Just as the socialist revolution will be unsuccessful without the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party, so the Marxist-Leninist party cannot be formed as the unified organization of all communists and as the leading centre of the proletarian revolution without being based on the program of the proletarian revolution. This is truer than ever today. At a time when there are many organizations and parties claiming to be fighting for socialism (and among them some who erroneously call themselves communists), the program upon which the proletarian party will base its actions will unquestionably be the ultimate test of its demarcation from all the so-called socialists and all the false communists.
For several years now the new communist forces in Canada have been directing considerable energy towards acquiring a communist viewpoint on Canadian society and the manner in which to fight for socialism here.
It is now possible to systematize the theoretical lessons and the concrete analysis and draw up the program for socialist revolution in Canada. Just recently the group IN STRUGGLE! published the Draft Program which it is submitting to the Marxist-Leninist movement and the working masses. We believe that at the present time the question of the program must be central to the concerns of communists involved in the struggle for the party.
Some might suggest that this is so obvious that it does not need to be repeated. And it is true that no one challenges, in words, the necessity of the program in the struggle to build the party. However, what happens is that it remains an assertion without practical consequences. So it is not necessarily so obvious. It is similar to the question of party-building, which as everyone likes to repeat, is the central task today: yet this does not prevent many communists who claim to share this viewpoint from devoting lots of energy to the Canadianization or democratization of unions and to making them into so-called “class-struggle unions” rather than building the base of an authentic proletarian party founded on nothing other than the Marxist-Leninist program.
We can illustrate the above with a concrete example. Everyone knows that in September the League decreed that the group IN STRUGGLE! had sunk into revisionism. Ever since then each issue of their newspaper The Forge has contained at least one article (and sometimes two or three) designed to prove IN STRUGGLE!’s revisionism. So far we have been treated to all sorts of nonsense. Generally the editors of The Forge take part of a sentence out of context, often deforming it, and then conclude pompously: well this proves IN STRUGGLE!’s revisionism.
This infantile behaviour characteristic of demagogues who delight in simple and clear statements is what led one of The Forge’s ink-slingers to write in the December 9 issue that IN STRUGGLE! is revisionist without a shadow of a doubt because one of its partisans stated at the QFL convention that IN STRUGGLE! was not in a hurry to create the party. The Forge was scandalized by such revisionist scorn for the masses!
In fact, IN STRUGGLE! is not in a rush to create a bogus party of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) or the Canadian Party of Labour variety or of the type the League claims to be in such haste to proclaim. This means that IN STRUGGLE! intends to create a party which has a Marxist-Leninist program, which unites genuine Canadian communists, which is sufficiently linked to the masses and has rallied enough workers (and not the eternal students disguised in overalls) that it will not indefinitely remain a party which only its members recognize and no one else listens to.
And so, if IN STRUGGLE! is not “in a hurry” to formally create the party, this is not, as the League claims, a manifestation of revisionism. Quite the opposite; it is because IN STRUGGLE! wishes to see the party created when the necessary conditions have been met, among them, the existence of a party program which demarcates clearly from revisionism. IN STRUGGLE! is not in a “hurry” to create the party but is involved at this very moment in tasks which will lead to its creation on a solid and genuinely communist footing.
This is not the case for the League which, to mention only one aspect of the problem, has not yet shown the slightest interest in the question of the program. We therefore ask the League the following question: What is the political basis upon which they expect to create the party they talk about and which the masses so urgently need? On the basis of the Statement of Agreement of November 1975? This text is in no way a party program. It is packed with serious political errors. Long sections of it are nothing more than a collection of phrases and paragraphs taken from Peking Review on the “three worlds” and from old CP documents on Canadian imperialism.
Or perhaps the League intends to create a party based on its different “class-struggle platforms” for daycare centres, food co-ops, etc., etc.? On the one hand these platforms are essentially reformist and, on the other, they do not address the central question of the socialist revolution. If the League’s “party” were to put these platforms forward in one form or another, this party would simply not be a Marxist-Leninist party but a “workers’ party” of the sort called for by the RMS, the SW or their ilk.
The League would obviously not agree with this viewpoint because, they would say, they are Marxist-Leninists. But the League’s intentions are one thing and the revolutionary party is another; we will know whether or not the party is the revolutionary party, regardless of the intentions and the pretensions of its members, if it puts forward or fails to put forward a revolutionary program.
What can we conclude from all this? That it is the League which has a revisionist position on the creation of the party, not IN STRUGGLE! It is the League which is committing the very errors it falsely accused IN STRUGGLE! of a year ago, that is, putting organizational questions above political questions. Concretely this means that the League claims that what is principal now for the creation of the party is the establishment of factory cells across the country. Ignoring for the moment the important question of who is to form these so-called cells – implanted students or workers – we must ask the League what program these cells are to be based upon: is it the communist program for revolution or the platform of struggle for the transformation of unions into “class-struggle unions”?
Since the League has a variety of platforms instead of a program, and since it does more agitation-propaganda on economic struggles and on the transformation of unions than on the question of the party and party program, its supposed factory cells dangerously risk being nothing but replicas of the workers’ committees of the defunct RCT gathering together militant workers who are struggling to change their union, thinking that this will lead to the party. In the name of the need to build the party in the heat of class struggle and within the framework of the immediate needs of the proletariat, the League is on its way to repeating an error which has been made dozens of times. And that error is to make tactics primary over strategy, to subordinate long-term objectives to the short-term objectives. The League could well set up a hundred or a thousand factory cells across the country, but if they are not communist cells they will not advance the struggle for the communist party by an iota; this will do nothing but consolidate the radical reformist tendency within the workers’ movement.
Every time in history that communists have made secondary the fundamental questions of program and strategy, they have gone down the opportunist path. One of the texts in which Lenin analysed this question very thoroughly is What is to be Done? At the very moment when the struggle for the reorganization of the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolshevik) was in full swing, the opportunists in the party were very anxious to call a congress in order to put the party organization on its feet without first being concerned with the line and the program of the party.
If Lenin and the Bolsheviks were not in a hurry to convene the party congress, which was finally held in 1903, it was not out of contempt for the masses and it was not because they wanted to create a revisionist party. In fact, Lenin’s objective at this time was to rid the Russian communist forces of economism and to ensure that the party be re-established on a truly Marxist basis, guaranteed by a program.
Well, what is the present situation in the Canadian workers’ movement as regards the struggle for socialism? The workers’ movement continues to be dominated by the old social democrats and by complete reformism on the one hand, and on the other hand, there are many groups and organizations which claim to be fighting for socialism and which denounce the NDP and the PQ, as well as the leadership of the CLC, the CNTU and even the CCU (Council of Canadian Unions). There are Marxist-Leninists and those who refer to Marxism-Leninism among these organizations. All these organizations are vying for the interests of the advanced and militant workers, and their often divergent positions cause considerable confusion since they all claim to have the correct line leading to socialism. It would be completely irresponsible for communists to claim that the conditions for the creation of the party have been met before there has been a clear demarcation of Marxism-Leninism from all the false solutions which run rampant in the workers’ movement on the question of socialism. And the main instrument in this demarcation can only be the Marxist-Leninist program for proletarian revolution in Canada.
So it is not through the League’s different reformist platforms, it is not through the password “class-struggle union” (borrowed, incidentally from the Saskatchewan Waffle), and it is not through the denunciation of corrupt union bosses... that this demarcation will occur. One does not have to be a communist to agree with the fight for popular daycare centers, or with the need for unions which are more democratic and combative, or with the elimination of corruption in the trade unions. To put it another way: it is not in the area of reforms and immediate struggle that communists must primarily gather, it is essential that this demarcation be on the program for socialist revolution.