What Lies Ahead for the Communist Party of Canada?

“Why vote Communist?”

A question I am frequently asked as a Communist Party candiate in Ontario’s provincial election. A vote for the Communist Party is a vote like no other.

When you vote Liberal, PC, Green or NDP, you vote for capitalism. You vote to accept that the system we have now, whether it is working presently or not, is good for the people.

When you vote Communist, you vote for capable worker-politicians. You vote for dedicated activists whose work among the people, for the people, gives us a unique quality. We know how government policies affect the people, how they play out on the ground, and how the people can be organized into the engine that turns the wheel of history.

We are not a party who takes its advice and cues from big business, small business, or foreign business. We learn from, and develop policies for, the working and oppressed people in this land.

Our aim is a socialist Canada, brought about by a large coalition of peoples’ and democratic forces under the leadership of the Communist Party. As the most dedicated activists, we aim to be the most strong-willed and capable leaders. We aim to keep the people firmly grounded in our position in the struggle, directly facing the exploiters and oppressors. We wish to marginalize and weed out those leaders of the people that preach retreat and concession when advance and determination is the order of the day.

Big business in Canada and their talking heads in the media advance anti-communism because communism is bad for them, not bad for the people. When they talk of communism, they focus on leaders and countries far detached from the current realities of Canadian life. When we talk about communism and craft our policies and positions, we base it all on nothing but the realities of that life. They demonize socialist countries for things that are present in our society, and often to a worse degree.

Forget what they say about “economic stability”, about “freedom and democracy”, about “trickle-down economic” or “rising tides lifting all boats”. Forget the business section of the newspaper – it is not neutral or unbiased. No news or information is. All news and information serves a purpose and is spoken from a certain bias. Anybody who says anything to the contrary is not accepting reality. And the business section, the financial advisors on camera, the “wisdom” taught to economic students…all of this serves the interests of the capitalist class.

We, not just the Communist Party but all progressive forces in society, are marginalized. We own no mass media; we do not write the history or economics textbooks; our only resource is the people and their determination to escape the mindlessness, misery and alienation of life under capitalism. Capitalism breeds no solidarity, no peace and certainly no justice. Capitalism breeds division, hate, isolation, and neverending conflict.

Socialism – that which we fight for – puts the people, their views, their needs, their interests and their culture, ahead of the interests of the elite. We work at the grassroots to bring power from the grassroots.

Canada in 2011 is not Russia in 1917, China in 1949, or Cuba in 1959. The means used to achieve and consolidate revolution in those countries will not be the same as used here, just as they were not the same among themselves. But however we bring about a socialist state, whose aim will be to bring all working people into running the country and conversely to knock the capitalist class out of power and out of existence as a class, we must bring it about.

To that end, we advance a program that is progressive to its core that calls for immediate action to improve the lives of working and oppressed people in Canada. We do so to rally all progressive, grassroots organizations around our party’s leadership. The mass organizations and trade unions are the social and economic foundation of socialism; the Communist Party and its allies are the political foundation.

It is the Communist Party that will guide the revolution, but the people and their mass organizations that will make it happen – it is they who will consolidate the revolution at every level of society.

This revolution will not come out of nowhere, or be a matter of the spontaneity of the masses. For this revolution to be a possibility, the Communist Party must achieve trusted leadership among the people. Our members are today working as leaders of the trade union, peace, democratic, farmers, student, youth, LGBTQ, women’s and national liberation movements in Canada. But our leadership needs to be expanded, brought together, and working cohesively. We are working always to achieve this goal.

The necessity of securing firm, committed, unrelenting, Marxist-Leninist leadership over the peoples’ movement has rarely been more pressing. As the presently-dominant social democratic leadership wavers and retreats, the forces of reaction grow stronger. The victory of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives at the federal level, various right-wing mayors exemplified by Rob Ford in Toronto, and the impending possibility of Tim Hudak becoming premier of Ontario, reactionary politicians, activists and businessmen are overjoyed. They have already started the war on the people, and to fight back against that is the duty of every progressive person. It is the duty of every communist to take up the leadership of that fightback.

Worse yet, the signs of nascent fascism are rearing their ugly heads everywhere. Seemingly-isolated incidents like Gary McHale’s antagonism of the Six Nations people fighting to protect their rights, the unleashing of state violence on peaceful protesters at the G20 and Montebello summits, and increasingly aggressive attacks by police on immigrant and guest worker communities are in fact connected to the rise of the reaction in Canada.

The nature of the right-wing is a reaction to progressive forces. In France, the revolution of 1789 met with hostility from the monarchs and lords who wished to preserve their feudal privileges. In America, the revolution of 1779 saw elements loyal to the British Crown battle for years before fleeing to settle in Canada. In interbellum Germany, the Nazis rose as a reaction to the strength of the Communist Party in the country – at the time, the German Communist Party was larger than the Soviet Party.

When capitalism is in extreme decay, and the forces of liberalism no longer enjoy the confidence of the people, fascism enters to fill the void. When that happens, the decisive question becomes a matter of life and death – we must do everything possible to resist the rise of fascism. We cannot do that by conceding, as the Social Democrats fatefully tried to do in Germany.

Politics is the expression of economics through the state. In a moment of extreme crisis, three political options are present:

-Fascism takes over in the interests of the most reactionary elements of capital, and their most subservient and treacherous members of the underclasses;
-Liberalism regains its footing and gains a new lease to rule as a system of class collaboration;
-The working class overthrows liberalism, crushes fascism, and begins to wage a protracted struggle against capitalism to construct socialism, led by their communist party.

The recession of 2008 was a minor speedbump for liberalism, not any sort of real threat to its ability to rule. However, if we are on the cusp of a crisis much worse than the ’08 recession, we may find that the option of liberalism disappears before us.

If that happens, it will only be the widespread faith of the people in the Communist Party’s ability to lead them to power that can prevent fascism’s rise. It will require that at the decisive moment when we must choose one path or the other, that the Communist Party issues correct leadership and makes the right decisions.

Whether we will soon be confronted with this task or not, we must work tirelessly to ensure that when we are confronted with it, we will be ready for it.

 

*originally written and posted on Facebook on September 24, 2011.

Lenin’s Theories Play Out Today

Ninety-three years ago Vladimir Ilyich Lenin took note of the changing landscape of Euro-American capitalism. He observed that capitalism had reached a point in its lifetime where it would have to change to adapt to the agitated working class of their respective countries. Labour unrest could only be put down by force for so long before an outright rebellion erupted, likely to culminate in a revolution to overthrow the capitalist power structure.

Lenin saw the connection between imperialism and capitalism. No longer were monarchies the sole propagators of imperialism; France and the United States are two notable examples of capitalist republics who, through military conquest and back-door deals, began constructing their own global empires.

The United States’ entrance into the circle of empires can be said to have begun in earnest following the Mexican-American War, wherein the entire states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming were ceded to the United States by the nascent independent state of Mexico. Texas had earlier seceded from Mexico (without Mexican consent or recognition) following colonization by Americans of European descent. The United States subsequently annexed the Republic of Texas (with Texan consent) as the 28th state in the Union. The American annexation of Texas, an act of covert conquest through the secessionist settlers, was the casus belli of the Mexican-American War.

France, by comparison, had lost most of its colonial possessions to Britain in the middle of the 18th Century. Napoleon III’s Second French Empire conquered Algeria, but it was not until the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870 that more colonies would be added. French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), French Polynesia, and territory making up the modern nations of Tunisia, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Benin, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, and Djibouti were consumed to satisfy the appetite of the Third Republic’s entrepreneurial capital-imperialists.

In this era, Euro-American industrialization was made exponentially more profitable by the extraction of raw materials from the colonies. Using these huge profit margins, the domestic working class could be paid just enough to keep them from revolting – assuming, of course, that we were all “stupid” enough to not know better, having been denied any opportunities for formal education.

Today a similar scheme is playing out. The developing nations of the world may not be under direct colonial administration anymore, but the combined pressures of the IMF, the World Bank, the governments of the capitalist countries and the armies that enforce their authority has reduced most Third World governments to indebted client states of Western capitalism.

Under these arrangements, shoes, clothing and cheap plastic toys are no longer made in North America, Europe, Japan or Australasia – they are made by extremely poor people (many of them children) in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These people, having little education, might consider the opportunity to work in such a vocation inviting compared to a peasant’s life of neverending toil with, at best, marginal returns. But once they arrive, they are often greeted with a barrage of hidden clauses, unreadable contracts (since the worker in question is likely illiterate), and broken promises.

Meanwhile, the working classes of North America, Europe and parts of the Pacific Rim retain their heavy-duty manufacturing jobs (auto assembly, steel milling, etc.) with enough take-home pay to feed their families, send their children to increasingly-expensive universities and pray for a stable retirement fund.

Under these circumstances, the capitalists pull the wool over the working class’ eyes, lending to them the belief that capitalism is not only functional, but beneficial to all. Any media exposure of the plight of the world’s working poor rarely (if ever) includes the capital-imperialist context.

Such were the conditions of the 1990s, the era of privatization, deregulation and globalization.

Is it not possible, though, that the final collapse of industry in the capitalist world (particularly North America) is upon us? It seems that we may be reaching a point in capitalism’s history where they are transforming yet again, this time to a state of permanent export capital. Cars and machinery won’t come from Ontario, Michigan or Ohio anymore; they will come from China, India and Brazil.

Considering that about 100,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the Greater Toronto Area from 2002 to 2007 alone (according to TD Bank), this certainly seems to be the case.

But what the capitalists must then reckon with is that, as Sir Isaac Newton said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. By the time that the toll of former manufacturing workers reaches one million, they will be facing a virtual army of the unemployed, of those who have invested decades of their lives in a single job to see it exported to Shanghai so that the factory owner can become even richer. And it will be any angry army. They will know exactly who to blame for the destruction of their livelihoods.

Or…

They will blame their job losses on the immigrants and minorities who “took” their jobs (the jobs were not handed to the immigrants by the capitalists so that profits will rise – no, the jobs were “taken” by the immigrants). They will organize not to fight the capitalists, but to racially cleanse the city streets. They will take the capitalists’ racist and sexist bait hook, line and sinker and turn a blind eye to the ever-fattening bank accounts of the capitalists who threw them overboard.

Unless communists, socialists, anarchists and indeed ALL progressives unite to organize the working class, including the recently-unemployed, into an anti-capitalist force, we may be doomed to experience the latter scenario.