First Published: In Struggle! No. 164, June 26, 1979
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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“CPC(M-L) is nothing but a paper empire of newspapers, phoney organizations and postal box number.” That is the conclusion reached by the Regroupement des ex-militants du PCC(m-l), a group of former members of the CPC(M-L), in its pamphlet, “CPC(M-L), a neo-Revisionist Organization”.
They continue: “Looking over the last eleven years of CPC(M-L)’s history, we can see that it never had a communist programme which demarcated from revisionism and opportunism in Canada. It never worked to accomplish the fusion of Marxism with the Canadian workers movement, managing only to spread out a handful of members isolated from one another ’from sea to shining sea’. CPC(M-L) never succeeded in building a national organization. It never applied a Leninist constitution, hence its organizational form was bureaucratic centralism. One fact says it all: there is but one leader who has survived all the zigs and zags engineered by CPC(M-L) and that is H.S. Bains and one close friend of his family.”
The Regroupement, set up in the summer of 1978 after “a number of people who had been members of CPC(M-L) for a long time” quit, believes that “there is a Marxist-Leninist centre for the rebuilding of the party; it is the MLOC IN STRUGGLE! and its Programme and Constitution are the programme and constitution for all communists in Canada.” The Regroupement adopted the following resolution at its May 18 1979 meeting: “Be it resolved that the group dissolve itself, that its former members stop meeting together in an organized fashion and that each comrade individually rally to IN STRUGGLE!.”
This decision to rally to IN STRUGGLE! is not only proof of the CPC(M-L)’s utter bankruptcy. It is also tangible evidence that the struggle for the unity of communists is being actively carried out in Canada today. IN STRUGGLE!’s Third Congress has given the Canadian working class back its communist Programme. Revolutionaries who have been taken in by the revisionism of the old Communist Party, the League or the CPC(M-L) can now make use of this Programme to break from those organizations or “parties” in order to work side by side with all sincere communists to rebuild the party of the proletariat. Workers who have been harangued for years by the social-democrats to ’vote for the lesser evil party to avoid the worst’ can decide to go for the best by taking up the Programme to create their own party.
The Regroupement was able, through studying the Programme and Constitution, and coming to agree with them, to clearly identify the CPC(M-L)’s revisionist positions and determine the tasks and perspectives that Canadian communists must take up. The following excerpts from their pamphlet “CPC(M-L), a Neo-revislonist Organization” is confirmation of this fact. The text also sheds more light on the duplicity and chauvinism of CPC(M-L):
...“Its ’internationalism’ amounts in practice to refusing to educate the Canadian proletariat to condemn and fight against its own bourgeoisie which exploits and oppresses workers and peoples in many countries. That is true for Chile, ... for Brazil, the West Indies, Africa etc ... it is a massive fraud to claim that this “party firmly supports the communist parties and revolutionary movements in these countries.
... The leadership has always been opposed to the communist policy of equality of languages and nations... It never once undertook a campaign among the English Canadian proletariat to get it to recognize the right to self-determination of the Quebec nation, including the right to separate... It never gave support to the demands of Francophones outside Quebec. Still less did it ever back the demands of the Native peoples preferring to advance the very vague slogan of respecting their hereditary rights.
...In keeping with its opportunist practice, the CPC(M-L) has over the years set up dummy committees on appropriate occasions like International Women’s Year. The committee declared into existence would then be allowed to remain inactive for a few years only to be revived, like the women’s organization was, for an occasion like the Eighth Congress of the Albanian Union of Women. It goes without saying that this committee, like all the others, was an organization in name only. It had no internal life nor was there any practical work done among the sector of the people it was supposedly concerned with.
...The congresses were held in contempt for Leninist norms... The delegates were not elected by their cells or committees... From the very first Congress to the most recent Special Congress (April 1978), documents were never ever made available. Instead we had the right to go listen to a number of speeches by the leadership where they gave us the line... It is clear to us that in this party there isn’t any kind of free and voluntary unity built between communists”.