What Does the Communist Party of Canada Have to Say?

  1. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    http://www.focusonsocialism.ca/random.asp?ID=347

    The above is a "tankie" perspective, but it is unusual in that it welcomes the Chavez initiative.

    Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism

    The proposal last November 2009 to organize a new international having the support of left-socialist revolutionary parties in Latin America, on the initiative of Hugo Chavez, is an important development in the anti-imperialist movement urgently in need of credible communist analysis.

    Socialist Project, a quasi-trotskyist group, that also includes some well informed writers, as usual is first out of the blocks with their commentary on this development. Where the term “Fifth International” has come from is not clear. The still born Fourth International was a trotskyist organization that since its inception in 1938 has fractured into a series of smaller groups.

    The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) leadership has once again been caught flat footed. To my knowledge the CPC leadership has said nothing publicly about this development. If they have good information about it, in their usual lofty manner, they keep it a secret. Supporters of the CPC as usual are the last to know and left to try and figure out such matters as best we can.

    This is not 1914 on the eve of World War One when the opportunist leadership of European mass socialist parties of the Second International betrayed the working class and went over to the support of their respective ruling classes and helped their imperialist masters lead the workers to the slaughter. The Bolsheviks and Leninist core of forces in working class parties condemned the opportunist leadership of the Second International for the betrayal and under the leadership of Lenin on March 19th 1919 formed the Third International popularly known as the Comintern that united all of the Communist Parties of the world under its leadership until dissolution in 1943.

    After the Soviet Union had defeated the Nazis in WW2 there followed a series of International Meetings of Communist and Workers Parties usually convened together with CPSU Congresses and its work was published in World Marxist Review as the main theoretical organ of that movement. The Communist Party of Canada played an important role in that work.

    Today things are different. The forces coming forward with the proposal for a “Fifth International” are not Communist Parties but are left anti-imperialist revolutionary parties some of which are in power and proclaim socialism as their goal. These movements act in solidarity with socialist Cuba and the Bolivarian revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia and are not overtly anti-communist. Within this movement there are also some pronounced pseudo leftist meddlers involved in the process in particular the usual claque of trotskyist and anarchist groups who do nothing but spread confusion.

    The suggestion by Socialist Project that the proposed “Fifth International” should be modeled on the World Social Forum is an example. It is not only absurd, it is reactionary. Big tent feel good talk fests is not what is required now. The petty bourgeois radicals prefer such loosely organized movements in which they have unrestricted freedom of movement to spread their doctrine of “world revolution”. The proposal by Socialist Project to build socialist unity in Canada on the basis of “unity in diversity among left working class forces” with eco-socialism as a centre piece has been around for some time and continues to be ignored and never discussed or challenged by the leadership of the CPC.

    [...]

    The IMCWP is beginning to provide answers to the problem of confronting the wrong positions of social democracy and social radicals of all stripes. The (IMCWP) has now completed 11 International meetings to develop a unified line and to re-establish the supremacy of the ideas of Marxism Leninism within the international working class and people’s revolutionary movements. Great progress is being made on re-establishing the fundamentals of Leninism in the era of imperialism in particular how to conduct the struggle for socialism in non-revolutionary situations and unite all of the anti-imperialist forces.

    There is no organized structure to the IMCWP movement except through the medium of Solidnet. A more advanced organization structure may be under discussion. Undoubtedly it will emerge at a certain conjuncture of both urgency and need and growing organizational strength. There is no doubt in my mind that it will eventually happen.

    The CPC cannot move forward, regardless of all of the omnibus resolutions it produces, all of the hosannas, if there is not a corresponding rise in the level of its theoretical and ideological work and by its independent effort begins to provide for the advanced working class activists of the organized labour, farmer, peace and democratic movements of our country, relevant and timely communist analysis in the realm of the struggle of ideas. We in CPS say without fear, that is not being done adequately and must be addressed and urgently.