by the kites Editorial Committee
August 2023
Communist revolutionaries in Canada have been working over the past two years to sum up and sort through the experience of what’s being called the “third party-building movement” in their country—the period ranging from the early 2000s to the late 2010s and consisting of the experiences of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada and Revolutionary Initiative.
In the spirit of this major undertaking of summation, comrades associated with this effort have reached even further back into the revolutionary upsurge of 1960s and 70s and the “second party-building movement” in Canada that comes out of those decades. The work of sifting through these experiences has, as far as we know, taken the form of private conversations, circulating correspondence, studying the limited number of texts and historical material that touches upon or comes out of these periods, and, very importantly, connecting with some of the remaining elder participants of that era who are still around and who have a lot to say and share concerning their political activity.
In 2022, the kites Editorial Committee began corresponding with one such elder, Ray Bobb, a former participant of the Red Power movement in Canada that lasted from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s. We had been familiar with some of Ray Bobb’s earlier works via Revolutionary Initiative, which had published some of his old writings on its website some years ago. In the Fall of 2022, kites received a new piece from Ray Bobb, Theory, Strategy & Tactics in the Native Movement (or, as he calls it, TST), which he described as intending to advance upon or replace all of his earlier writings and thinking. The circulation of TST made for a good opportunity to bring ourselves into conversation with Ray Bobb and the ideas in his new piece, and so in the first half of 2023 the kites Editorial Committee commissioned an interview, which is now being published alongside TST and this editorial introduction.
As a bridge between summing up the third party-building movement and the work of strategizing for a future proletarian revolution in Canada, Ray Bobb’s essay, TST, and our interview with him, serve as both a look back at Native liberation politics in recent decades and a strong prescription concerning its future.
Ray Bobb argues that the only way forward for “the Indian nation,” which he analyzes as “a nation of the exception,” is a new revolutionary Indian nationalism. As Ray Bobb puts it (and as we’ve entitled our interview with him), “If Indians cannot develop into a modern nation then they will disappear.” This threat of disappearance is attributable to the Canadian imperialist state’s ongoing assimilationist agenda when it comes to the “the Native internal colony,” leading Ray Bobb to the position that “the tactics of the Native movement must, at this time, be focused on exposing, opposing, and reversing the Federal Government’s comprehensive treaty process.”
On the question of how the imperialist assimilationist agenda can be halted and genuine self-determination realized, Ray Bobb offers some strategic formulations for the contemporary proletarian revolutionary movement concerning Native people and the rest of the working class:
The Native internal colony being a part of both the third and first worlds requires strategy with the dual, mutually-inclusive objectives of revolutionary integration and revolutionary sovereignty.
Revolutionary integration means that a part of the Native internal colony will struggle, not only for integration into Canada, but also for a Canada that is not exploitative or oppressive.
Or in other words,“Strategy, so circumscribed, must proceed along the lines of an alliance between Native patriots and the progressive sector of the Canadian working class.”
TST and our interview with Ray Bobb lay down significant points and raise important questions concerning national oppression, Native liberation, and proletarian revolution in Canada, and as such comrades in Canada who are associated with kites, and the kites Editorial Committee are equally eager to be in conversation with these two pieces. That said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t note at least one major point of difference between these two pieces and the kites Editorial Committee.
Our main political divergence with these pieces concerns a thread of “Third Worldism” or “Lin Biaoism” that runs through them. The time in which Ray Bobb came up as a revolutionary in the 1960s and 70s saw an unprecedented and worldwide wave of national liberation struggles that were overwhelming the imperialist powers like never before. Hence, a popular notion developed among revolutionaries at the time—stated most explicitly by one leader in socialist China, Lin Biao, who became the namesake for this outlook later on—that world revolution could only come about by way of revolutions in the oppressed countries encircling and eventually defeating the imperialist countries. This position was a crude extrapolation of Mao Zedong’s strategy of protracted people’s war, which was taken up by Maoists across the world in countries with feudal or semi-feudal countrysides to wage protracted, rural guerrilla wars with the intention of amassing enough force to eventually encircle and overwhelm the main fortifications of the class enemy in the cities. The extension of this line of thinking onto a world scale—revolution in the oppressed countries encircling the imperialist countries—came to be known as Lin Biaoism.
Unfortunately, however, that’s not how history played out. While formal independence was attained for most of the colonies, capitalism-imperialism eventually restabilized its control over and deepened its exploitation and plunder of the oppressed countries by integrating the bourgeois classes of the oppressed countries as greater partners in the system of imperialist domination and exploitation. Meanwhile in imperialist countries, the popular classes have seen their conditions steadily degrade since the 1970s under the “neoliberal” offensive of the imperialist bourgeoisie. In our view, the sum of these historical developments since the 1970s has certainly nullified the hypothesis that world revolution can only and principally come by way of the oppressed countries.
Notwithstanding these historical developments, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, this Lin Biaoist or Third Worldist position made a come-back among some self-proclaimed “Maoists” on the internet, mainly across North America, who latched onto this ideology in order to justify their cowardly refusal to try to make revolution in their own countries. Needless to say, those trends amounted to nothing (except for spreading their cynical views online and justifying doing nothing). Hence, we were compelled to note our point of difference with this thread of Lin Biaoism. That said, this is not at all how we interpret Ray Bobb’s intention or position: we strongly value his analysis and look forward to bringing our readers and comrades into conversation with his perspectives.
A few final editorial remarks: TST has been copy edited by, and is being published first in, kites. However, Ray Bobb has circulated a draft of TST to other publications to maximize its reach and impact on “the Native movement and its future.” And so, TST may appear elsewhere at some later time with no attribution or reference to kites and with slightly different copy edits.
A final remark for kites readers and younger comrades in general—especially in countries like the US and Canada where some decades have passed with no real communist vanguard party worthy of the name and thus where many potential younger revolutionaries lack the benefit of revolutionary elders: To whatever extent elder revolutionaries like Ray Bobb are still kicking around and can be engaged—and to be clear, not those who’ve degenerated into revisionism, defeatism, dogmatism, or despair—comrades should urgently get to know them, their views, and their experiences.
We look forward to releasing more interviews of this kind to our readers in the future.
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