mosfeld
22nd July 2011, 14:30
A Canadian Maoist elaborates why he supports the PCR-RCP in his country. The PCR-RCP is very similar to RIM affiliates, such the MLM Parties in Italy, France, Peru, Afghanistan and India.
Why I Support the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada
by JMP
Originally this was supposed to be a much smaller post, generally meant to reply to some of the question I've received from friends and comrades who have asked me, for several years now, why I tend to sympathize with and endorse/support the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada both in my blog and in my real life. Due to the recent arrests of four PCR-RCP members, and the revelation that the Canadian state is taking this organization seriously as a possible threat, I decided it might be appropriate to write an article explaining the political and philosophical reasons behind my support. Until very recently, aside from those of us who follow Maoist-style politics, the PCR-RCP has been generally unknown in english-dominant Canada (as opposed to in Quebec where they have much more recognition) and this is post is generally aimed at this part of the country, as well as those readers in other countries who have expressed interest in this organization. As noted above, it was meant to be much shorter: I have since divided the content into three posts.
Years ago, when the majority of political activist energy was filtered through the affinity and working groups of my union local, I had an encounter with a fellow union activist about the need to be involved in something broader than disconnected, though perhaps vital, groups. He argued that, since I defined as a communist, I should involve myself in a communist organization that was closer to a party due to the limits to "movementism" and "trade union consciousness." At the time, since I was just emerging from an "anti-vanguard" type of communism, I was not entirely convinced by his arguments. Moreover, due to my dawning sympathies with anti-colonial and third world marxism (sympathies that would eventually lead me to Maoism), I was also unconvinced that the communist organization he was promoting, the New Socialist Group [NSG], answered the political questions I was just beginning to ask.
Eventually when I started to move towards Lenin's analysis of the state, I could not help but recall this conversation. The problem, however, was that the solution he had proposed (getting involved with the NSG) did not seem entirely compelling: there did not appear to be any communist organization in Toronto, let alone Canada, that adequately addressed the problems I was beginning to believe were raised by the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Even my partner (who was responsible for so much of my political education) was arguing for the need to become involved in something broader than the union movement or these "movementist" groups, claiming that I might benefit from something that was actually "communist" rather than simply unionist or activist. And I remember telling her, on more than one occasion, "you're right but I don't feel drawn to any of the organizations in Toronto."
That is, even if I could accept that there was a need for a revolutionary party, something that could ideologically unite various and disparate struggles, there did not appear to be any organization in the city that was up to the challenge. This is not to say that I dismissed the work of activists in organizations like the New Socialist Group, Autonomy and Solidarity [now the "Upping the Anti" collective], or even the Socialist Project––some of them were doing, and continue to do, excellent work––but just that all of these groups did not appear to have: 1) a truly concrete analysis of the concrete situation that is Canada; 2) an appreciation for both the historical and international histories of revolution.
For example, none of the Toronto communist organizations (whether they proclaimed themselves as "parties" or "projects" or "pre-parties" or etcetera), possessed a theoretically unified analysis of the Canadian social and historical context and what it would mean to build a revolutionary organization within this context. The analysis was disparate, sometimes intentionally eclectic, and often was about to responding to anti-people politics rather than coherently explaining a pro-people, that is communist, political program. And though some of this analysis was incisive and influential to my growth as a political activist, it did not seem substantially different than the analysis that could be produced by leftist intellectuals involved in disparate affinity groups. The point being: I wanted to involve myself with a group that could actually produce a productive and revolutionary response to the Canadian context––a group that knew what it was for, and not just what it was against, and was interested in working out the steps required, in this capitalist-colonialist nation, for revolution.
The fact that the majority of these Toronto groups were rather dismissive of the politics that emerged from the two great world historical communist revolutions––first Russia and then China––was something that always troubled me. Since I was moving towards a position that understood that the insights derived from the Chinese Revolution possessed as much universal significance as those derived from the Russian Revolution, I could not in good faith work with an organization that dismissed the contributing of Maoism, was dogmatically Trotskyist (or at the very least post-Trotskyist), and maybe didn't even reflect the insights of the Russian Revolution––aside from some general "Lenin-was-a-great-revolutionary-leader-but-Stalin-ruined-things" position. Other than a vague lip-service to the Russian Revolution, there was really no significant talk of the Chinese Revolution, or even a coherent appreciation of the lessons learned from past anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles. Even worse, when the Peoples War in Nepal was at its apex, not one of these groups even cared; they were more invested in populist movements in Venezuela than a potential communist revolution––some of them even admitted that they didn't care about Nepal because they "knew where that type of politics would lead" (an odd statement from supposed communists).
And these were the organizations of the supposed "non-dogmatic" communist left. For I already knew that I would never be interested in those antiquated self-proclaimed parties that were trapped in historical dead-ends, cultic and missionary, or had degenerated into parliamentarianism. These painfully orthodox organizations were the sorts of organizations, after all, that had once made me feel that communism was either repellant or antiquated.
So when I first learned of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada [PCR-RCP] I was initially wary. First of all, the fact that it called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party caused me to immediately associate it with a notorious and dogmatic organization in the United States. And even after one of my close comrades (a Maoist whose many debates and interventions with me influenced my understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) attended the PCR-RCP's founding congress and explained that, no, the Canadian Revolutionary Communist Party was entirely different from the identically named organization south of the border, I was still somewhat suspicious. At that point in time I had resigned myself to a Maoist-Third-Worldism by default: this was not to say that I believed that revolution was impossible in the centres of capitalism, and that the solution was some sort of global peoples war, but that I was becoming more and more convinced that the "culture industry" prevalent in imperialist countries might be strong enough to prevent any potential and truly revolutionary party from emerging. Although my communism was beginning to embrace the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, my experience with the supposedly revolutionary groups in Toronto––groups that spoke of revolution as something that happened elsewhere but were never interested in imagining its possibility in their own context––unfortunately predisposed me towards skepticism.
It wasn't until my experiences with my union local's most recent strike that I was again faced with the limitations of trade unionism, the need for involving myself in something broader––the necessity for a communist party that was brought home by the boundaries of union politics. Thus, following the sordid end of the strike, I once again started to investigate the existence of self-proclaimed communist parties in my political landscape. Recalling what the comrade mentioned above had said about the PCR-RCP, I decided to seriously engage with its program. Several other members of my union local, who were also impressed by the limitation of trade-unionism, joined me in several reading groups that engaged with the party program. And though this engagement was eventually aborted due to post-strike exhaustion, it was still an engagement that caused me to appreciate both the program and existence of the PCR-RCP. But it was also this engagement that led me to attend the Second Canadian Revolutionary Congress sponsored by the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada and, upon being impressed by the PCR-RCP members in attendance, to decide that I both sympathized with and supported this organization as the only current potential and revolutionary party in Canada.
And since I still get questions as to why I think that the PCR-RCP is the only existing organization in Canada that I believe can rightfully call itself a party, as compared to those other organizations I was never interested in joining, I am going to try and explain my reasons for thinking in this way. I understand from my own experience, after all, the immediate skepticism that is raised against a group that uses the term "revolutionary party." I don't think this skepticism is wrong: there have been so many disappointments, and so many new communist groups that manifest every two or three years––entryists, other versions of parliamentarianism, or splinter fractions of the same Trotsykist/post-Trotsykist banality.
There are reasons, after having observed the Toronto left and seeing the limits of even what its most progressive communist organizations could offer, that I believe the PCR-RCP is worth supporting. I have broken these reasons down into five interrelated categories, the first of which I will discuss below and the other four I will divide into two successive posts: settler-colonialism and the national question; advanced guard versus tailism; concrete analysis of a concrete situation; revolutionary versus activist mind-set; and practice.
1: settler-colonialism and the national question in Canada.
This was probably the biggest barrier to joining the actually existing communist groups––especially since I was doing academic work on the question of settler-colonialism and was very aware that this nation we call "Canada" emerged through the contradiction of colonizer and colonized. Although some communist groups were good at supporting indigenous self-determination, none of them really placed this self-determination within a larger theoretical framework. They could not explain, aside from basic human rights and morality appeals, the why of supporting indigenous sovereignty.
This is not to say that some of these groups were not excellent in some of their practice surrounding indigenous self-determination (some of the members of Upping The Anti, for example, have been extremely exemplary in this regard, especially and most recently in the case of the Six Nations stand-off with Caledonia), but that there was no attempt to place this practice within a coherent theoretical approach to revolution in Canada. Even worse: the anarchists who were sometimes better than the communists in concretely supporting indigenous struggle would often, due to their anarchist politics, fight tooth-and-nail against the idea of national sovereignty––and some supposed "communist" groups were not immune to this political analysis.
And then there were those groups who, though endorsing indigenous self-determination, were still so caught up in demands for Quebecois sovereignty as the prime national question, that they really had no systematic way of assessing Canadian settler-colonialism. At best, the fundamental colonial contradiction was treated as identical to the supposed Quebec-Canada contradiction; at worst, it was misconstrued as a disconnected moral issue––something to do with "rights" and "decency"––allowing some of the more dogmatic groups to argue that Lenin's theory of the national question had nothing to do with indigenous people who (insert chauvinist reason here) lacked proper nationhood. (I wish I was joking, but I'm not: this is an argument that is actually made by some "marxist" groups.)
So the first thing that made me take the PCR-RCP seriously, the make-it-or-break-it test that because of my political sympathies I would use to assess communist groups, was the fact that it was the only communist group in Canada that understands the settler-colonial context within a comprehensive party program. And despite the fact that the PCR-RCP emerged in Quebec, it is significant in that it applies Lenin's theory of the national question primarily to indigenous nations and not to the Quebecois. (And according to some of the ignorant comments of the post mentioned above demonstrated a hatred of this position.) The fact that the settler-colonial question was approached as important, and in a concrete manner, is extremely significant––especially (and I emphasize this especially) in a nation that only exists because of a colonial encounter. I should also point out that the similarly named American group is known for having a rather chauvinist approach to settler-colonialism (among other things).
2: advanced guard versus tailism
I've lost count of the number of times a member of a self-proclaimed communist organization has argued that you cannot talk about politics x because this might alienate everyday people. Sometimes this has taken the form of not talking about communism––maybe going so far as to hide one's own communism––because "the working class", especially in Canada, might find communism frightening.
This attitude is often the result of Draper's theory of "socialism from below" that is currently more popular in Toronto than anywhere else. The claim is that the masses will figure out the correct politics on their own, spontaneously perhaps, and we just need to get behind them when they do––there's no point in talking to them ahead of time because that would just get in the way of their historical destiny. And even though this position sounds good it is actually quite condescending because it results in a refusal to actually talk to people, many of whom lack the privilege to engage with political texts in, for example, a university setting, and share this privilege. It is a with-holding, a miserly hoarding of knowledge, and is often rather political: "we'll talk to other intellectuals about communism, or people at demonstrations who look like our type, but not to people outside of university and activist circles––can't have them misunderstand this sort of thing until they're ready!" As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argued in an old Cell 16 article:
"We must avoid one major error of middle-class organizers. In an effort to 'win' people over to the movement (win a vote?), organizers often imitate the style of life of those they are organizing. This is patronizing and unliberating and cruel. People who are oppressed want alternatives, and want to learn. They do not want to be further entrenched in their oppressive style of life. We must be generous with our knowledge, and not underestimate the desire for freedom on the part of the oppressed, and not mistake ignorance for desire." (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution)
For even when some groups will out themselves as communist, there are times when they still refuse to push the radical politics that communism should entail: they will avoid the questions raced by feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and queer movements––perhaps worried that these radical concerns will drive people away. Even worse, they will say communism out of one side of their mouths, and parliamentarianism out of the other: that is, they will speak of the need for revolution and then spend most of their time agitating for social democratic reformism.
This is tailing the masses rather than providing them with a revolutionary alternative. Clearly the point is not that a revolutionary party should be completely divorced from the masses, but it still needs to be providing a revolutionary direction: the theory of the mass-line says that an advanced communist organization needs to engage in a from the masses to the masses circuit: organizing the spontaneous concerns and visceral desire for rebellion into a coherent politics. This mass-line politics can never simply be from the masses; going to the masses cannot mean disguising one's politics.
One of the things I have admired about the PCR-RCP is that it practices this mass-line understanding of revolutionary politics, refusing to lapse into tailism. After all, people who tail the masses are sometimes people who are not really involved in the struggles of the masses: whereas some groups are cabalistic revolutionary purists who are dogmatically so far beyond the masses to make them divorced from peoples' everyday concerns, so many other groups lag behind when it comes to their political practice––waiting for some spontaneous movement that they hope will be the revolution. The PCR-RCP, however, has engaged with political struggles of the everyday and, within these struggles, has always argued that it is important to agitate for communism. Not a dogmatic: we-know-better-than-you approach symptomatic of certain marxist missionary groups (and thus papers that babble incessantly about arcane debates from 1917) but an attempt to actually connect in an organizational manner.
I learned this concretely when I joined the open organization that was formed at the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress and found myself involved in projects that were an attempt to honestly agitate for communism and use this agitation as a method of organizing. First there was the Elections Boycott Campaign, where the PCR-RCP argued that an already existing boycott (where a significant portion of the Canadian masses refused, and still refuse, to participate in parliamentarianism) signified a spontaneous rejection of the system and so the role of communists was to engage with this sentiment according to the mass-line: the rejection of the system in the form of a refusal to vote came from the masses; the job of communists was to therefore go to the masses, engage with this refusal, and attempt to organize it into something politically coherent. And we learned, from speaking to people on the street, that this the refusal was indeed an angry rejection of the system––and this anger provided an opportunity to speak about the need for organizing a revolutionary alternative.
Secondly, we are also involved in an ongoing attempt to actually spread communism in the form of an accessible and non-sectarian newspaper. Rather than simply leaving these newspapers at drop points where we would have no idea if they're being taken or read, we have handed them out on the street and used them as an occasion to speak with people. Not to say "hey, join our group right now because we are the priests of a new order," but to actually speak about communist politics and encounter others who might be drawn to revolutionary praxis.
The point being, any communist organization that refuses to openly agitate for radical politics (choosing instead to either become dogmatically insular or engage in tailism) is far from the avant garde of a revolutionary movement. This very simple act of agitating publicly for communism––and doing so without engaging in dogmatism, leftist turf wars, or liquidating the idea of revolution within bourgeois democracy––is the bare minimum requirement of any communist organization that wants to call itself a party.
3: concrete analysis of a concrete situation
Any organization that claims to be revolutionary party needs to possessed a unified political theory that is a concrete analysis of its concrete situation. So just as the Bolsheviks required a unified theory that could explain revolution in their social and historical context, and the Chinese Communists under Mao needed the same for their situation, a party needs to develop what I have called elsewhere a living marxism (specifically in this part of an inter-blog dialogue that is somewhat onerous) that not only takes into account the revolutionary lessons of the past, but is able to synthesize these questions within its own social and historical context.
Thus, another one of the initial reasons I was drawn to the PCR-RCP was that its programme (along with its related theoretical essays in the french Arsenal and the english Peoples War Digest) was the first coherently successful attempt, in my opinion, of developing a proper revolutionary and historical materialist analysis of this social context at this historical juncture. If we communists believe that, along with Lenin, there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, then we should accept that it extremely important to have a coherent and concrete theoretical foundation. And not an overly academicized foundation, but one that is aimed at actual revolutionary praxis––a theory that demands practice rather than alienating the former from the latter.
In the first main point of my previous entry, I discussed how the PCR-RCP's analysis of settler-colonialism was what first, years ago, caused me to take interest. This consideration is intimately connected to my point about a concrete analysis of a concrete situation: I strongly believe that since the nation called "Canada" emerged from the violent contradictions of colonial conquest, any valid historical materialist analysis of the Canadian situation needs to deal with this, and deal with it properly, if it wants to be taken seriously. It is not enough to simply pay lip-service to indigenous rights for they have to be seen as revolutionary needs, rather than simple liberal rights, and as part of the material reality that produces Canadian class struggle. As Mao's theory of contradiction tells us, if we ignore contradictions of oppression that are part of the way our society was born and continues to function, and even if we ignore these contradictions because they do not appear to fit an orthodox and dogmatic understanding of the "capitalist versus labour" contradiction, then we are actually supporting the ruling classes and are against revolutionary class struggle.
(In any case, the PCR-RCP is the only communist party organization in Canada that has properly and concretely approached the contradiction of colonialism, has refused to treat it as an interesting side-issue, and treats it as a significant part of the structure of Canadian capitalism. I'm re-emphasizing this here because this really does need to be seen as extremely significant: there has not been a single would-be communist party in Canada that has treated settler-colonialism and the national question of Canada's colonized nations with the same seriousness. This is not to say that individual communists, and maybe even small groups of communists, haven't produced proper analyses; what I am saying that no self-proclaimed Canadian communist party, communist pre-party, or communist project has treated this issue with either the same seriousness, the same historical materialist insight, and the same anti-colonial principles. I believe I can make this claim because my doctoral work was on anti-colonialism and marxism and, after spending years researching the Canadian would-be communist parties and their theoretical understanding of Canadian settler-colonialism, I tended to dismissive all of these parties as being ideologically blind to this fact. Again, it was one of the reasons that this was the first thing I wanted to know about the PCR-RCP when I initially heard of its existence.)
Moreover, the PCR-RCP's theoretical analysis does another four things that other Canadian communist organizations are not doing: i) it summarizes the Canadian historical context of struggle and coherently assesses the current historical juncture; ii) it rejects simplistic and dogmatic guidelines in an attempt to make sense of the location and nature of the Canadian revolutionary class; iii) it places Canada squarely within the imperialist camp, as its own and independent imperialist power, rather than treating it as a proxy imperialist power that is somehow also neo-colonized by the United States; iv) it uses all of this in its programme (which is a to-the-point explanation of the larger body of theoretical work it has been producing because it is a programme) to focus on the need for revolution and thus even discusses the how and why of achieving revolution in Canada.
I am not going to spend too much time explaining in-depth the PCR-RCP's programme––it would be better if people assessed it for themselves using the link provided above––because the aim of these entries is to summarize the reasons why I decided this organization was worth supporting. Suffice to say, those four points are extremely important, both separately and together, and I'm sure that some of my Canadian readers can understand the controversy of some of the points. Point (iii), for example, is a contentious issue amongst those Canadian communist organizations that claim to be parties: the PCR-RCP is the first self-proclaimed party that rejects the ahistorical and problematic notion that Canada is not an imperialist power in its own right––and though there are a few contemporary leftist academics who have just recently begun writing on this issue. Jerome Klassen, for example, first pioneered this position in Canadian academia several years back; Todd Gordon has recently written a book on this very issue. Even still, the PCR-RCP was pushing this position before it emerged in academia, and is the first Canadian communist party to have taken this position.
And the other points––an accurate summation of the Canadian struggle and its current juncture, a concrete engagement with the Canadian class struggle and what constitutes/composes the proletariat, and an attempt to actually think through the steps required for a revolution––are what make the PCR-RCP programme pretty much the only programme in this social-historical context that is not: a) so theoretically dense and obtuse that only a few specialists can read it; b) so crude and anti-intellectual that theory is disdained for spontaneity; c) incoherent and thus not worthy of being called a programme in the first place.
All of this is very significant in a period where attempted party programmes and theoretical approaches in the Canadian left are considerably dismal. Especially judged against the currently popular theory that claims middle-class students/intellectuals (and often those students who are white, male, and from economically privileged backgrounds) are the preeminent revolutionary class (because, for some reason, Black Bloc initiated riots are seen as the height of Canadian revolutionary struggle) is becoming popular in some sectors (mainly because these sectors, coming from the privileged classes praised by the theory, want to see themselves at the forefront of revolution). When I observe these types of theories, and am shocked that they are being accepted by some leftist organizations despite their lack of theoretical rigor and refusal to actually engage with the concrete circumstances of Canadian society, I cannot help but be impressed by what the PCR-RCP has put forward.
None of this is to say that this programme is flawless, or that it might contain blind-spots, but even the PCR-RCP sees it as a living document that can possibly change and grow. No one creates a perfectly closed theory; those who claim they have the final and formal truth are not communists but dogmatists, which is why so many programmes and sectarian theories have remained the same for decades. Even still, potential blind-spots or not, I found the PCR-RCP programme leaps and bounds ahead of other attempts; this, in my mind, spoke to a quality of revolutionary practice and investigation lacking in other groups.
4: revolutionary versus activist mind-set
Despite the quality of its programme, I would still dismiss the PCR-RCP if it produced members who were the typical arrogant assholes one finds in most activist organizations. After years of participation in the Toronto left, I was growing tired of self-righteous activism––the cliquishness, the holier-than-thou politicking, and the unquestioned tradition of sneering at older activists on the part of new activist heroes who, by virtue of being knew, think they know everything. You walk away from an organization for even a year, drifting because these movementist groups encourage burn-out and impermanence, and you will return to discover new cliques, new people who think they are the smarter than everyone else. This arrogance, combined with a general unwillingness to be self-critical, has always bothered me… maybe because it was also convicting: I eventually could not help but see my younger self reflected in the expressions and actions of the younger generations. As I wrote in the post cited in this paragraph: "My jaded activist self is generally tired of encountering young activists (most often young men) who think they are god's-gift to the left. The number of times I have encountered someone in their early 20s who believes his ideas are unique, that his actions are changing the world, and who wants to preach the revolution to me without knowing anything about my experience is astounding." And I know that others will agree with this sentiment.
But when I first truly encountered a group of PCR-RCP members I was impressed. (I write truly encountered because I met two of their members a year and a half earlier around the time I was first becoming interested in their organization, but this was not enough for me to understand how they behaved as an organization.) When I attended the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress I was half-expecting to deal with the same I-know-more-than-you-stupid bullshit that is unfortunately a hallmark of large sectors of the left––a petty-bourgeois ideology that does almost as much damage as anti-left propaganda. On the one hand I was looking forward to this Congress, because by this time I knew enough of the PCR-RCP to respect them more than any other leftist group in Canada, but on the other hand I was worried that I would be met with a group of self-proclaimed saints who would dispense marxist revelations to their english-speaking-Canada counterparts. I thought this because of my past experiences, because of conservations I had observed amongst supposed progressives, and because of all of the heart-ache that the left fosters amongst itself. I entered the overpopulated room in which the congress gathered with feelings of trepidation, with an annoyance that those who had organized the conference would make outsiders feel unworthy, and simply assuming that this would be accepted as normal behaviour.
What I observed, however, was a meeting of disciplined and thoughtful comrades who did not act according to what I had taken were normative activist tropes of behaviour. Here were people who were humble with each other, who acted as equals regardless of different social positions, who could debate without being disparaging, turning what would be terribly embarrassing fights in other activist contexts into progressive moments of education––whenever things appeared to get tense, the building tension was evaporated with good humour and humility. I have to admit (and perhaps apologize to the generous Quebec comrades) that I did not speak at that congress; at that point in time I was too tired of listening to my own voice and was much more inclined to be passive. I think in some ways I was taken aback by the manner of interaction which felt entirely alien to my previous activist experiences.
And maybe this is the point: I was not interacting with activists but with people who saw themselves as revolutionaries. For if you see yourself as the latter, and refuse to accept that revolutionary politics are a dinner party, then you behave in a wholly different manner: in this context it cannot be about cliques, about identity politics versus identity politics, about who is more left than who, but about solidarity and the discipline and commitment required by this solidarity. It is about self-awareness and understanding how your actions and attitudes influence others; it is about serving the people.
I have sat through innumerable long and contentious meetings and, because of this, was at a point where I was beginning to dread every political meeting I planned to attend. Especially after my union local's strike, where I was exhausted by the most contentious and spiteful GMMs where bureaucracy had replaced progressive politics, I assumed that every political meeting I would ever attend in my entire life would be doomed to petty factionalism. So I was extremely shocked to find myself actually enjoying the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress. This is not to say that there weren't differences between comrades present (there were), or that there weren't any arguments (of course there were debates), but just that the differences of opinion never became embittered, never transformed into tragic collisions of principle, and never appeared to detract from an overall solidarity and enjoyment of actually engaging with radical politics. Not just talking about some singular issue for an over-specialized affinity group, but engaging with the root politics foundational to the Canadian context. This was why I was actually excited to participate in the open coalition established at the Congress and to support, in my own small way, these people that had impressed me more than any of the activists I have known since… well, forever.
Nor was my experience at the the Congress isolated. Since I became involved with a coalition organization that was doing things in tandem with the PCR-RCP, I would continue to encounter this organizations members. Every encounter echoed what I had experienced at the congress. Even when one of their members critiqued my talk at a public teach-in, it was done in a comradely manner (both supportive and insightfully critical) that I never felt I was dealing with the same sort of activist mentality that has bugged the shit out of me for a decade. When activists criticize you, the critiques are generally self-serving because they are designed to shore up individual influence and power––these critiques are divisive. But when people who properly understand themselves as revolutionaries criticize you, they do it because they want you to be a better organizer in the aims of something bigger than both of your individual selves––these critiques are designed to produce unity. The former category, though quite skilled at producing criticism, can never accept the same criticism from the latter category.
In my above cited report about the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress I wrote: "The lack of arrogance, the relaxed atmosphere, the unwillingness to make anyone feel unwelcome––all of this spoke to a practice that was serious about making manifest the politics [the PCR-RCP] preached." I stand by this claim and think it is extremely important when it comes to assessing whether an organization has a right to refer to itself as a communist party. The representatives of other organizations I have met in my Toronto experience––whether possible parties, political projects, disparate organizations, single-issue groups, or even those organizations who were anti-capitalist but not communist––have often failed to behave in this disciplined and considerate manner. I would never accept a revolutionary leadership from an organization that treats its own members in a manner that undercuts the very politics they are supposed to represent; if you are as petty as the petty-bourgeoisie, then you're not worthy to place yourself at the forefront of Canadian radicalism.
5: practice and revolutionary "authority"
Back during the weeks where I was involved with the Elections Boycott Campaign, I ended up becoming involved in an exchange of polemics with one of my friends/comrades. He wanted to know why the PCR-RCP had the right to call the boycott––what they had done to warrant their supposed authority in making such a call––and asked for details about their practical political actions. At the time, and probably because of the heightened grumpiness caused by pursuing that campaign in the Toronto activist context, I was initially (and unfairly I admit) annoyed by his demands. Since I was merely a supporter of the party, I couldn't really provide him with some insider's glimpse of the PCR-RCP; even if I was a member, I felt it would have been undisciplined (due to security reasons) to respond.
In retrospect, however, I have to admit that this question was fair and that, at the time, I was interpreting it in the wrong way: a party needs to prove itself in practice, it can't just be a small group of people with a "divine" revelation, otherwise it cannot claim to be a revolutionary party. And though I probably could have argued that the party programme I already discussed could only have emerged through practice, that would still not answer the concerns. At the same time, however, this desire to know the precise details of a party in the making––to want an inventory of specifics that will convince us that a possible party is already engaged in great and earth-shaking things––can be used as an excuse to not involve oneself in an organization that might be a potential revolutionary force. According to the maxim of one PCR-RCP member: "when you want something you will find a thousand ways; when you don't want something you will find a thousand reasons."
In any case, it is clear that the PCR-RCP's practice is accomplishing something considering that the Quebec police, as noted in my first entry, now appear to be treating them as a security threat. And though the state views anyone who is even mildly left as a possible and future threat––and has attacked individuals and groups who we know will never accomplish the overthrow of capitalism––the fact that special security squads are being designated by the National Security Integrated Team as a threat, that the Maison Norman Bethune is under surveillance, and the rumour of special "red squads" being tasked to investigate the PCR-RCP is extremely significant. But to be attacked by the enemy, as Mao argued, can also be a good thing; it demonstrates that they are taking your politics––politics that should be the annihilation of theirs––seriously.
So why are the capitalist security authorities possibly concerned with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada? Perhaps it is the fact that the party is moving to the forefront of political struggle in Quebec: as the prime communist force in CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes) it has been ubiquitous in rallies and anti-capitalist actions––so much so that the recent May 1st demonstrations in Montreal endorsed the PCR-RCP boycott slogan, as well as a quote from Mao ("it is right to rebel") as the prime slogans for their march. Then there are the growing party fronts and coalitions such as the Revolutionary Workers Movement (an attempt at accumulating and organizing the disparate proletariat), the Feminist Front (an organization that pushes a revolutionary feminism in an attempt to organize working women against the capitalism behind patriarchy), and the Revolutionary Student Movement (a mass organization that treats students in working class highschools and CEGEPs as possible communist activists)––all of which are engaged, or will be engaged, in important work.
Then there was the formation of the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee [PRAC] at the the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress, mentioned above, that was an attempt to start a coalition organization that would be able to implement a broader front-style politics in english-dominated Canada. It was the PRAC, at least in Ontario, that helped launch the PCR-RCP's call to boycott the federal elections, the authority of which some might still find suspicious.
Therefore, perhaps we should treat this call for an elections boycott as a microcosm for the PCR-RCP's purported revolutionary authority. Personally, if any other group aside from the PCR-RCP had made this call I probably would have reacted in the same manner as those friends/allies/comrades who were suspicious of a boycott campaign. The only reason I accepted its logic was because I had prior knowledge of the PCR-RCP and had attended the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress. (So maybe this is a moment of self-criticism because maybe, if I hadn't paid attention to the PCR-RCP's emergence or attended its open congress I might have also denounced the call as "ultra-left" without examining the arguments.)
The question of authority, however, might be misplaced. As a party that practices the mass-line, the PCR-RCP's call for a boycott had nothing to do with the Stalinist notion of the vanguard (typified, for example, in Stalin's Foundations of Leninism) where the party's role is to command and the masses role is simply to follow its authority––a notion of the vanguard that the Chinese Communists under Mao criticized as "metaphysical." If the party is to also serve the masses, then its authority is a theoretical and revolutionary translation of the desire of the people: as noted in the previous post, the authority behind the boycott was the masses' rejection of parliamentarianism. So what provided authority and substance to the boycott position was the fact that it was based on the practice of millions of workers and oppressed people who, in the words of Lenin, had to "experience [bourgeois democracy] themselves" in order to surpass it.
Therefore, a party that practices the mass-line, and thus in practice will represent the revolutionary desire of the masses, should be forced to ask two questions when it encounters something like an unwillingness to participate in federal elections: i) are the actions of the masses just; and ii) depending on the answer to the first question, what are the consequent politics? The answer to these questions changes completely when a party practices the mass-line takes the position at the bottom with the exploited, rather than a position at the top with the bourgeoisie––or even rather than a position that imagines itself outside of the class struggle and speaks in the name of abstract principles such as democracy or rights.
Since revolution is not a question of "human resources"––not about exchanging the personnel of the ruling classes with the staff of the proletariat––but a complete transformation of the structure in which social categories, groups, classes, and relations are based, then a party that desires to become the revolutionary authority of the people has to pursue this understanding of revolution in practice. Someone once described this understanding of revolutionary practice to be by using the analogy of a game.
If we play a game where the capitalist dictates the rules and boundaries of the game, deciding where we would put our pieces, and with-holding the right to change the rules of the game at any time. What would we do to win such a game? One option would be to play the game and continue to lose––this might be a learning experience but, at point or other, we would be forced to realize that the game itself is pointless. So maybe we would approach the game with cunning, hoping to be sneakier than the capitalist by attempting to alter the ideas that define the game's confines. Or maybe we would approach the game in the hope that the capitalist dies of a heart attack. Or maybe, following the anarchists, we would just make up our own rules and pretend that the person who owns the game doesn't exist even though the capitalist is allowing us to play the bloody game in the first place.
Someone who practices a revolutionary notion of the party, however, would approach our metaphorical game in the following manner: s/he would analyze the game, recognize the cause of injustice, refuse to play and, in doing so, possibly force the capitalist to change the rules. (Refusing to play will necessarily change the rules because the capitalist needs us to play in order for the game to exist.) Most importantly, though, someone engaged in revolutionary practice would not be interested in simply change the rules because s/he wants an end to the game itself. The point is to force the capitalist to defend itself and reveal to the other players what is at stake so that they understand that losing is not the only possibility and that, by following this example, the capitalist will be forced to implement more rules, against all of the players, isolating itself and losing its often unquestioned authority.
Therefore, the value of an initiative or proposal is measured by what we are seeking to achieve. Proper communist practice, the kind of practice I believe the PCR-RCP is pursuing, is to pursue and then find answers to the needs demanded by revolutionary politics. Returning to the analogy of the boycott campaign, the question we need to ask is the following: do we want to strengthen the revolutionary camp or strengthen the abstract notion of democracy by electing one part over another? Too often we approach the important issues through ideological abstractions (my utopia is better than yours, my ideas look niftier on paper when opposed to yours, etc.) rather than resolving fundamental contradictions. What distinguishes the concrete from this abstract approach, however, is what can be found in the real world through revolutionary practice.
If we want to prove something, we must implement this something in practice and this is called politics––this is also what distinguishes the PCR-RCP from the RCP-USA. Moreover, and most importantly for the social context in which I live, this also distinguishes the PCR-RCP from the countless other leftist organizations that either resign themselves to cultic purity, hide their communism behind successive veils of social democracy, or openly practice entryism.
And it is because of this practice, the attitude and revolutionary mindset behind this practice, the theory that is bound up in this practice, and the politics I have observed the PCR-RCP attempting to build––a politics that prefigures socialism––that I have been sympathetic and supportive of this organization on my blog and in my active life. This is not to say that I see the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada as a "done deal", a static entity that will always be the only party authority no matter what, because I understand that organizations are always in transformation and can change for the worse just as easily as they can change for the better. I can also imagine other organizations, perhaps organizations inspired by the example of the PCR-RCP, emerging as possible party entities in the future.
The thing is, the PCR-RCP, which has always seen its growth and development in terms of line struggle––as something that is always open to the future––would agree that it is not some absolutely and hermetically closed organization. Maoists understand line struggle, after all, and how organizations can collapse. They also understand how they can be renewed, how they can develop through revolutionary practice: parties are not static, and should never dogmatically purist, but at the same time they are not nebulous (and thus ultimately meaningless) organizations that drift aimlessly without theoretical and practical direction.
And so maybe this self-awareness––this understanding of a party that is always open to the future but that still must, despite its openness, pursue the revolutionary theory that was presented by the Russian and Chinese Revolutions but in this social context––is what most attracted me to the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada. As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, and as I have mentioned elsewhere, I used to be wary of the entire notion of a vanguard because there was a part of me that always found it unyielding, purist, closed off from the people it was supposed to represent. And theoretically recognizing the need for a party was still different than accepting the existence of a possible party in my social context. The fact that the PCR-RCP as a party attracted my sympathies, and is the only communist group in Canada to have done so, is something I still find significant. My aim with this series of entries was simply to explain this significance.
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-support-revolutionary-communist.html
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-support-revolutionary-communist_18.html
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-support-revolutionary-communist_22.html
Why I Support the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada
by JMP
Originally this was supposed to be a much smaller post, generally meant to reply to some of the question I've received from friends and comrades who have asked me, for several years now, why I tend to sympathize with and endorse/support the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada both in my blog and in my real life. Due to the recent arrests of four PCR-RCP members, and the revelation that the Canadian state is taking this organization seriously as a possible threat, I decided it might be appropriate to write an article explaining the political and philosophical reasons behind my support. Until very recently, aside from those of us who follow Maoist-style politics, the PCR-RCP has been generally unknown in english-dominant Canada (as opposed to in Quebec where they have much more recognition) and this is post is generally aimed at this part of the country, as well as those readers in other countries who have expressed interest in this organization. As noted above, it was meant to be much shorter: I have since divided the content into three posts.
Years ago, when the majority of political activist energy was filtered through the affinity and working groups of my union local, I had an encounter with a fellow union activist about the need to be involved in something broader than disconnected, though perhaps vital, groups. He argued that, since I defined as a communist, I should involve myself in a communist organization that was closer to a party due to the limits to "movementism" and "trade union consciousness." At the time, since I was just emerging from an "anti-vanguard" type of communism, I was not entirely convinced by his arguments. Moreover, due to my dawning sympathies with anti-colonial and third world marxism (sympathies that would eventually lead me to Maoism), I was also unconvinced that the communist organization he was promoting, the New Socialist Group [NSG], answered the political questions I was just beginning to ask.
Eventually when I started to move towards Lenin's analysis of the state, I could not help but recall this conversation. The problem, however, was that the solution he had proposed (getting involved with the NSG) did not seem entirely compelling: there did not appear to be any communist organization in Toronto, let alone Canada, that adequately addressed the problems I was beginning to believe were raised by the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Even my partner (who was responsible for so much of my political education) was arguing for the need to become involved in something broader than the union movement or these "movementist" groups, claiming that I might benefit from something that was actually "communist" rather than simply unionist or activist. And I remember telling her, on more than one occasion, "you're right but I don't feel drawn to any of the organizations in Toronto."
That is, even if I could accept that there was a need for a revolutionary party, something that could ideologically unite various and disparate struggles, there did not appear to be any organization in the city that was up to the challenge. This is not to say that I dismissed the work of activists in organizations like the New Socialist Group, Autonomy and Solidarity [now the "Upping the Anti" collective], or even the Socialist Project––some of them were doing, and continue to do, excellent work––but just that all of these groups did not appear to have: 1) a truly concrete analysis of the concrete situation that is Canada; 2) an appreciation for both the historical and international histories of revolution.
For example, none of the Toronto communist organizations (whether they proclaimed themselves as "parties" or "projects" or "pre-parties" or etcetera), possessed a theoretically unified analysis of the Canadian social and historical context and what it would mean to build a revolutionary organization within this context. The analysis was disparate, sometimes intentionally eclectic, and often was about to responding to anti-people politics rather than coherently explaining a pro-people, that is communist, political program. And though some of this analysis was incisive and influential to my growth as a political activist, it did not seem substantially different than the analysis that could be produced by leftist intellectuals involved in disparate affinity groups. The point being: I wanted to involve myself with a group that could actually produce a productive and revolutionary response to the Canadian context––a group that knew what it was for, and not just what it was against, and was interested in working out the steps required, in this capitalist-colonialist nation, for revolution.
The fact that the majority of these Toronto groups were rather dismissive of the politics that emerged from the two great world historical communist revolutions––first Russia and then China––was something that always troubled me. Since I was moving towards a position that understood that the insights derived from the Chinese Revolution possessed as much universal significance as those derived from the Russian Revolution, I could not in good faith work with an organization that dismissed the contributing of Maoism, was dogmatically Trotskyist (or at the very least post-Trotskyist), and maybe didn't even reflect the insights of the Russian Revolution––aside from some general "Lenin-was-a-great-revolutionary-leader-but-Stalin-ruined-things" position. Other than a vague lip-service to the Russian Revolution, there was really no significant talk of the Chinese Revolution, or even a coherent appreciation of the lessons learned from past anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles. Even worse, when the Peoples War in Nepal was at its apex, not one of these groups even cared; they were more invested in populist movements in Venezuela than a potential communist revolution––some of them even admitted that they didn't care about Nepal because they "knew where that type of politics would lead" (an odd statement from supposed communists).
And these were the organizations of the supposed "non-dogmatic" communist left. For I already knew that I would never be interested in those antiquated self-proclaimed parties that were trapped in historical dead-ends, cultic and missionary, or had degenerated into parliamentarianism. These painfully orthodox organizations were the sorts of organizations, after all, that had once made me feel that communism was either repellant or antiquated.
So when I first learned of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada [PCR-RCP] I was initially wary. First of all, the fact that it called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party caused me to immediately associate it with a notorious and dogmatic organization in the United States. And even after one of my close comrades (a Maoist whose many debates and interventions with me influenced my understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) attended the PCR-RCP's founding congress and explained that, no, the Canadian Revolutionary Communist Party was entirely different from the identically named organization south of the border, I was still somewhat suspicious. At that point in time I had resigned myself to a Maoist-Third-Worldism by default: this was not to say that I believed that revolution was impossible in the centres of capitalism, and that the solution was some sort of global peoples war, but that I was becoming more and more convinced that the "culture industry" prevalent in imperialist countries might be strong enough to prevent any potential and truly revolutionary party from emerging. Although my communism was beginning to embrace the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, my experience with the supposedly revolutionary groups in Toronto––groups that spoke of revolution as something that happened elsewhere but were never interested in imagining its possibility in their own context––unfortunately predisposed me towards skepticism.
It wasn't until my experiences with my union local's most recent strike that I was again faced with the limitations of trade unionism, the need for involving myself in something broader––the necessity for a communist party that was brought home by the boundaries of union politics. Thus, following the sordid end of the strike, I once again started to investigate the existence of self-proclaimed communist parties in my political landscape. Recalling what the comrade mentioned above had said about the PCR-RCP, I decided to seriously engage with its program. Several other members of my union local, who were also impressed by the limitation of trade-unionism, joined me in several reading groups that engaged with the party program. And though this engagement was eventually aborted due to post-strike exhaustion, it was still an engagement that caused me to appreciate both the program and existence of the PCR-RCP. But it was also this engagement that led me to attend the Second Canadian Revolutionary Congress sponsored by the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada and, upon being impressed by the PCR-RCP members in attendance, to decide that I both sympathized with and supported this organization as the only current potential and revolutionary party in Canada.
And since I still get questions as to why I think that the PCR-RCP is the only existing organization in Canada that I believe can rightfully call itself a party, as compared to those other organizations I was never interested in joining, I am going to try and explain my reasons for thinking in this way. I understand from my own experience, after all, the immediate skepticism that is raised against a group that uses the term "revolutionary party." I don't think this skepticism is wrong: there have been so many disappointments, and so many new communist groups that manifest every two or three years––entryists, other versions of parliamentarianism, or splinter fractions of the same Trotsykist/post-Trotsykist banality.
There are reasons, after having observed the Toronto left and seeing the limits of even what its most progressive communist organizations could offer, that I believe the PCR-RCP is worth supporting. I have broken these reasons down into five interrelated categories, the first of which I will discuss below and the other four I will divide into two successive posts: settler-colonialism and the national question; advanced guard versus tailism; concrete analysis of a concrete situation; revolutionary versus activist mind-set; and practice.
1: settler-colonialism and the national question in Canada.
This was probably the biggest barrier to joining the actually existing communist groups––especially since I was doing academic work on the question of settler-colonialism and was very aware that this nation we call "Canada" emerged through the contradiction of colonizer and colonized. Although some communist groups were good at supporting indigenous self-determination, none of them really placed this self-determination within a larger theoretical framework. They could not explain, aside from basic human rights and morality appeals, the why of supporting indigenous sovereignty.
This is not to say that some of these groups were not excellent in some of their practice surrounding indigenous self-determination (some of the members of Upping The Anti, for example, have been extremely exemplary in this regard, especially and most recently in the case of the Six Nations stand-off with Caledonia), but that there was no attempt to place this practice within a coherent theoretical approach to revolution in Canada. Even worse: the anarchists who were sometimes better than the communists in concretely supporting indigenous struggle would often, due to their anarchist politics, fight tooth-and-nail against the idea of national sovereignty––and some supposed "communist" groups were not immune to this political analysis.
And then there were those groups who, though endorsing indigenous self-determination, were still so caught up in demands for Quebecois sovereignty as the prime national question, that they really had no systematic way of assessing Canadian settler-colonialism. At best, the fundamental colonial contradiction was treated as identical to the supposed Quebec-Canada contradiction; at worst, it was misconstrued as a disconnected moral issue––something to do with "rights" and "decency"––allowing some of the more dogmatic groups to argue that Lenin's theory of the national question had nothing to do with indigenous people who (insert chauvinist reason here) lacked proper nationhood. (I wish I was joking, but I'm not: this is an argument that is actually made by some "marxist" groups.)
So the first thing that made me take the PCR-RCP seriously, the make-it-or-break-it test that because of my political sympathies I would use to assess communist groups, was the fact that it was the only communist group in Canada that understands the settler-colonial context within a comprehensive party program. And despite the fact that the PCR-RCP emerged in Quebec, it is significant in that it applies Lenin's theory of the national question primarily to indigenous nations and not to the Quebecois. (And according to some of the ignorant comments of the post mentioned above demonstrated a hatred of this position.) The fact that the settler-colonial question was approached as important, and in a concrete manner, is extremely significant––especially (and I emphasize this especially) in a nation that only exists because of a colonial encounter. I should also point out that the similarly named American group is known for having a rather chauvinist approach to settler-colonialism (among other things).
2: advanced guard versus tailism
I've lost count of the number of times a member of a self-proclaimed communist organization has argued that you cannot talk about politics x because this might alienate everyday people. Sometimes this has taken the form of not talking about communism––maybe going so far as to hide one's own communism––because "the working class", especially in Canada, might find communism frightening.
This attitude is often the result of Draper's theory of "socialism from below" that is currently more popular in Toronto than anywhere else. The claim is that the masses will figure out the correct politics on their own, spontaneously perhaps, and we just need to get behind them when they do––there's no point in talking to them ahead of time because that would just get in the way of their historical destiny. And even though this position sounds good it is actually quite condescending because it results in a refusal to actually talk to people, many of whom lack the privilege to engage with political texts in, for example, a university setting, and share this privilege. It is a with-holding, a miserly hoarding of knowledge, and is often rather political: "we'll talk to other intellectuals about communism, or people at demonstrations who look like our type, but not to people outside of university and activist circles––can't have them misunderstand this sort of thing until they're ready!" As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argued in an old Cell 16 article:
"We must avoid one major error of middle-class organizers. In an effort to 'win' people over to the movement (win a vote?), organizers often imitate the style of life of those they are organizing. This is patronizing and unliberating and cruel. People who are oppressed want alternatives, and want to learn. They do not want to be further entrenched in their oppressive style of life. We must be generous with our knowledge, and not underestimate the desire for freedom on the part of the oppressed, and not mistake ignorance for desire." (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution)
For even when some groups will out themselves as communist, there are times when they still refuse to push the radical politics that communism should entail: they will avoid the questions raced by feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and queer movements––perhaps worried that these radical concerns will drive people away. Even worse, they will say communism out of one side of their mouths, and parliamentarianism out of the other: that is, they will speak of the need for revolution and then spend most of their time agitating for social democratic reformism.
This is tailing the masses rather than providing them with a revolutionary alternative. Clearly the point is not that a revolutionary party should be completely divorced from the masses, but it still needs to be providing a revolutionary direction: the theory of the mass-line says that an advanced communist organization needs to engage in a from the masses to the masses circuit: organizing the spontaneous concerns and visceral desire for rebellion into a coherent politics. This mass-line politics can never simply be from the masses; going to the masses cannot mean disguising one's politics.
One of the things I have admired about the PCR-RCP is that it practices this mass-line understanding of revolutionary politics, refusing to lapse into tailism. After all, people who tail the masses are sometimes people who are not really involved in the struggles of the masses: whereas some groups are cabalistic revolutionary purists who are dogmatically so far beyond the masses to make them divorced from peoples' everyday concerns, so many other groups lag behind when it comes to their political practice––waiting for some spontaneous movement that they hope will be the revolution. The PCR-RCP, however, has engaged with political struggles of the everyday and, within these struggles, has always argued that it is important to agitate for communism. Not a dogmatic: we-know-better-than-you approach symptomatic of certain marxist missionary groups (and thus papers that babble incessantly about arcane debates from 1917) but an attempt to actually connect in an organizational manner.
I learned this concretely when I joined the open organization that was formed at the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress and found myself involved in projects that were an attempt to honestly agitate for communism and use this agitation as a method of organizing. First there was the Elections Boycott Campaign, where the PCR-RCP argued that an already existing boycott (where a significant portion of the Canadian masses refused, and still refuse, to participate in parliamentarianism) signified a spontaneous rejection of the system and so the role of communists was to engage with this sentiment according to the mass-line: the rejection of the system in the form of a refusal to vote came from the masses; the job of communists was to therefore go to the masses, engage with this refusal, and attempt to organize it into something politically coherent. And we learned, from speaking to people on the street, that this the refusal was indeed an angry rejection of the system––and this anger provided an opportunity to speak about the need for organizing a revolutionary alternative.
Secondly, we are also involved in an ongoing attempt to actually spread communism in the form of an accessible and non-sectarian newspaper. Rather than simply leaving these newspapers at drop points where we would have no idea if they're being taken or read, we have handed them out on the street and used them as an occasion to speak with people. Not to say "hey, join our group right now because we are the priests of a new order," but to actually speak about communist politics and encounter others who might be drawn to revolutionary praxis.
The point being, any communist organization that refuses to openly agitate for radical politics (choosing instead to either become dogmatically insular or engage in tailism) is far from the avant garde of a revolutionary movement. This very simple act of agitating publicly for communism––and doing so without engaging in dogmatism, leftist turf wars, or liquidating the idea of revolution within bourgeois democracy––is the bare minimum requirement of any communist organization that wants to call itself a party.
3: concrete analysis of a concrete situation
Any organization that claims to be revolutionary party needs to possessed a unified political theory that is a concrete analysis of its concrete situation. So just as the Bolsheviks required a unified theory that could explain revolution in their social and historical context, and the Chinese Communists under Mao needed the same for their situation, a party needs to develop what I have called elsewhere a living marxism (specifically in this part of an inter-blog dialogue that is somewhat onerous) that not only takes into account the revolutionary lessons of the past, but is able to synthesize these questions within its own social and historical context.
Thus, another one of the initial reasons I was drawn to the PCR-RCP was that its programme (along with its related theoretical essays in the french Arsenal and the english Peoples War Digest) was the first coherently successful attempt, in my opinion, of developing a proper revolutionary and historical materialist analysis of this social context at this historical juncture. If we communists believe that, along with Lenin, there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, then we should accept that it extremely important to have a coherent and concrete theoretical foundation. And not an overly academicized foundation, but one that is aimed at actual revolutionary praxis––a theory that demands practice rather than alienating the former from the latter.
In the first main point of my previous entry, I discussed how the PCR-RCP's analysis of settler-colonialism was what first, years ago, caused me to take interest. This consideration is intimately connected to my point about a concrete analysis of a concrete situation: I strongly believe that since the nation called "Canada" emerged from the violent contradictions of colonial conquest, any valid historical materialist analysis of the Canadian situation needs to deal with this, and deal with it properly, if it wants to be taken seriously. It is not enough to simply pay lip-service to indigenous rights for they have to be seen as revolutionary needs, rather than simple liberal rights, and as part of the material reality that produces Canadian class struggle. As Mao's theory of contradiction tells us, if we ignore contradictions of oppression that are part of the way our society was born and continues to function, and even if we ignore these contradictions because they do not appear to fit an orthodox and dogmatic understanding of the "capitalist versus labour" contradiction, then we are actually supporting the ruling classes and are against revolutionary class struggle.
(In any case, the PCR-RCP is the only communist party organization in Canada that has properly and concretely approached the contradiction of colonialism, has refused to treat it as an interesting side-issue, and treats it as a significant part of the structure of Canadian capitalism. I'm re-emphasizing this here because this really does need to be seen as extremely significant: there has not been a single would-be communist party in Canada that has treated settler-colonialism and the national question of Canada's colonized nations with the same seriousness. This is not to say that individual communists, and maybe even small groups of communists, haven't produced proper analyses; what I am saying that no self-proclaimed Canadian communist party, communist pre-party, or communist project has treated this issue with either the same seriousness, the same historical materialist insight, and the same anti-colonial principles. I believe I can make this claim because my doctoral work was on anti-colonialism and marxism and, after spending years researching the Canadian would-be communist parties and their theoretical understanding of Canadian settler-colonialism, I tended to dismissive all of these parties as being ideologically blind to this fact. Again, it was one of the reasons that this was the first thing I wanted to know about the PCR-RCP when I initially heard of its existence.)
Moreover, the PCR-RCP's theoretical analysis does another four things that other Canadian communist organizations are not doing: i) it summarizes the Canadian historical context of struggle and coherently assesses the current historical juncture; ii) it rejects simplistic and dogmatic guidelines in an attempt to make sense of the location and nature of the Canadian revolutionary class; iii) it places Canada squarely within the imperialist camp, as its own and independent imperialist power, rather than treating it as a proxy imperialist power that is somehow also neo-colonized by the United States; iv) it uses all of this in its programme (which is a to-the-point explanation of the larger body of theoretical work it has been producing because it is a programme) to focus on the need for revolution and thus even discusses the how and why of achieving revolution in Canada.
I am not going to spend too much time explaining in-depth the PCR-RCP's programme––it would be better if people assessed it for themselves using the link provided above––because the aim of these entries is to summarize the reasons why I decided this organization was worth supporting. Suffice to say, those four points are extremely important, both separately and together, and I'm sure that some of my Canadian readers can understand the controversy of some of the points. Point (iii), for example, is a contentious issue amongst those Canadian communist organizations that claim to be parties: the PCR-RCP is the first self-proclaimed party that rejects the ahistorical and problematic notion that Canada is not an imperialist power in its own right––and though there are a few contemporary leftist academics who have just recently begun writing on this issue. Jerome Klassen, for example, first pioneered this position in Canadian academia several years back; Todd Gordon has recently written a book on this very issue. Even still, the PCR-RCP was pushing this position before it emerged in academia, and is the first Canadian communist party to have taken this position.
And the other points––an accurate summation of the Canadian struggle and its current juncture, a concrete engagement with the Canadian class struggle and what constitutes/composes the proletariat, and an attempt to actually think through the steps required for a revolution––are what make the PCR-RCP programme pretty much the only programme in this social-historical context that is not: a) so theoretically dense and obtuse that only a few specialists can read it; b) so crude and anti-intellectual that theory is disdained for spontaneity; c) incoherent and thus not worthy of being called a programme in the first place.
All of this is very significant in a period where attempted party programmes and theoretical approaches in the Canadian left are considerably dismal. Especially judged against the currently popular theory that claims middle-class students/intellectuals (and often those students who are white, male, and from economically privileged backgrounds) are the preeminent revolutionary class (because, for some reason, Black Bloc initiated riots are seen as the height of Canadian revolutionary struggle) is becoming popular in some sectors (mainly because these sectors, coming from the privileged classes praised by the theory, want to see themselves at the forefront of revolution). When I observe these types of theories, and am shocked that they are being accepted by some leftist organizations despite their lack of theoretical rigor and refusal to actually engage with the concrete circumstances of Canadian society, I cannot help but be impressed by what the PCR-RCP has put forward.
None of this is to say that this programme is flawless, or that it might contain blind-spots, but even the PCR-RCP sees it as a living document that can possibly change and grow. No one creates a perfectly closed theory; those who claim they have the final and formal truth are not communists but dogmatists, which is why so many programmes and sectarian theories have remained the same for decades. Even still, potential blind-spots or not, I found the PCR-RCP programme leaps and bounds ahead of other attempts; this, in my mind, spoke to a quality of revolutionary practice and investigation lacking in other groups.
4: revolutionary versus activist mind-set
Despite the quality of its programme, I would still dismiss the PCR-RCP if it produced members who were the typical arrogant assholes one finds in most activist organizations. After years of participation in the Toronto left, I was growing tired of self-righteous activism––the cliquishness, the holier-than-thou politicking, and the unquestioned tradition of sneering at older activists on the part of new activist heroes who, by virtue of being knew, think they know everything. You walk away from an organization for even a year, drifting because these movementist groups encourage burn-out and impermanence, and you will return to discover new cliques, new people who think they are the smarter than everyone else. This arrogance, combined with a general unwillingness to be self-critical, has always bothered me… maybe because it was also convicting: I eventually could not help but see my younger self reflected in the expressions and actions of the younger generations. As I wrote in the post cited in this paragraph: "My jaded activist self is generally tired of encountering young activists (most often young men) who think they are god's-gift to the left. The number of times I have encountered someone in their early 20s who believes his ideas are unique, that his actions are changing the world, and who wants to preach the revolution to me without knowing anything about my experience is astounding." And I know that others will agree with this sentiment.
But when I first truly encountered a group of PCR-RCP members I was impressed. (I write truly encountered because I met two of their members a year and a half earlier around the time I was first becoming interested in their organization, but this was not enough for me to understand how they behaved as an organization.) When I attended the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress I was half-expecting to deal with the same I-know-more-than-you-stupid bullshit that is unfortunately a hallmark of large sectors of the left––a petty-bourgeois ideology that does almost as much damage as anti-left propaganda. On the one hand I was looking forward to this Congress, because by this time I knew enough of the PCR-RCP to respect them more than any other leftist group in Canada, but on the other hand I was worried that I would be met with a group of self-proclaimed saints who would dispense marxist revelations to their english-speaking-Canada counterparts. I thought this because of my past experiences, because of conservations I had observed amongst supposed progressives, and because of all of the heart-ache that the left fosters amongst itself. I entered the overpopulated room in which the congress gathered with feelings of trepidation, with an annoyance that those who had organized the conference would make outsiders feel unworthy, and simply assuming that this would be accepted as normal behaviour.
What I observed, however, was a meeting of disciplined and thoughtful comrades who did not act according to what I had taken were normative activist tropes of behaviour. Here were people who were humble with each other, who acted as equals regardless of different social positions, who could debate without being disparaging, turning what would be terribly embarrassing fights in other activist contexts into progressive moments of education––whenever things appeared to get tense, the building tension was evaporated with good humour and humility. I have to admit (and perhaps apologize to the generous Quebec comrades) that I did not speak at that congress; at that point in time I was too tired of listening to my own voice and was much more inclined to be passive. I think in some ways I was taken aback by the manner of interaction which felt entirely alien to my previous activist experiences.
And maybe this is the point: I was not interacting with activists but with people who saw themselves as revolutionaries. For if you see yourself as the latter, and refuse to accept that revolutionary politics are a dinner party, then you behave in a wholly different manner: in this context it cannot be about cliques, about identity politics versus identity politics, about who is more left than who, but about solidarity and the discipline and commitment required by this solidarity. It is about self-awareness and understanding how your actions and attitudes influence others; it is about serving the people.
I have sat through innumerable long and contentious meetings and, because of this, was at a point where I was beginning to dread every political meeting I planned to attend. Especially after my union local's strike, where I was exhausted by the most contentious and spiteful GMMs where bureaucracy had replaced progressive politics, I assumed that every political meeting I would ever attend in my entire life would be doomed to petty factionalism. So I was extremely shocked to find myself actually enjoying the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress. This is not to say that there weren't differences between comrades present (there were), or that there weren't any arguments (of course there were debates), but just that the differences of opinion never became embittered, never transformed into tragic collisions of principle, and never appeared to detract from an overall solidarity and enjoyment of actually engaging with radical politics. Not just talking about some singular issue for an over-specialized affinity group, but engaging with the root politics foundational to the Canadian context. This was why I was actually excited to participate in the open coalition established at the Congress and to support, in my own small way, these people that had impressed me more than any of the activists I have known since… well, forever.
Nor was my experience at the the Congress isolated. Since I became involved with a coalition organization that was doing things in tandem with the PCR-RCP, I would continue to encounter this organizations members. Every encounter echoed what I had experienced at the congress. Even when one of their members critiqued my talk at a public teach-in, it was done in a comradely manner (both supportive and insightfully critical) that I never felt I was dealing with the same sort of activist mentality that has bugged the shit out of me for a decade. When activists criticize you, the critiques are generally self-serving because they are designed to shore up individual influence and power––these critiques are divisive. But when people who properly understand themselves as revolutionaries criticize you, they do it because they want you to be a better organizer in the aims of something bigger than both of your individual selves––these critiques are designed to produce unity. The former category, though quite skilled at producing criticism, can never accept the same criticism from the latter category.
In my above cited report about the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress I wrote: "The lack of arrogance, the relaxed atmosphere, the unwillingness to make anyone feel unwelcome––all of this spoke to a practice that was serious about making manifest the politics [the PCR-RCP] preached." I stand by this claim and think it is extremely important when it comes to assessing whether an organization has a right to refer to itself as a communist party. The representatives of other organizations I have met in my Toronto experience––whether possible parties, political projects, disparate organizations, single-issue groups, or even those organizations who were anti-capitalist but not communist––have often failed to behave in this disciplined and considerate manner. I would never accept a revolutionary leadership from an organization that treats its own members in a manner that undercuts the very politics they are supposed to represent; if you are as petty as the petty-bourgeoisie, then you're not worthy to place yourself at the forefront of Canadian radicalism.
5: practice and revolutionary "authority"
Back during the weeks where I was involved with the Elections Boycott Campaign, I ended up becoming involved in an exchange of polemics with one of my friends/comrades. He wanted to know why the PCR-RCP had the right to call the boycott––what they had done to warrant their supposed authority in making such a call––and asked for details about their practical political actions. At the time, and probably because of the heightened grumpiness caused by pursuing that campaign in the Toronto activist context, I was initially (and unfairly I admit) annoyed by his demands. Since I was merely a supporter of the party, I couldn't really provide him with some insider's glimpse of the PCR-RCP; even if I was a member, I felt it would have been undisciplined (due to security reasons) to respond.
In retrospect, however, I have to admit that this question was fair and that, at the time, I was interpreting it in the wrong way: a party needs to prove itself in practice, it can't just be a small group of people with a "divine" revelation, otherwise it cannot claim to be a revolutionary party. And though I probably could have argued that the party programme I already discussed could only have emerged through practice, that would still not answer the concerns. At the same time, however, this desire to know the precise details of a party in the making––to want an inventory of specifics that will convince us that a possible party is already engaged in great and earth-shaking things––can be used as an excuse to not involve oneself in an organization that might be a potential revolutionary force. According to the maxim of one PCR-RCP member: "when you want something you will find a thousand ways; when you don't want something you will find a thousand reasons."
In any case, it is clear that the PCR-RCP's practice is accomplishing something considering that the Quebec police, as noted in my first entry, now appear to be treating them as a security threat. And though the state views anyone who is even mildly left as a possible and future threat––and has attacked individuals and groups who we know will never accomplish the overthrow of capitalism––the fact that special security squads are being designated by the National Security Integrated Team as a threat, that the Maison Norman Bethune is under surveillance, and the rumour of special "red squads" being tasked to investigate the PCR-RCP is extremely significant. But to be attacked by the enemy, as Mao argued, can also be a good thing; it demonstrates that they are taking your politics––politics that should be the annihilation of theirs––seriously.
So why are the capitalist security authorities possibly concerned with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada? Perhaps it is the fact that the party is moving to the forefront of political struggle in Quebec: as the prime communist force in CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes) it has been ubiquitous in rallies and anti-capitalist actions––so much so that the recent May 1st demonstrations in Montreal endorsed the PCR-RCP boycott slogan, as well as a quote from Mao ("it is right to rebel") as the prime slogans for their march. Then there are the growing party fronts and coalitions such as the Revolutionary Workers Movement (an attempt at accumulating and organizing the disparate proletariat), the Feminist Front (an organization that pushes a revolutionary feminism in an attempt to organize working women against the capitalism behind patriarchy), and the Revolutionary Student Movement (a mass organization that treats students in working class highschools and CEGEPs as possible communist activists)––all of which are engaged, or will be engaged, in important work.
Then there was the formation of the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee [PRAC] at the the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress, mentioned above, that was an attempt to start a coalition organization that would be able to implement a broader front-style politics in english-dominated Canada. It was the PRAC, at least in Ontario, that helped launch the PCR-RCP's call to boycott the federal elections, the authority of which some might still find suspicious.
Therefore, perhaps we should treat this call for an elections boycott as a microcosm for the PCR-RCP's purported revolutionary authority. Personally, if any other group aside from the PCR-RCP had made this call I probably would have reacted in the same manner as those friends/allies/comrades who were suspicious of a boycott campaign. The only reason I accepted its logic was because I had prior knowledge of the PCR-RCP and had attended the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress. (So maybe this is a moment of self-criticism because maybe, if I hadn't paid attention to the PCR-RCP's emergence or attended its open congress I might have also denounced the call as "ultra-left" without examining the arguments.)
The question of authority, however, might be misplaced. As a party that practices the mass-line, the PCR-RCP's call for a boycott had nothing to do with the Stalinist notion of the vanguard (typified, for example, in Stalin's Foundations of Leninism) where the party's role is to command and the masses role is simply to follow its authority––a notion of the vanguard that the Chinese Communists under Mao criticized as "metaphysical." If the party is to also serve the masses, then its authority is a theoretical and revolutionary translation of the desire of the people: as noted in the previous post, the authority behind the boycott was the masses' rejection of parliamentarianism. So what provided authority and substance to the boycott position was the fact that it was based on the practice of millions of workers and oppressed people who, in the words of Lenin, had to "experience [bourgeois democracy] themselves" in order to surpass it.
Therefore, a party that practices the mass-line, and thus in practice will represent the revolutionary desire of the masses, should be forced to ask two questions when it encounters something like an unwillingness to participate in federal elections: i) are the actions of the masses just; and ii) depending on the answer to the first question, what are the consequent politics? The answer to these questions changes completely when a party practices the mass-line takes the position at the bottom with the exploited, rather than a position at the top with the bourgeoisie––or even rather than a position that imagines itself outside of the class struggle and speaks in the name of abstract principles such as democracy or rights.
Since revolution is not a question of "human resources"––not about exchanging the personnel of the ruling classes with the staff of the proletariat––but a complete transformation of the structure in which social categories, groups, classes, and relations are based, then a party that desires to become the revolutionary authority of the people has to pursue this understanding of revolution in practice. Someone once described this understanding of revolutionary practice to be by using the analogy of a game.
If we play a game where the capitalist dictates the rules and boundaries of the game, deciding where we would put our pieces, and with-holding the right to change the rules of the game at any time. What would we do to win such a game? One option would be to play the game and continue to lose––this might be a learning experience but, at point or other, we would be forced to realize that the game itself is pointless. So maybe we would approach the game with cunning, hoping to be sneakier than the capitalist by attempting to alter the ideas that define the game's confines. Or maybe we would approach the game in the hope that the capitalist dies of a heart attack. Or maybe, following the anarchists, we would just make up our own rules and pretend that the person who owns the game doesn't exist even though the capitalist is allowing us to play the bloody game in the first place.
Someone who practices a revolutionary notion of the party, however, would approach our metaphorical game in the following manner: s/he would analyze the game, recognize the cause of injustice, refuse to play and, in doing so, possibly force the capitalist to change the rules. (Refusing to play will necessarily change the rules because the capitalist needs us to play in order for the game to exist.) Most importantly, though, someone engaged in revolutionary practice would not be interested in simply change the rules because s/he wants an end to the game itself. The point is to force the capitalist to defend itself and reveal to the other players what is at stake so that they understand that losing is not the only possibility and that, by following this example, the capitalist will be forced to implement more rules, against all of the players, isolating itself and losing its often unquestioned authority.
Therefore, the value of an initiative or proposal is measured by what we are seeking to achieve. Proper communist practice, the kind of practice I believe the PCR-RCP is pursuing, is to pursue and then find answers to the needs demanded by revolutionary politics. Returning to the analogy of the boycott campaign, the question we need to ask is the following: do we want to strengthen the revolutionary camp or strengthen the abstract notion of democracy by electing one part over another? Too often we approach the important issues through ideological abstractions (my utopia is better than yours, my ideas look niftier on paper when opposed to yours, etc.) rather than resolving fundamental contradictions. What distinguishes the concrete from this abstract approach, however, is what can be found in the real world through revolutionary practice.
If we want to prove something, we must implement this something in practice and this is called politics––this is also what distinguishes the PCR-RCP from the RCP-USA. Moreover, and most importantly for the social context in which I live, this also distinguishes the PCR-RCP from the countless other leftist organizations that either resign themselves to cultic purity, hide their communism behind successive veils of social democracy, or openly practice entryism.
And it is because of this practice, the attitude and revolutionary mindset behind this practice, the theory that is bound up in this practice, and the politics I have observed the PCR-RCP attempting to build––a politics that prefigures socialism––that I have been sympathetic and supportive of this organization on my blog and in my active life. This is not to say that I see the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada as a "done deal", a static entity that will always be the only party authority no matter what, because I understand that organizations are always in transformation and can change for the worse just as easily as they can change for the better. I can also imagine other organizations, perhaps organizations inspired by the example of the PCR-RCP, emerging as possible party entities in the future.
The thing is, the PCR-RCP, which has always seen its growth and development in terms of line struggle––as something that is always open to the future––would agree that it is not some absolutely and hermetically closed organization. Maoists understand line struggle, after all, and how organizations can collapse. They also understand how they can be renewed, how they can develop through revolutionary practice: parties are not static, and should never dogmatically purist, but at the same time they are not nebulous (and thus ultimately meaningless) organizations that drift aimlessly without theoretical and practical direction.
And so maybe this self-awareness––this understanding of a party that is always open to the future but that still must, despite its openness, pursue the revolutionary theory that was presented by the Russian and Chinese Revolutions but in this social context––is what most attracted me to the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada. As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, and as I have mentioned elsewhere, I used to be wary of the entire notion of a vanguard because there was a part of me that always found it unyielding, purist, closed off from the people it was supposed to represent. And theoretically recognizing the need for a party was still different than accepting the existence of a possible party in my social context. The fact that the PCR-RCP as a party attracted my sympathies, and is the only communist group in Canada to have done so, is something I still find significant. My aim with this series of entries was simply to explain this significance.
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-support-revolutionary-communist.html
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-support-revolutionary-communist_18.html
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-support-revolutionary-communist_22.html