The Fourth Conference of Canadian Marxist-Leninists, to be held in early February, comes at a particularly important moment for the Canadian working-class movement. The Conference, which will deal with the current tasks of Canadian communists at the stage of reconstructing the party, comes at the moment when the very question of creating the party capable of making the socialist revolution is more and more on the minds of the most class-conscious and militant workers.
The crisis that the capitalist world, including Canada is experiencing, and the repressive measures the bourgeoisie has been forced to introduce because of it, have made the proletariat increasingly conscious that socialism is the only real solution to the ills of capitalism. At the same time, parties that claim to serve the interests of the masses, in particular the NDP and the PQ, are being increasingly shown up for the frauds that they are, especially since where they have taken power they have clearly revealed their fundamentally bourgeois character. In the same manner the union centres, whose role is to serve the interests of workers, but who almost all support the NDP or the PQ to one degree or another, are being unmasked on several levels.
This is the background against which a growing number of workers have begun to see the young Marxist-Leninist movement as a very serious hope, as the embryo of the force capable of leading the masses in the struggle for socialism. This in itself is an important victory because it is indeed under the leadership of its revolutionary class party, a party that applies Marxism-Leninism, that the proletariat will be able to defeat the bourgeoisie and build socialism. Today, the Marxist-Leninist movement is engaged in that very struggle, in the struggle to build the party of the revolution.
One would have to be very naive to believe that from now on things are just going to develop on their own. The bourgeoisie, for its part, has already given ample proof that it is willing to use any means necessary to prevent the working class from opting for a revolutionary orientation. It has already thrown itself into a rapidly billowing anti-communist campaign. Workers who are communists, or even just sympathetic to the Marxist-Leninist movement, are laid off on a variety of pretexts. Newspapers, radio and television have gone out of their way to present communists in an unfavourable, even ridiculous, light. Communists, they say, are a pack of troublemakers, they’re a gang of dangerous dreamers.
What is worse, these same words have been taken up by some within the working-class movement itself, especially by the labour bosses, who have not failed to notice that their collaboration with the bourgeoisie is being increasingly contested.
Up to this point, it’s all relatively easy to disentangle: there is nothing overly surprising in the fact that the bourgeoisie and its agents within the working-class movement are viciously opposed to the Marxist-Leninist current and to the communists themselves, But at the same time that the old-style social democrats are inevitably being exposed, a “new generation” of so-called socialists and communists is in the process of coalescing and is getting ready to lead the working-class movement down a reformist dead-end. Look at the revisionist Communist Party of Canada that totally betrayed the working class more than thirty years ago, trying to shine the buttons on its uniform. Look at the Trotskyists who spend years and years dividing and subdividing but who have today entered a phase of reunification.
But what currently characterizes the special efforts of the bourgeoisie to safeguard its hegemony over the labour and working-class movements is the proliferation of groups and organizations in every region of the country that call themselves socialist, or Marxist, or even Marxist-Leninist. Some of these groups have the nerve to present themselves as the party of the working class. All of them have two things in common. First, they are all to the left of the PQ and the NDP and, in general, of the present leadership of the union centres. Second, they are all important obstacles to the dissemination of the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint either by denouncing it outright, or by deforming to such a degree that it leads to the same result: the slowing down of the merger between Marxism-Leninism and the working-class movement.
Claiming to build socialism without relying on Marxism-Leninism, and draping an opportunist line with the banner of Marxism-Leninism, are both revisionist. They both provide the bourgeoisie with an invaluable service in its reactionary fight to prevent the victory of proletarian ideology in the working-class movement. Today, the task of the authentic Marxist-Leninist forces is to expose these phoney revolutionaries, to destroy their opportunist line and to bring the vanguard of the proletariat into the struggle to build the Marxist-Leninist party.
It was through putting forward its point of view and criticizing the reformist, social-democratic, Trotskyist and revisionist points of view that the Marxist-Leninist movement has reached its current level of development. The time has come for our work to take on a more rigorous and systematic form, and by making the defence of the program for proletarian revolution the focal point of its activities, the Marxist-Leninist movement will be able to unite and rally the most advanced workers to communism. This is what the struggle to build the party commands at the present time; this is the key to victory over the opportunist tendencies which even within the proletariat form the greatest obstacle to the realization of this basic task.
Since September 1976, the Canadian Marxist-Leninist group IN STRUGGLE!, with the collaboration of the other participating groups, has organized three national and several regional conferences of Marxist- Leninists. The first, in September 1976, dealt with the unity of communists; the second, in April 1977, examined the path of the proletarian revolution in Canada; and the third, in September 1977, focused on the international situation and the resulting tasks of communists. Despite the boycott of the Second and Third Conferences undertaken by the Canadian Communist League (Marxist-Leninist), and despite the fact that one group, Bolshevik Union, came more in a spirit of divisiveness than a spirit of unity, there is no doubt that the Conferences strongly contributed to the political development of the movement as a whole; that they promoted the dissemination of the communist viewpoint within the masses; and that they made important victories of Marxism-Leninism over opportunism possible. As well, they were a positive factor in the unification of authentic communists across the country.
The Fourth Conference on the tasks of Marxist-Leninists must be an opportunity to consolidate the advances made in the past, to unmask more clearly than ever erroneous viewpoints and to reaffirm the ideological and political unity of Marxist-Leninist forces with the aim of concretely preparing the fundamental debates that will take place in the coming months on questions of program. Because it is around the program of the proletarian revolution, and only around this program, that Canadian communists will be able to unite on a solid footing and go on to create the authentic party of the revolutionary proletariat, the party that will be able to guide the Canadian masses in the struggle for socialism.