational principle of democratic centralism. But if he clings to his self interest, his bourgeois ego, his private capital, that is, like a miser clings to his gold, he will come to no good end, simply that. First apriori rationalisation –CPC(M-L) is counter-revolutionary, agent, you name it. Then an endless series of anecdotes, gossips, lies, slanders, to prove the case. From there collaboration with the state to isolate CPC(M-L). Or if one is even more fool-hardy and mindless as were some neo-trotskyists in CPL a few years back, they may even try an adventure of physical attack. There is no teaching a reactionary.
Thus we have the amazing situation of En Lutte! emulating every bad habit, method and style of the modern revisionists in a matter of a few months. From a position of admitting they know virtually nothing about the history or the political economy of Canada to being experts on what a Marxist-Leninist line and what a neo-revisionist line is on the principal contradiction in Canada. From an organisation which admitted only a few months ago that it knew virtually nothing about the history of the Canadian and world communist movement to being experts on CPC(M-L), experts on the nature of modern revisionism (which they said a few months back was not even a significant factor in Canadian communist politics), experts on China, experts on international relations in an extremely complicated and complex world situation. What method do they use to acquire all this instant knowledge? What is the source of their ideas and conclusions?
Their method is the old method, the method of apriori thinking; the source of their conclusions is their own private opinions which are distorted by their private interests, and have nothing whatever to do with either the objective world or communist revolution.
But by far the best teacher by negative example to leap out naked and unashamed into the arena of communist politics is the Montreal organisation, MREQ. Every old method, every old habit and style of the modern revisionists is concentrated and crystalised in the “Introduction” to MREQ’s pamphlet, “Impotent Shrills of an Organisation Called MREQ”.
First of all they actually brag that they began this enterprise with their minds made up. They know, have known and will know for all time by a stroke of genius that CPC(M-L) is, was and forever more will be counterrevolutionary. Amen.
They say: “MREQ has never considered CPC(M-L) a genuine party and we have always opposed them in our mass work.” Now “never” and “always” is a long time. CPC(M-L) has a history. MREQ has a history. Nothing is said of this in the introduction –just that MREQ has always known that CPC(M-L) is not a “genuine party”. Fine.
What do they conclude from this? “Moreover, once we started struggling to build a Marxist-Leninist organisation, it became clear that our work in exposing CPC(ml) was not sufficient and that detailed research was necessary.” (p. 6) Now any scientific minded person will immediately say if you have already reached your conclusion where is your detailed research, the study and investigation of the facts from which you derived the truth? Now of course MREQ, like any historical idealist, must abstract a situation from its concrete circumstance. Why did Nigel Morgan apriori discover Hardial Bains was a CIA agent? Because Hardial Bains had hit this reactionary right in front of the masses and revealed his bankruptcy, his essentially anti-communist ideology and anti-communist line. When did the modern revisionists leap into print to tell the world they had discovered CPC(M-L) was an agent of imperialism? Right after the Party had made a significant impact on the masses in the October 1972 election, after the Partisan Organisation and Chulima Collective united with the Party, and more directly after the Party hit Mr. Kashtan’s reactionary treasonous line of sell-out to Soviet social-imperialism in January 1973. Now MREQ has leaped recklessly into the fray. Why? Because during the mass movement of students in Quebec during the fall and winter of 1974-75 the Party’s political line and organisational efforts greatly undermined MREQ’s consistently opportunist position.
The Party advanced the political line: Let Marxist-Leninists unite; let the revolutionary anti-imperialist students unite; let all the students unite. Let us build the Party, build the anti-imperialist united front, build the self-defense organisation of the students. MREQ’s political line consistently was: let us split the Marxist-Leninists over “ideological debates”; let us use the anti-imperialist middle section of students to stop organising either an anti-imperialist united front or the defence organisation of the students. At that time the Party also entered into a vigorous and lively polemic against the political line and theories advanced by MREQ. As a guide to these polemics the Party stated clearly as follows: “We have merely answered attacks on ourselves and defended ourselves against all sorts of revisionist and opportunist slanders but we do not believe that 1. just because there are disagreements, we have joined opposing camps, and 2. that once disagreements arise, they are permanent and eternal. We believe that disagreements can be straightened out and clarified if the Marxist-Leninists persist in pointing out one another’s errors by joining one party and waging vigorous struggle there. Building one’s own fiefdom and paying attention to only the narrow interests of one’s own organisation is extremely detrimental to the growth and development of the revolutionary movement. At the same time, we do not advocate unity at ail costs, that is unity with revisionists and opportunists of various hues.” (PCDN, Vol. 4, No. 81, Dec. 16, 1974) The Party continued to polemicise against MREQ’s wrong lines until January 18, 1975.
But MREQ can not possibly grasp the objectivity of this phenomenon. Like Nigel Morgan they have already reached their apriori conclusion. The source of their misfortune is that CPC(M-L) is counter-revolutionary. In denouncing the Party, the very first reason they give to prove its counter-revolutionary nature is that “a large number of people have been abused by this organisation.” This is definitely true. We abuse Trudeau and his lackey government; we abuse the police and the whole fascist state apparatus; we abuse William Kashtan, William Stewart and Nigel Morgan. In short we abuse all the hardened chieftains of the U.S. imperialists and the Soviet social-imperialists, and all the hardened opportunist allies of these two superpowers in our country. Now if MREQ felt abused by CPC(M-L) for our polemics against them, why not give us back tit-for-tat scientific refutation of our wrong political lines or ideological stance? For the same reason that William Stewart was not interested in answering our arguments against Kashtan’s Moscow speech. He could not do so on scientific grounds. Hence his wild assertions. And MREQ has no modesty in telling the world that what modern revisionism has to say about CPC(M-L) can be matched and anted up one by themselves. “CPC(ml)’s line is nothing but an insidious witches’ brew of opportunism and is a fundamentally counter-revolutionary organisation. It is totally foreign to the spirit and practice of Marxism-Leninism and is a group which has denigrated and slandered the image of communism in the eyes of the masses, misled struggles, ruined the lives of many potentially good militants, and generally acted as splitters and wreckers of the mass and vanguard movements.” (p. 6) Fine.
But MREQ has forgotten one detail. CPC(M-L) exists in this world whether they like it or not, and we will seta few things straight. For example MREQ says, “a number of people have wondered whether CPC (M-L) was founded by the CIA or the KGB. We have not uncovered any documentary evidence of this.” (Ibid., p. 103) Just who wonders MREQ does not say. Nigel Morgan used to wonder whether the Internationalists were CIA agents and guess who reassured his suspicions? The KGB in Moscow, in the summer of 1965.
MREQ covers up the fact that the KGB is well represented in Canada by the revisionists and other opportunists of the MREQ-type, and that they have a whole apparatus working for them in our country with travel agencies, trading companies, and you name it. But MREQ has no concern about Soviet social-imperialist meddling in Canada. Let me tell MREQ who else used to wonder. When the Internationalists re-organised in Montreal in 1968, the notorious anti-communist gossip-columnist, “Fitz”, in the Montreal Gazette asserted in his column with no equivocation that “according to confidential Washington sources” the McGill Student Movement and the Internationalists are “backed by the CIA as a means of spreading confusion and dissension in the Canadian New Left movement.” MSM and the Internationalists, claims Fitz, “are encouraged by the CIA to infiltrate and disorganise leftist organisations here.” (Fitz, “On and Off the Record”, photostated in McGill Student, Vol. 1, No. 6, November 5, 1968) How about that! Morgan with his inside track in Moscow, and Fitz with his inside track in Washington both wondered about the CIA and the Internationalists and both had their curiosity satisfied. But it doesn’t end here. No sir, there is yet to come a professor with a “scholarly reputation as a-Marxist historian” who also wondered about the Internationalists and the CIA. Eugene Genovese, who was thoroughly exposed as a racist and a fascist by the Sir George Williams Movement during the struggle against racism there in 1968-69, also had an inside track. To where? Peking. “I have good contacts in Peking”; and from these he concludes, “they’re (the Internationalists) agents of anti-communist governments ... I am using the term CIA as a kind of shorthand.” (Dorothy Eber, The Computer Centre Party, Tundra Books, Montreal, 1969, p. 105) Nigel Morgan, with his inside track to Moscow; “Fitz” with his “confidential Washington sources”; and Genovese with his “good contacts in Peking”: all three of them notorious anti-communists, all wondered about the CIA and the Internationalists, and all had their suspicions confirmed –Morgan to protect exposure of the revisionists by the Internationalists, Fitz to protect his class allies in the New Left, Genovese to protect his career as a “Marxist historian”.
Now, MREQ, when did you begin to “wonder” about the CIA and CPC(M-L). In the summer of 1971 when you became part of the CIA Operation Chaos to divide the Canadian communist movement. Look at MREQ’s record in this Operation Chaos from 1971 to 1972: a) they themselves came out of a split from MEQ, the Party student organisation; b) the bookstore Livres et Progressiste et Periodique Ltee. was taken over by fraud and turned into Librairie Progressisste in order to split the communist movement; c) the Afro-Asian Latin American People’s Solidarity Movement was split with a clique forming Afro-Asian Latin American People’s Solidarity Committee; d) Indian Progressive Study Group was split with a clique forming Indian People’s Association now re-organised as the Indian People’s Association of North America. In addition the Montreal branch of the Canadian Friends of China was taken over by Operation Chaos, as well as the Mouvement Progressisste Italo-Quebecois which they liquidated. MREQ now wants to mystify its past, cover up its tracks. They play their little trick of just ”dropping” the old lie about the CIA, and then pretend to be above all these rumours. But let me tell MREQ –you gentlemen, just like Morgan for the KGB, and Fitz and Genovese for the CIA, are the CIA in Canada. It is MREQ which is part of Operation Chaos, and the facts are right before our eyes; they actually did split the communist movement and created maximum chaos and confusion in the revolutionary ranks. And now we have this yellow journal of their’s. Who is going to believe this is “Marxism-Leninism”? This is straight forward splittism, slandering and rumour mongering, elevated to the level of political “theory”.
Then there is Dave Paterson with his little mimickery of MREQ: “I am not here repeating the old rumour of Bains being an agent of the CIA or the FBI or the Soviet revisionists. I know of no evidence whatever to lend credibility to these charges.” (“Ravings of a Man Named Dave Paterson”, Mass Line, Vol. 6 & 7, Number 56, August 15, 1975, p. 20) Excuse us while we laugh at your naivite, Paterson. These “when did you stop beating your wife” innuendoes are written for school children, or childish gossip mongers. Not content to drop the CIA rumour in his trickster manner, Paterson also passes on the Toronto Star’s slanders about Joe Burton infiltrating our Party. This is also a joke. How do you infiltrate CPC(M-L)? Even Allmand and his RCMP security desk admit they cannot infiltrate the Party. Agents can only infiltrate sects and circles. MREQ is a sect; Paterson is a circle. They’re infiltrated by the state, not CPC(M-L). That is why MREQ and Paterson play the role of splitters, intriguers and conspirators. They are sectarians and the natural vehicle for Operation Chaos to do its dirty work throughout Canada. They are host to an endless stream of CIA agents coming from down south carrying out their dastardly splitting and wrecking activities in the communist movement in Canada.
But let Dave Paterson, like MREQ, try to explain his role in Operation Chaos of splitting the Canadian communist movement. Let both MREQ and Paterson try to account for the dubious backgrounds of these U.S. citizens they have in their sects and circles. How is it these U.S. “new leftists” who MREQ and Paterson have in their pockets are the most virulently anti-CPC(M-L), the most sectarian splitters and gossip mongers? Paterson is well-known for his jaunts back and forth to the U.S. to confer with this dubious U.S. expert on the Canadian revolution, and some others somewhere else. Of late these Operation Chaos splitters have been taking jaunts to Europe to get an inside track on CPC(M-L) there. Recently one of Paterson’s comrades in the west returned quite happy to discover from a chat with some dubious character in London that Comrade Bains is a revisionist. All of this is the worst aspect of the reactionary style.
Chairman Mao teaches us: Practise Marxism, not revisionism; Unite, don’t split; be open and above board, don’t intrigue and conspire. What do MREQ, Paterson and all the other teachers by negative example do? –practice revisionsim, split, intrigue and conspire. But then they all agree that Mao Tsetung Thought is not the international doctrine of the modern proletariat, nor is it suitable and mandatory for the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries. MREQ and Dave Paterson should be aware that Marxist-Leninists of this country know who are CIA and KGB agents and that they are all to be found in the holy alliance of the “left”, the nestling ground for all anti-Canadian anti-people elements.
I conclude this portion by giving a quotation from Mass Line #55 on the role of the RCMP in splitting the communist movement:
“(9) The current campaign for the unity of the Marxist-Leninists dates back to the fall of 1972 (and before that to 1968) when two organisations in Vancouver, the Partisan Organisation and the Chullima Collective, joined the Party on the basis that there can only be one Marxist-Leninist Party in a country and that all Marxist-Leninists must join and build such a Party. After their initiative, New Morning Collective joined the Party, followed by some CAPS in Quebec as well as several individuals from places all across Canada. This entire trend was hated by the police who went around escalating its slander campaign against the Party in order to disrupt the growing unity of the Marxist-Leninists.
“The class basis of disruption of unity of the Marxist-Leninists is infiltration of the ranks of the Marxist-Leninists by the petty bourgeoisie. During the period of general economic crisis, some petty bourgeois take the road of their brand of revolutionism and infiltrate the Marxist-Leninists. These individuals are extremely prone to the rumours and gossips spread by the police. While the police are the origin of the campaign to split the Marxist-Leninists, petty bourgeois elements become their instruments. During the current campaign to support the struggle of the Anishinabe people, the petty bourgeoisie revolutionists repeated every slander issued by the RCMP in order to liquidate the developing unity between the Native people and the working class. Hundreds of examples can be given whereby those individuals who call themselves ”Marxist-Leninists” are actually the ones doing maximum damage to the cause of the working and oppressed people. Not to grasp how the RCMP operates is objectively to go over to the side of the enemy.
“It is our firm belief that the entire propaganda that THERE IS NO PARTY originates from the police. It is the same propaganda, in new garb, of the theme propagated in the 1960’s that THERE IS NO NEED FOR A PARTY. Currently, we have seen some tracts which have come out to say THAT WE HAVE TO BUILD A PARTY. All these lines are erroneous and originate from the RCMP. Let us explain to you why. A revolutionary party of the proletariat based on revolutionary theory is not the private property of anyone and does not come into being as a result of the wishes of a few individuals. It is the outcome of the historical process. After the rise of modern revisionism in Canada, several people attempted to organise a Marxist-Leninist Party. These people made the attempts by calling upon all Marxist-Leninists to unite.
“When Progressive Workers Movement was founded in 1964, they issued a general call and Marxist-Leninists responded to this general call. We were supporters of PWM for several years. After PWM died, we contacted Marxist-Leninists all across Canada and Quebec and called upon them to form the Party. Many responded and joined at the founding. Many joined later. And those who degenerated or lost faith in Marxism-Leninism left and sank into obscurity. But the key point is that there was a general call given and the Marxist-Leninists responded to it. It is only petty bourgeois revolutionists who –instead of uniting into one Marxist-Leninist organisation –stick to the line of private property and conspiracy, form their cliques and never issue their calls to everyone, and never strive to unite with others on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory and Marxist-Leninist political line. Such petty bourgeois revolutionism is the enemy of the Marxist-Leninists, of the working class and oppressed people and is a collaborator of the RCMP.” (Mass Line, No. 55)
The concentrated expression of the reactionary style, all of its worst features, are exposed in Jack Scott’s diatribe printed as an appendix of MREQ’s pamphlet. How excellent to see this old fogey with his long history of splitting, conspiring and intriguing, telling his lies and slanders with these little anti-communist children gathered at his feet. But like all reactionary monsters and demons, Jack Scott’s lies and slanders leap out to expose his anti-communist soul, and his history as a political swindler and double dealer. In order to analyse this reactionary style in detail and clarify the splittist role he has played in the past ten years it is necessary to go through his diatribe sentence by sentence, and so I ask for the reader’s patience as we cut into the heart of this political corpse, and deal with, in order, point by point, what this charlatan and fraud has to say.
“I was twice invited to be national chairman of Hardial Bain’s organisations.” An outright lie, and already the man is trying to cover his tracks by mystifying everything, obscuring the objective politics of class struggle, and launching into his favorite method of fighting, the politics of personal abuse and discrediting others. Note also that these opportunists can’t even repeat each other’s lies correctly. MREQ introduces Scott by saying how “CPC(ml) approached him with an offer of the post of CPC(ml) National Secretary”. Scott never mentions “national secretary”; one lie is simply converted into another lie in the careless lazy manner characteristic of all opportunists. “The first time was when the Progressive Workers was still in existence.” This is also a lie. We shall see how the liar exposes himself. “The Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist) had had a preliminary central committee meeting in Montreal.” The CCM(M-L) never had a central committee. Nor did its leading body ever meet in Montreal. At this time there was a separate organisation for Marxist-Leninists in Quebec, quite a well-known fact in the Canadian communist movement, and certainly known to Scott.
“Jamie Reid came to Vancouver to offer me the national chairmanship of this organisation.” Another lie, which begins to expose his system of lies: first of all Jamie Reid has never offered the chairmanship of anything to Jack Scott. But note. He says PWM was still in existence; it is a fact, which he doesn’t mention, that he was chairman of PWM. Did CCM(M-L) not know this fact? How did this alleged offer come out of the sky? We shall see.
“I rejected it on the bases (sic) that they did not have any leadership of the revolutionary movement to offer anyone.” Here a bit more of his soul is exposed. Yes, the Internationalists and CCM(M-L) did have the leadership of the revolutionary movement, and this was what rubbed his ego in 1969, and agitates him today. Look at Jack Maley’s speech in the Appendix where he says, “When I returned to PWM in early 1969 (he had been out of town working in construction –editor) the Internationalists were being discussed at every meeting. Some of Jack Scott’s close adherents ... were boasting of their ’revolutionary’ actions undertaken against Hardial Bains’ people. No other struggle –except the one for ’pure’ Canadian unions –had so much attraction for these people. Any move, any offer for common meetings to discuss unity and common actions was side-stepped.” (See Historical Articles and Documents, item No. 5) Brian Sproule, who was influenced by PWM, but had friendly relations with the Vancouver Student Movement, was told by Jack Scott’s flunkey to “leave VSM or else.” (See Item No. 6) D.J. O’Donnell, another Vancouver militant, reports “The only discipline of CLAM (Jack Scott’s anti-communist student sect at UBC in 1969-70) was that it not talk to the Internationalists.” (See item No. 7) Not only did the Internationalists and CCM(M-L) have the leadership of the revolutionary movement to offer, the masses were actively seeking that leadership. This is why Scott and his arrogant sectarian cronies were running around in a flap brow-beating people and carrying on their political double-dealings.
I told them that the workers of this country would develop the revolutionary movement and produce their own leaders.” This is a lie. Jack Scott has never given his straight-forward views to the communists; in fact whenever he has met Comrade Bains he acts like an ingratiating child. He has no inner strength, conviction, dignity or culture whatsoever. Furthermore the revolutionary workers’ movement like the revolutionary students’ movement, and all the revolutionary peoples’ movements do indeed produce their own leaders. They inevitably produce their own charlatans as well. In the course of social practice the charlatans are exposed and shunned by the masses, and the revolutionary leaders are warmly supported. Scott came forward in 1964 to pronounce himself a leader; in a few years he had exposed himself as a thorough charlatan, incapable of leading anything, and was heading for political extinction. The Internationalists were re-organising and actually leading. This is what drove Scott into a frenzy and accounts for his double-dealing politics in this 1969 period as we shall see.
“It was not their’s to offer.” Indeed, revolutionary leadership was their’s to offer; Comrade Bains won this leadership, the respect and confidence of the masses, through his actual social practice at UBC in organising the Internationalists and advancing the whole politics and cultural life of the campus over the period from 1963 to 1965 and after. While Scott has exposed his inability to lead the revolutionary workers Comrade Bains had proven his ability to lead the revolutionary students. This is what irks the petty competitive soul of Scott and drives him to empty bluster and bragging in front of little reactionary school children. Is he fishing for an ”offer” from them? What little schemes and aspirations does this old windbag have in mind by telling these children his little stories? I’m sure I don’t know. What is clear is that every class offers leadership to those who want to lead. Revolutionaries offer leadership to those who want to lead revolution; reactionaries offer leadership to those who want to lead counter-revolution. Whatever offers Scott is fishing for from MREQ and others are reactionary offers. Scott once fished in CPC(M-L) to see if he could catch an ”offer” to lead reaction. He caught nothing. Now he’s fishing in waters teeming with reactionaries, and he will no doubt catch his offer. Does he expect revolutionaries to applaud?
“The second time was when they set up the CPC(M-L).” When and where was this? The man tries to mystify everything to the extreme. CPC(M-L) was set up right under this arrogant sectarian’s nose in December 1969 in Vancouver. In fact, Dave Danielson, a genuine veteran communist worker, telephoned Jack Scott to invite him to attend and join the young revolutionaries, to which Scott responded with arrogant sneers and derision. Scott the liar and windbag doesn’t even know when or where CPC(M-L) was “set up”.
“If you go back to the reports of the first convention (which can be found in PCDN) you’ll notice that they elected all the officers with the exception of national chairman.” What first convention? When? Where? What issues of PCDN? The founding conference of CPC(M-L) took place at the year-end conference in Vancouver in 1969. There a draft political report was presented and discussed, then reproduced and sent to all units of CCM(M-L) where it was discussed thoroughly for three months.
On March 31, 1970 a meeting of CCM (M-L) dissolved the old organisation and organised a new central organising committee to build the Party. The First Congress of CPC(M-L) was held from May 15-22,1971 in Guelph, Ontario. The Second Congress of CPC(M-L) was held in Montreal in March 1973. So why is this old wretched wanderer Scott being so elusive. What “first convention”? Furthermore the old fool can’t even investigate the fact there was no PCDN in December 1969, nor in May 1971. PCDN had been stopped in March 1971, and resumed as People’s Canada Daily News Release in September 1971. So where are these mysterious reports of Scott’s mysterious convention? No list of officers was given, nor is there any reference to a “missing” national chairman.
“I had a copy of the reports before I heard from them and I laughed and told my friends that I was sure that they were going to be here to see me.” Here the man is caught! How did he get the reports? Who gave them to him? How did he have a premonition someone was going to visit him? All this mystery he evokes is to cover his tracks. Is Scott an astrolger? No. Scott simply wasted the time and money of others to feign political seriousness, in order to play his double-dealing tricks and split the communist movement. “Sure enough, the next day, I think it was, Arnold August and another one of them knocked at the door.”
Such precision. “The next day” –of what year? decade? Are you sure Jack Scott that it wasn’t a telephone call. And that it wasn’t you who went to knock on the door on the “den of iniquity” on Joyce Road which you wrote about in your little poison pen letter? Are you sure Arnold August never came to pick you up so you could meet with Comrade Bains in order that you could carry on with your double-dealing tricks, sneaking around to pick up some credibility to save you from political extinction? Think it over, maybe these questions will jog some facts out of your senile memory.
“(By the way, I had been invited to the founding convention and they had even offered me a return airplane ticket to attend their meeting. I refused and gave them back the ticket).” He crawls into his parenthesis here and exposes a little bit more of his string of lies. First he had the report, then he expected someone to knock on his door, then he remembers “by the way” that the Party had invited him to some mysterious meeting. Now note the internal contradictions of his grammar. He was “offered” a ticket; he refused; then he “gave them back the ticket”. If he refused the “offer”, the meaning he intends to convey, why would he have to give back the “ticket”. An offer and ticket are two different things. The truth is he accepted the “offer”; refused to complete his part of the agreement, namely to go to the meeting, and then “gave ... back the ticket” which he had accepted with the offer. Thus the liar traps himself.
“They said the Central Committee had unanimously decided that they wanted me for national chairman.” Another lie –there was no central committee meeting. This is just a fraudulent story to puff himself up with self-importance in order to impress these little children gathered at his feet.,/P>
“I replied, ’no thanks!’ However, I not only turned them down but I was critical of them.” Here the charlatan nature is more exposed. Not only did this wheeler-dealer not turn down an offer which was never made to him; but he has never once given his political criticisms of the Party. Indeed, he has continually claimed to agree with the political line, and oppose the “form”, the “style” of the Party. If he had the manhood, a communist worker’s simple dignity to say freely what was on his mind to Comrade Bains, or any one else, he might have accomplished something in life. But he is a thorough revisionist, a cowardly person, who refuses to fight on the basis of an integrated world outlook, on the basis of political line, on a scientific, objective basis in class struggle. Hence his endless stories, gossips, lies, his intrigues and conspiracies, his double-dealings, and his eventual and continuous self-exposure as a charlatan in front of the masses.
“From then on the differences between us became sharper, especially as they became crazier (their boasting about arrests, their so-called ’carrying Marxism-Leninism to the working class’...).” Even this point is wrong. The differences between Jack Scott and the PWM, and Comrade Bains and the Internationalists go back to the 1963-4 period. The contradiction has its origins at the very beginning and the struggle between Scott’s arrogant sectarianism to split the people, and Comrade Bains’ revolutionary largeness of mind to unite the people in struggle against the main enemy while sorting out various questions of theory, dates from the time when Comrade Bains sought out the PWM and Jack Scott in his desire to unite with the anti-revisionist forces in Vancouver. As for the differences becoming greater, of course, Jack Scott in this period was giving lectures from his rocking chair on his criticisms of Peking Review, and his theory of “freedom to criticise” Chairman Mao Tsetung, and denouncing the “cult of the individual” of Chairman Mao. CPC(M-L) was taking Mao Tsetung Thought to the masses, and being viciously attacked by the state and their revisionist agents in the mass movement. From the position of a comfortable rocking chair, serving time in jail in order to propogate Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought is “crazy”. Revolution to a counter-revolutionary is “crazy”. Every class has its likes and dislikes; its ideas of sanity and insanity.
“The whole thing sharpened up so much that I became their main attacking point.” This is another braggard lie to impress children with how important this corpse in search of a grave is. Where did all this “attack” take place? In the central Party literature there was only one article, and that one was of a theoretical nature, written with a reference to Jack Scott. Even that one did not mention his name, but referred to him indirectly as a “Vancouver labour leader”.
“Why did they want me?” I have to laugh at this pretentious old reprobate. What Scott means is why did he want them. The answer is simple. He wanted to run around in various circles; pick up some credibility as a revolutionary; and resurrect himself from political obscurity.
“My speculation of this is based on very substantial evidence.” Excuse me while I laugh at you again, Mr. Scott, sir, but you claim such authority as a Marxist-Leninist, and give lectures to people to read articles from Peking Review on aprioristic thinking, and here you are confessing to the little school children that you are a speculative philosopher. Every Marxist-Leninist knows there are only two types of knowledge, direct or indirect knowledge. Yet Scott is most foggy, vague, lost for detail, about his own direct experience in this world. No wonder he has to “speculate”. As for the “evidence” of this speculation, we find it is just more speculation.
“I have been a friend of China for a good many years and have gained some respect among the Chinese comrades.” Is that so? Were you a friend of China when you printed the photograph in the October 1966 edition of Progressive Worker of the counter-revolutionary revisionist Liu Shao-shi on the presidium to illustrate the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China which was presided over by Chairman Mao Tsetung? Were you a friend of China when you forced the Progressive Workers’ cadres to memorize “Self-cultivation” by this revisionist dog? Here is what Jack Maley says about “friendship to China”, Mr. Scott: “The only Chinese author studied, and I may say repeatedly, and in great detail, was the man who wrote How to be a Good Communist, Liu Shao-shi himself. Time and time again the PWM study circles were forced to defend the theories of that horrible book.” (See Item No. 5) Or was Jack Scott a friend of China when he was promoting his criticisms of the “language” in Peking Review, and advocating a “critical outlook” towards Mao Tsetung Thought? Or maybe Scott was being a friend of China in 1974, the year the Chinese Communist Party reprinted the works of Stalin On the Opposition, while Scott was publishing Two Roads to denounce the road of the October Revolution, slander Comrade Stalin as a great power chauvinist, and stir up old imperialist lies about antagonistic contradictions between People’s China and the Soviet Union headed by Stalin. Does Scott think that Canadian communists have not heeded Chairman Mao’s teachings about the two-line struggle within China, about the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat? Precisely through such struggle swindlers and double dealers like Scott can float themselves. Who is Jack Scott friends with in China, with what line and what class? Is he speaking as a Marxist-Leninist, as a spokesman of the communist movement or as a wanderer? He openly gossips about how it was his publication of Two Roads which won him favour and promoted him in China. What China? Chairman Mao’s China? Your friendship, Scott, is the friendship of a real enemy.
“(Whether this is deserved or not is another matter)”. Here the scoundrel crawls back into the refuge of his parenthesis; his conscience is pricked. This is precisely the question which is being sorted out in the international communist movement, Mr. Scott, what is deserved and by what class. You treacherously try to avoid the class struggle, the two-line struggle in the international communist movement, by playing your trickster role of hiding in the mass movement of the people’s friendship organisation, which you reduce to a sectarian clique in order to advance your position in life, and from which you wage your slander and gossip campaign against the communists. Like all liquidationists you neither build the Party and fight out the two-line struggle within the discipline of the organisation, nor do you build the mass democratic movement on a communist non-sectarian basis. Instead you use the “broad section” of anti-imperialist, generally progressive forces as an amorphous loose base wherein you carry on your intrigues and conspiracies with impunity.
“And this is well known to Bains”. Yes it is. Let me tell you something, Mr. Scott, our Comrade Bains also knows one or two things more about your “friendship” with China, than you let on. In the period from 1967 to 1973 why weren’t you beating your breast about being a “friend” of China? Why was the publishing of Two Roads so important for your new “friendship”. Don’t be impatient Mr. Scott. The two-line struggle is far from over. We shall see who is a friend of whom, and what is “well known to Comrade Bains”.
“Thus, if they got me, this would be like getting a passport to China.” How about that! For Scott’s information the Canadian government issues passports not Mr. Scott, nor the People’s Republic of China. The Canadian government arbitrarily deprives revolutionaries of their democratic rights; and refuse to grant them their citizenship and passports. This is well known to Scott; and it’s well known that Comrade Bains is one of those attacked by the Canadian state on this front. But if Comrade Bains needs a passport it is not to China, nor can Mr. Scott be of any assistance. Jack Scott’s attitude is an embarrassment to the Canadian people, especially to the communists. For someone who these reactionary school children call a ”veteran militant communist” to speak this way about this friendship with China is a sacrilege of communism, and an insult to the cultured and friendly attitude of the Canadian people in their international relations with other countries.
“If I had joined CPC(M-L), on the basis of my contacts with the Chinese they presumed that the Chinese would think this is a good organisation because Scott was joining and he is a Marxist-Leninist...” Scott is a truly sly old dog. It seems he is trying to evoke the embarrassed sympathy of the communists that a man could be such a pathetic, self-deluded fool to think anyone would view Scott as an arbitrator of who is, or who is not a Marxist-Leninist. Everyone knows there are social classes and class struggle, and that only the protracted history of this struggle in Canada will show who is or who is not a communist leader. But this sly old trickster is fishing. He is advertising himself in the opportunist circles across Canada as the ”man with the passport.” He is saying to them, listen you young upstarts in Toronto and Montreal, I may be an old dog, but I have a passport to China in my pocket. I “blocked” CPC(M-L) because they wouldn’t make any opportunist deals with me and insisted on fighting out political lines, so watch out. Same with all this talk about ”offers” of National Chairman. Everyone has their interests in this world; there is no action without motivation. Yes, he is motivated by spite to discredit and abuse (CPC(M-L), but a political swindler always has something in mind for enhancing his own petty interests. This is why he engages in this disgusting conceit, this seemingly mindless self-promotion. This is the political talk of a wanderer, a political huckster, charlatan, and counterrevolutionary wind-bag.
“(At one time they went around telling people that I had joined the party which was not true of course. Some friends then said that if Scott has joined, the organisation must have something good about it. ’We will join too.’ The reaction I liked best showed some independent initiative. They said that if it was true that Scott had joined them he must be out of his skull.)” Note how he crawls into his parenthesis again in order to abstract himself from the action, lift himself off the earth. He uses the perspectives of the omniscient story-teller, as a device whereby he tries to wipe pot his meandering tracks as he wanders from one circle to another, the vagabond, travelling one man show. But Scott has left tracks despite his efforts to eliminate them. In 1971-72 he was criss-crossing the country in order to resurrect himself politically, and used the Party for this end. He openly bragged about his factionalist intentions among his cronies and communalist friends. Comrade Brian Sproule who was living in his house at the time reports: “Just before I moved into Scott’s house he made a speaking tour in Eastern Canada ... Scott came from this tour and said that he had met various CPC(M-L) comrades and he was saying that CPC(M-L) seemed to be on the right path, that it had some good things about it, with some young people around it but it had a problem and that was Hardial Bains. He said as CPC(M-L) grew Bains’ influence would diminish and he would gradually be pushed aside.”
Here is the real Jack Scott, the conspirator and intriguer, with his obsession to split the communist movement, and reduce CPC(M-L) into another sect in order to liquidate it. How to do this? Eliminate the Marxist-Leninist leadership of Comrade Bains. How to do this? Feign friendship and desire to unite, while making political deals and fishing around various opportunist circles behind the back of the Party. This is the method used by all charlatan splitters and wreckers in the communist movement. Among those with whom he conspires are two groups of opportunists. One group says CPC(M-L) is “changing”, it is becoming “nice”, “sensible” –i.e. liberal bourgeois. They have some hopes, watching the manoeuvres of their master Mr. Scott, that they will usurp the Party, remove Bains, and turn CPC(M-L) into another revisionist or neo-trotskyist sect. Another group of opportunists has no such illusions; if Scott thinks he can infiltrate and split that communist fortress, they say, he is “out of his skull.” Today of course the charlattan Scott, who in those days past was bragging about how he precisely would do just that, pretends he knew all along the second camp of opportunists was correct. All from the heavenly sanctuary of his parenthesis!
“Having lost me, they then started making really vicious and slanderous attacks on me.” What Scott means is that having lost the opportunity of doing what he had highest hopes to do, namely have the Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Party “gradually pushed aside”, so he could split and wreck CPC(M-L), he had to satisfy himself with getting as much for himself as he could. What he salvaged himself from political extinction, and picked up some credibility as “Marxist-Leninist” again. Second, he managed to pacify a little group of school children at UBC to make sure they would never make any move in their life and do something useful for the Canadian people and workers and oppressed nations in the world. This is what Jack Scott got out of his double-dealing tricks. CPC(M-L) only got one thing, some excellent education from a teacher by negative example.
“All their newspapers with extensive attacks were mailed to the Chinese embassy with attention drawn to the articles on me.” Here his monster really jumps out. The Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPC(M-L) held on March 27,1972 in Vancouver, and duly publicised in the Party press, adopted a resolution on the history of the relationship between jack Scott and CPC(M-L). This resolution was an inner-Party document, but a full copy of the resolution was written up as a letter to Jack Scott and handed to him in person. The Party presented its criticism to him in an open and above board manner, and is printing its views for the first time in the appendix of this issue of Mass Line. (See Item #11) Scott who claims to be so much in the “know” about the Party had no clue as to what was going on. Comrade Robert A. Cruise was elected National Secretary, and Comrade Bains was not listed as having any formal position.
Comrade Cruise, as National Secretary, went to the University of British Columbia and officially repudiated Jack Scott’s line on the Luddites of the 19th century. Scott is an anarcho-syndicalist and romanticises and promotes in a historical idealist manner the pre-communist and anti-communist tendencies in the workers’ movement. The Luddites were the organised handicraft workers, mainly weavers and spinners, whose handicraft production was being destroyed by the new industrial mode of production. For a period, the two modes co-existed one with the other. The wives and children of the weavers were driven into the mills to work as factory hands in the new industrial mode, while the men desperately tried to compete with this new mode which was driving down the prices because it consumed far less socially necessary labour time than the old mode. In this transitional period in which the small handicraft producer was being expropriated from the ownership of his means of production, they revolted and attacked the new industrial mode by simply smashing the machines, and “unplugging” the steam engines in factories. This was a pre-industrial proletarian form of class struggle, and in its essence reactionary, despite the justness and heroic aspects of these struggles. Scott promotes these Luddite struggles in the same way he promotes the crude, anarcho-syndicalist, a Utopian sectarian, in the Lassallean-Proudhon tradition. To take this stand in the 1970’s, the era of Mao Tsetung Thought, is of course, ultra-reactionary and counterrevolutionary. All of this comrade Cruise carefully explained at UBC, and a report of his meeting was printed in the Vancouver Student.
A responsible person on the editorial board of the Vancouver Student went to see Jack Scott, showed him the article by Robert A. Cruise repudiating Scott’s line on Ludditism, and asked Scott to write his views in order to broaden and deepen the polemic. Scott, who hypocritically proposed among the opportunists to create ”an ideal situation in an intellectual discussion” by having “opposing sides to concern themselves with the task of illuminating the issues, and bringing to light the truth”, refused to “illuminate the issues” or bring his light to the “truth” about the Luddites, and scorned the opportunity of writing his views in Vancouver Student. (Jack Scott, “Reviews” Canadian Revolution, Vol. 1, No. 2. August/September 1975, p. 39)
The one other “extensive attack” printed in the newspapers of CPC (M-L) is one entitled “A Study of ’How Engels Criticised Duhring’s Apriorism” by Joseph Redpath, and is an excellent theoretical refutation of Jack Scott (although it; does not refer to him by name). It is reprinted as item number 13 in the appendix, and should be studied in detail to grasp the philosophical outlook of Scott, and all the opportunist chieftains. It came into being because the Vancouver Secretary of CPC(M-L) went to visit Jack Scott about this slander and rumour mongering attack against the Party. Scott arrogantly told the Vancouver Secretary that CPC(M-L) should read the article in Peking Review entitled “How Engels Criticised Duhring’s Apriorism”. CPC(M-L) followed Jack Scott’s line on this question, and as a result showed how in fact Scott himself is the apriorist thinker, and thoroughly exposed the philosophical roots of his obscurantist idealism.
Scott’s idealism and metaphysics is used by him, as by all reactionaries to obscure history, and mystify everything in order to protect his reactionary self-interest.
A most perfect example of this is the monster which leaps out of Scott’s head with respect to “newspapers” with articles allegedly attacking Scott being mailed to the Chinese embassy. The Party sends its newspapers to forty-three different countries in case Scott would like to know; China is one of those countries. But this monster which jumped out from Scott is his whole criminal activity of writing and mailing poison-pen letters. When he left the revisionists he composed a whole series of very vicious and slanderous letters about various revisionist leaders to discredit them through gossips about their personal life. These letters did a great deal of harm because the revisionist leadership used them to discredit Marxism-Leninism, and the Communist Party of China. Scott tacitly admitted writing these scandal sheets, which he mailed to the homes of many revisionists, including my parents, in an interview with the Vancouver monopoly press. The Party sent Jack Scott its appraisal of him after the Third Plenum in an open and above board manner. But Scott does not fight that way. Instead he composed a poison-pen letter allegedly written by Comrade Bains, and sent it to a New Left paper in Vancouver.
The political focus of the letter is that Scott is very influential in the New Left circles, and that according to the forgery, Comrade Bains “may have to try discrediting him.” (See item number 11)
Comrade Brian Sproule’s statement provides additional facts to reinforce my charge against Jack Scott. He says:
“Another time I came home and Scott said that the existence of a letter had come to his attention. This letter had been slipped under the door of a certain paper and it was signed H. Scott claimed ’that the letter had to be written by Bains because the letter knew too much.’ ...Scott got on the phone and told all sorts of people about the letter. I believe he had a copy which he read over the phone...Scott was the leading promoter of this letter saying that it was virtually written by Comrade Bains.” (See item number 6)
How would Scott know that the letter “knew too much”, if in fact the “knowledge” contained in it was not a reflection of his own “knowledge”? After all Scott has a great deal of difficulty remembering even the simplest facts about his relations with the Party, but has great clarity at “remembering” the gossip and political line of the forgery. Furthermore, the forged letter itself is identical in form, style and overall content to the one’s Scott used to send to the revisionists. Finally a more clever manoeuvre to assume the position of righteous old communist attacked by irreverent degenerate and foreign Devils is hard to conceive. The letter surfaced at exactly the same time that the Party presented Scott its appraisal of him.
Scott pursued this line of political skullduggery by sending the one or two articles from CPC(M-L) newspapers to the Chinese Embassy for exactly the same reason, to appear as an embattled old communist veteran attacked by abusive young “ultra-leftists” led by that foreign Devil Bains. From this sanctimonious position he carried his campaign of abuse to discredit the Party. This is Scott’s method; of political fighting, and is a concentrated expression of the reactionary style used by all opportunists and reactionaries. They refuse to struggle in an open and above board manner over political line because they can never defeat the iron-clad reasoning of scientific analysis. Hence they do their maximum to obscure what the issues are, and to mystify history in order to fool and deceive the people.
“Thus, they were not so concerned with undermining whatever influence I might have in Canada, but with undermining any prestige I might have with the Chinese.” Listen Jack Scott, CPC(M-L) does not discredit anyone. Our Party fights in class and national struggles of the Canadian people. In the course of those struggles the sectarian likes of Jack Scott, thorough social-chauvinists, zeroes in theory and practically incompetent, come up to split and wreck the united front, and do their best to abuse and discredit the communists and thus carry out fine work for the CIA and RCMP. If Scott had an ounce of shame, how does he explain his lies and slanders nestled inside MREQ’s yellow journal. This stuff of their’s is the lowest form of abuse, abuse raised to the level of political theory, that I have ever read in the communist movement.
“They obviously wanted to be accepted by China.” Listen, Scott, why don’t you keep the Chinese out of all this. Stick to Canada; this is where we are fighting imperialism. Quit making all these appeals, as the revisionists have done for five decades, to some arbiter, some absolute authority external to our revolution. On the one hand you reject the authority of Mao Tsetung Thought as the necessary, mandatory theoretical guide to action for the Canadian revolution. On the other, you twist and dodge away from a political fight in two-line struggle over how to advance the Canadian revolution, by vulgarising every issue to some sort of petty squabble which you then run like a little child with to your ”friends” in China. You are debasing communism, and you are debasing and muddling up what correct relations should be. CPC(M-L) is a communist party, the political party of the modern proletariat, contingent of the international communist movement and like every party we advocate and work for relations between people and people, government and government, and party and party between our country and the socialist states. Scott mystifies all this; he blurs very necessary lines, in an effort through his informality to push his opportunism and split the communist movement.
“Another reason for wanting me was that they hoped to split the PWM, and get all or most of our members.” This is also a big laugh. In May 1968 when the Internationalists were re-organised in Montreal their biggest aspiration was to unite with all Marxist-Leninists in Canada. Likewise a number of the younger militants in PWM like Jack Maley and others wanted to unite with the Internationalists. When Robert A. Cruise invited the PWM to attend the Canadian Student Movement Conference at the year’s end in 1968, he received a very warm letter signed “comradely, Bob Edwards, for PWM” in which he regretted not being able to come, but promised a statement in support of CSM. (See item number 1) In fact two of Scott’s student agents, one an ex-Internationalist, did come to Montreal, but fled with their horror stories a day or two later. But the Internationalists stepped up their efforts to unite with the PWM, and in a series of formal meetings and discussions drew up an agreement between them which both sides agreed upon. In this agreement CPC(M-L) agreed to support the Progressive Worker as a national Marxist-Leninist magazine, and agreed that the Internationalists in B.C. should come under the discipline of PWM. But Scott continued to play his double dealing tricks as Jack Maley described. Every effort was made to block unity between the Internationalists and the PWM.
In the spring of 1969 the comrades in CCM(M-L) invited Jack Scott, and the PWM to attend the North American Conference of Anti-Imperialist Youth held in Regina from May 7-12,1969. Scott arrogantly sent a lecture to the youth in the form of a statement but he refused to come there to defend his thesis. Like all arrogant sectarians, Scott is an ignoramous, and a coward, and was deathly afraid of being exposed in front of the youth as a charlatan by Comrade Bains. Nevertheless his statement is profoundly self-exposing document. In it he elevates his sectarian politics to the level of theory. He says:
“The anti-imperialist movement as we said before, must be a forum where, firstly, actions are proposed to oppose imperialism, and secondly where various political philosophies contend and recruit members. A political movement must struggle ideologically for leadership, not impose it.” First of all the mass movement of the people invents its own forms of struggle; Marxists learn from them and assist to generalise them without in anyway imposing sectarian schemata, or “favorite panacea” worked out in some Jack Scott private library. This line that the anti-imperialist movement is a “forum” is wrong. The revisionists, trotskyists and other sectarians, deathly afraid of releasing the revolutionary energy of the masses, all want to impose their little sectarian schema on the people. Furthermore, they all want to seize hold of a mass motion and throttle it, cater to the lowest level, and divert it from its own ends in the quest to recruit a few members and supporters. Scott advocates this as a “Marxist-Leninist” theory, which is nothing more than a “theory” for parasitising off the mass movement, something Scott has been doing for over ten years. Finally, note Scott’s unctuous self-righteous lecture to the youth about “ideological struggle.” He at the very same time was dictating to Brian Sproule not to have anything to do with the Internationalists “or else”; and who was dictating to CLAM as their only discipline, not to talk to the Internationalists, as I have already quoted from D.J. O’Donnel; and who was blocking the revolutionary workers in PWM from meeting with the Internationalists as Jack Maley so resolutely denounced at the Third Consultative Conference of CPC(M-L).
Then suddenly in the November 1969 B.C. Newsletter, Jack Scott opened a vicious and slanderous attack on the CCM(M-L) by saying they were fraudulently selling Progressive Worker, and were soliciting funds illegally in the name of PWM. This public outburst of a split in the Marxist-Leninist ranks, and with a specific singling out of Comrade Bains as the leading member of CCM(M-L), was a deliberate provocation to set the state against CCM(M-L), just as the revisionists had been doing all along. Ostensibly the reason for this outburst was that a New Left degenerate youth culture paper in Vancouver, the Georgia Straight, carried an article saying Jack Scott was Chairman of CSM. The most likely explanation is that Scott himself had the rumour floated there in order to give himself a pretext for his public denunciation of Hardial Bains and also providing a useful piece of information for the police. Had Scott any sentiment for the unity of Marxist-Leninists why would he let an article in an anti-communist newspaper provoke him to make his attack. This is why I accuse him of setting the whole thing up. It fits perfectly in his pattern of doing things, and reflects his motivation to discredit Comrade Bains, who by that time had emerged as a practical Marxist-Leninist organiser in Canada “threatening” Scott’s little kingdom and “reputation.” In fact there was virtually nothing left of the Progressive Workers Movement in 1969. Scott had liquidated the organisation with the exception of a clique of students, most of them Scott had encouraged to split from the Internationalists in August 1967. As for “getting” PWM members, there is no holding down a communist. Jack Maley explains clearly how he left PWM in bitter disgust and contempt of Scott’s anti-communism. How long did it take for him and Comrade Bains to meet and to get to know one another? Two years? Three years? Marxist-Leninists as first nature seek unity with other Marxist-Leninists, seek unity of the people against the handful of common enemies. Only a reactionary seeks to split and divide the communist movement and the masses.
“Progressive Worker (the organ of PWM) was widely known.” Yes, but where? In government circles? In Jack Scott’s basement? “We had over one thousand subscriptions all across Canada and we also sold on newstands.” When? In 1969 which is the time Scott makes his accusation about the Internationalists trying to “gobble” PWM up? No, Jack Maley says: “Although there were 3,000 PWM magazines being printed every month, only 100 of these had a local circulation. In other words, the PWM magazine was no longer the “popular worker’s magazine”. (See item number 6) Scott tries to obscure history. Yes, Progressive Worker was a popular workers’ magazine during its early period. The masses indeed looked toward the PWM for leadership. But they received misleadership, and their hopes for a Marxist-Leninist party were dashed by Scott’s sectarian splittist politics. When the Internationalists were seeking unity with the PWM it was a spent and dying force. But the Internationalists had a great respect for what it thought were the old communists, and would go to any lengths to make a link with the revolutionary workers in PWM. And who hated this most of all, and did everything possible so that those links would not be forged between the revolutionary students and workers –Jack Scott. So he clung like grim death on to his little clique, until they frittered away chasing their shadows and dreams. At the end they were left with a little magazine with some bird’s head munching on a maple leaf! As for numbers of magazines sold, let me tell Jack Scott that CPC(M-L) used to sell more than 3,000 copies of Mass Line on the streets when it was a weekly during the 1969-70 period.
“We did have a name and I was known as the editor of the paper.” Yes, Scott certainly did have a name –swindler, double-dealer, liquidator, anti-communist, to name a few of the names the communist militants denounced him with when they discovered his true charlatan nature, He was known, alright, as a poison-pen writer, promoter of national chauvinism, splitting in the trade union movement. He was also known to the bourgeois media as a kindly old story teller sitting in his rocking chair decked out in his worker’s tee-shirt, a real lumpen-proletarian windbag.
“I personally know a great many people across the country; after all, I have been around the revolutionary movement in Canada for almost half a century.” Yes, this is true, “around and around” the revolutionary movement. But never in the revolutionary movement. A more apt phrase could not be found to describe this vagabond wanderer, this unsettled quasi-intellectual with his fabulous private library and collection of rare books to stir the heart of any eccentric bourgeois academic. He literally trundles his way from one little communalist clique to another winding his way across the country. As for his “several thousand contacts”, Jack Scott you make me laugh at your pretensions. Listen, I used to be one of your “thousands of contacts” when I lived in Edmonton and put up with you. In February 1972 I hustled around with my little communalist clique to gather a meeting for what, 10, 12, people in Edmonton to hear your children’s stories about the Winnipeg General Strike, and the fair haired lady, One Big Union, violated by the Communist Party. At your University of Toronto meeting in October 1971 the CPC(M-L) made up the largest portion of your meeting. That is when you were playing the trickster and using your political double-dealings to advance your credibility. In Ottawa in the summer of 1974 there was a meeting of ten or twelve people; again a number of them were Party people. Jack Scott is just a blow-hard, and is trying his best to create illusions in the minds of some political children under the influence of MREQ, or some other opportunist group. All this advertising is nothing more than Scott trying to wheel and deal in this new coalition of the Holy Alliance of the Left which is falling over itself in a pathetic effort to caricature communism and CPC(M-L).
“All these factors could lead them too (sic) to the totally ridiculous position of inviting someone who was never a member of CPC(M-L), who was not contemplating becoming one, to be national chairman,” All right, now I will clarify what this old fogey is talking about since he doesn’t want to stumble out of the fog himself. I have already described his attempts to use the Party in the fall of 1971. Scott makes such a big mystery out of the natural course of Marxist-Leninists contacting one another to build the unity of the communist movement. Before Scott exposed himself with his double-dealing tricks, the Party made a number of specific proposals to him. One of these proposals was to be Chairman of the Presidium of the Consultative Conference of the Party. I will quote from the Third Plenum document which explains perfectly what the situation was:
“By offering him a position on the Presidium, we wanted his views to be heard and then we could also give the views of the Party and real class struggle on various questions could take place. The Chairman of the Presidium is in no way the chairman of the Party and all this we fully explained to him. As to membership in the Party, it was quite obvious that he was coming close to the Party in Vancouver and it was only just to invite him to join.” (See item number 11)
The Presidium was designed to bring together Party and non-Party friends to have consultations about specific questions affecting the communist movement, and had the specific object in mind of uniting the old, middle-aged and the young Marxist-Leninists across Canada. One proposal was that the Presidium, between consultative conferences (there have been three so far, 1972, 1973, 1974), would edit a Marxist-Leninist theoretical journal which Scott had consistently expressed interest in. This is why he was asked to attend the First Consultative Conference which opened in Toronto, January 1, 1972, and carried on in Montreal on January 8, 1972. He agreed to attend the Conference, received his airline ticket, then went back on his agreement, and that is why he “gave back the ticket.” The conference had nothing whatever to do with the organisational side of the Party, nor did the positions on the Presidium. All his efforts at mystification are to confuse these few simple facts of history?
All of Scott’s breast-beating is now the latest fad in Canadian opportunist circles. If you haven’t offered at least a position on the CPC(M-L) central committee you have no status in beer hall revolutionary jam sessions. Dave Paterson adds little contribution to mystify everything by saying “several persons, including myself, were offered positions on the central committee of CPC(M-L), an organisation to which we did not even belong.” (“The Ravings of a Man Named Dave Paterson”, Mass Line, Vol. 6 and 7, No. 56, August 1975, p. 17) Like Scott, Paterson also mixes everything up to advance his status. CPC(M-L) never offered Paterson a position on any committee! In discussions with the Partisan Organisation in the fall of 1972, in which he never participated, CPC(M-L) and Partisan Organisation agreed that there would be representatives from Partisan Central Committee on the CPC(M-L) Central Committee in order to share experiences for a brief transitional period. But every member of Partisan Organisation who wanted to join CPC(M-L) had to do so on the basis of his or her revolutionary credentials and nothing else. Paterson, Scott and their whole cabal of bit-players and come-by-chance revolutionaries are putting on airs, and intellectualising in front of one another in a desperate effort to turn their comedy into serious farce.
I am tempted to say something not very nice about these reactionary blowhards and intellectual windbags as a consequence of hearing a comment from a mutual acquaintance of mine and these opportunists who live in California. This acquaintance said, “well, MREQ has really nailed CPC(M-L) now.” I am inclined to change their Christian metaphor of crucifixion to a more homely one. The situation is like a human body infected by some lice, and there is this human hand about to reach out and crush this louse named MREQ.
And to crush a few parasitic lice as well. CPC(M-L) is that living body, and is quite prepared to pick off these lice living on the body of revolution in our country. Jack Scott is one of those lice. Three years ago he came up with his poison-pen letter to discredit the Chairman of the Party, Comrade Bains; now three years later he has come up with the drivel in MREQ’s pamphlet. In those same three years this living body of CPC(M-L) has quite gloriously upheld the style of fighting a straight forward battle over political line. But you Jack Scott, and your political allies, don’t address yourself to any of the political issues facing the Canadian people. You are classical social-fascists. The entire revolutionary movement should be warned that you are the eyes and ears of the state, and the PR men for social-chauvinism and for anti-communism right in the midst of the communist movement. Our Party will carry on sustained, painstaking struggle on every front against you. Marxism-Leninism rose in struggle against opportunism. We are thankful to you for providing us this excellent opportunity to train the revolutionary forces in our country in the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought once again. Comrade Bains, my best teacher by positive example, has repeatedly pointed out to me, that while opportunists on their part use every circumstance to create devil theories to mystify, sow confusion and muddle up everything, their opposition to Marxism-Leninism begins and ends with a mere impotent bluster and abuse. For their part, the Marxist-Leninists use every circumstance to clarify issues, and unify the ranks of the people. I fully agree with this outlook of Comrade Bains. We will carry on our tasks of clarification, while you will continue generating confusion.
In conclusion I thank Jack Scott, just as I thank Nigel Morgan, William Stewart, and many many more. They are all revisionists and charlatans. Without their invaluable assistance as teachers by negative example, I would never have known the likes of them could really exist. They are everything I most enthusiastically want to leave behind; the old world which needs to be destroyed in order for any progress to be made in Canada. I am now a proud candidate member of CPC(M-L), a soldier in a revolutionary party whose mission in life is to smash the imperialist system in our country, and build a new people’s Canada free from foreign domination and exploitation of any kind. Only a Party based on the revolutionary theory of Mao Tsetung Thought and organised in the revolutionary style can accomplish such an historic and glorious task. The CPC(M-L) is such a Party!
Long live CPC(M-L)!
Long live Mao Tsetung Thought!
Down with opportunism!
Down with splitters and wreckers!
Long live the unity of Marxist-Leninists of the world!