The Communist Party of Canada distributed a tabloid during and after the G20 Summit protests titled "United to demand a People's Recovery". It bears close scrutiny.
The question arises, if the CPC is a radical workers' party, and given that working people constitute the vast majority of society, why doesn't it propose a "Workers" Recovery? The answer is simple: The CPC advocates a multi-class strategy of alliance with the liberal or 'patriotic' Canadian bourgeoisie. While this is completely contrary to socialism, which strives for independent working class political action against the capitalist rulers and their system, it is an old story for this party that broke with revolutionary politics over 80 years ago.
To dispel any doubt about our claim, the CPC literature makes clear its embrace of bourgeois liberal values. It calls for a "foreign policy based on peace and disarmament", even though this is impossible short of the socialist transformation of society, and only fosters illusions in the present state.
Of course, the workers' movement can win temporary reforms, even a reduction in arms expenditures, or a withdrawal from an imperialist war of occupation (like the current one in Afghanistan). But a "foreign policy based on peace and disarmament" can occur only when the working class takes control of the economy and state, and re-organizes society for production to meet human needs rather than serve private profit. When capitalism has been eradicated on a world scale, and only then, will we have genuine peace and disarmament.
The CPC statement goes on to call for a "People's Coalition of labour and democratic forces which can press for even more substantial social and economic transformation". This signals the CPC commitment to a government coalition with bourgeois Liberals, Greens, so-called Red Tories, and other representatives of the putative 'progressive' wing of the Canadian business class. Indeed, the CPC endorsed the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition (backed by the bourgeois nationalist Parti Quebecois) in the winter of 2008-2009, pining only to be a part of it.
Such a coalition would be a death trap for the working class movement. It would undermine the independence of the unions and the labour-based New Democratic Party, subordinating the entire workers' movement to a section of the Canadian capitalist class. It would lead to a huge defeat, not to any kind of progressive transformation of society.
Workers have seen such treacherous coalitions operate in Chile in 1973, and more recently in France and Italy. The CPs in those countries participated in politically disarming the working class. They enabled Capital to re-organize its forces and to impose its reactionary agenda against working people. The CPC has been wedded to this rotten 'strategy' since the 1940s, which included its "no strike pledge" in Canada during WW2. That is why it declined from a mass party to the tiny, aged, dogmatic, reformist sect it is today.
The Stalinist movement worldwide has the blood of millions of communists on its hands. It betrayed scores of real revolutions (from Spain in the 1930s, Greece in the 1940s, Indonesia in the 1960s, to Chile in the 1970s). It was an obstacle to the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and today it betrays the Palestinian people by advocating the completely discredited "two-state solution", thus defending the continued existence of the apartheid Zionist state of Israel.
The CPC has never broken with Stalinism, the theory and practice of the criminal mis-leadership of the former degenerated workers' state in Russia. The CPC is still stuck in the rut of liberal 'popular-frontism', the distopia of 'socialism in one country', and the totalitarian nightmare of bureaucratic-centralism. (To learn more about these ideas, please visit: www.socialistaction.org )
Why dredge up this sad past? As we know, those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. Remember the hit song tag line: We won't be fooled again.
Socialist Action represents the revolutionary continuity of the first communists in Canada, from the period of the early 1920s, before the degeneration of the Comintern under Stalin, before the CPC expelled its revolutionary leaders Jack MacDonald and Maurice Spector. We advance a Transitional Programme, or Workers' Agenda, consistent with the method of Lenin, Trotsky and the early, healthy years of the Communist International.
We invite serious activists to take the revolutionary path forward -- the fight for socialism and working class independence from the parties of Capital. -Barry Weisleder
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