A New Party is Born

Founding Announcement of the (New) Communist Party of Canada

January 31, 2024

To all those toiling and struggling in Canada who suffer and anger at the worsening of conditions among the people broadly; and

To all those who have no illusions remaining about the supposed benevolence of the Canadian state, who have come to see the naked reality of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class that controls it, and the imperialist state that it has long been and become in order to serve that ruling class; and

To all those who have come to understand and stand in opposition to bankrupt liberalism and the monsters it breeds around the world;¹

And finally, to all the rest who are in search of a real way forward out of the misery and decay of the present world, which is the world imposed by capitalism and imperialism,

We say: Don’t despair! Because a new period has commenced, a new party of the proletariat has been forged!

Today, we announce the formation of the (New) Communist Party of Canada (the (N)CPC), the succesful completion of its Founding Congress, and the public release of its Political Program.

The new Party is announced today, but it was not born today. The (N)CPC was born in clandestinity over two years ago, in 2021, after the protracted Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21 succeeded in rallying communist revolutionaries from across Canada, old and new, with many veterans of what we have come to calling the “third,” and even some from what we are calling the “second,” communist party-building movements in Canada, alongside a great many newer, younger proletarian revolutionaries who were only too ready to carry forward the torch of proletarian revolution in the world today.

The (N)CPC was born in clandestinity because our Party—which is guided by what we consider to be the highest stage of revolutionary proletarian theory at this point in history, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism—knows only too well that proletarian revolution is neither a peaceful “civil” act nor a Parliamentary affair. Rather, it is a protracted political process of accumulating revolutionary forces, building the organs of proletarian political power and escalating confrontations with the ruling class and its agents that can and eventually must lead to open civil war between the antagonistically opposed classes. We know full well that the capitalist-imperialist state and ruling class will not hesitate to vilify and repress the communist vanguard party and the proletarian revolutionary movement the moment it apppears as a threat to the bourgeoisie. Thus, our Party builds the proletarian revolution accordingly, in clandestinity. After all, a real (i.e., revolutionary) communist party is the only existential threat that the bourgeoisie faces. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie knows this, while many Leftists,“Marxists,” “Maoists, ” etc. do not. Serious communist revolutionaries like ourselves, however, do, and thus act accordingly in our mission to bring the proletariat into power.

The (N)CPC now counts over two years of party-building activity since its constitution in 2021. These two years have consisted of intensive and extensive political activity that has included:

• a continuation of the process of regrouping communist revolutionaries in Canada through unity and struggle;
• advancing the process of summing up the experience and rectifying the errors of the preceding (third) party-building movement;
• building the infrastructure of the new party;
• developing new mass work in the working class and other sections of the proletariat with refined methods and in ways that break with the limitations of the preceding movement;
• developing and struggling over the Party Program and its revolutionary strategy; and finally,
• convening and successfully concluding both the Founding Conference (2021) and Founding Congress (2023) of the (N)CPC.

Prior to the Party’s consolidation in 2021 as a democratic centralist communist vanguard party, well over a year of serious effort was directed into the Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21. This process succeeded in uniting (through struggle) most remaining fragments of the third party-building movement and the vast majority (but not all) of the participants of the various groupings represented in the unity-struggle process, namely: Unité Maoiste, Proletarian Revolutionary Organization (coming out of one strand of the former Revolutionary Initiative, or RI), a separate group “RI-Canada,” and what remained of the “Pan-Canadian” section of the PCR-RCP. In fact, all the members of the first three groupings in this list were won to the new party, as well as the majority of the latter grouping.

The Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21 can claim success in having unified most of the existing proletarian revolutionary groupings in Canada who had managed to find and expand their political initiative preceding, during, and following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the absence of the guiding hand of a larger democratic centralist communist organization behind them. It was a remarkable achievement that these forces in 2020-21 managed to accomplish in just about a year’s time what the two organizations of the third party-building movement (RI and PCR-RCP) were not able to achieve in 15 years, i.e., unifying virtually all groupings of communist revolutionaries into a single revolutionary communist vanguard party.² However, it was by learning from the experiences that came before us that we’ve made these advances and forged the new party.

As its first public act, the (N)CPC brings forward its Program for socialist revolution in Canada, a document struggled over for many months, and based in many more months of research and theoretical work, and finally, debated, refined, and adopted at the Founding Congress of the (New) Communist Party of Canada in 2023. We expect this document to be a great point of debate for some years to come as we build the Party into a formidable force and take the next steps in the proletarian revolutionary process in this country. We wholeheartedly invite the discussion, debate, and further struggle for unity with all other proletarian revolutionaries who we will soon encounter and the many more who we have yet to forge.

The (N)CPC upholds, seeks to build upon, and will sum up to the best of our abilities, the experience of its revolutionary predecessors, including: the first and once revolutionary (but no longer) Communist Party of Canada of the 1920s and ’30s, what we call the first party-building movement in Canada; followed by the Marxist-Leninist anti-revisionist movement that arose from the 1960s onward, leading to the second party-building movement throughout the 1970s, especially the Workers’ Communist Party of Canada and In Struggle!; and finally, the two organizations of the third party-building movement in Canada whose experiences range from the early-to-mid 2000s right up to the end of the 2010s, namely the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) and Revolutionary Initiative (RI). These last organizations have provided much of experience and force out of which our party has been forged.

The (N)CPC, through the contributions of a great number of participants of the third party-building movement, is now nearing the completion of summations of the overall experience of the third party-building movement, consisting of distinct summations of both PCR-RCP and RI, as well as a separate and briefer overview of the “third wave” as a whole. These summations will clarify what we have learned, what we uphold, and what we have needed to make a break from the third party-building movement. As for the main short-comings of our forerunner organizations, our Party Program summarizes:

In the case of the PCR-RCP these shortcomings were mainly the consequence of dogmatism and poor application of democratic centralism, leading to stagnation and a series of splits. For Rev­olutionary Initiative, a foundational failure to grasp party building as the principal task of communist revolutionaries opened room for a syndicalist deviation to take hold in the organization, leading to a process of liquidation.

Our Party and its cadre will soon bring forward our full summations of these organizations, which we believe will amount to the most comprehensive overview to date concerning the PCR-RCP and RI experiences. Our Party has studied these experiences to a great extent (which many of us were a part of), and we are well underway in the course of rectifying the errors of our predecessors.

It is also our aim to see similarly comprehensive summations made of the first and second waves of communist party-building in Canada. However, given that our existing movement is much further removed in time and personal connection from those earlier periods of the proletarian revolution in Canada, we must find distinct approaches to summing those up. We are still in the process of investigating parts of the second wave of party-building, which comes to us largely by way of discussions and interviews with the revolutionary elders and veterans still kicking around from that period. Parts of this work will be published in the not-too-distant future in kites. We also intend to initiate a comprehensive summation of the first Communist Party of Canada in its revolutionary days. However, that period will likely only be accessible to us through academic tracts and older anti-revisionist literature, and not first-hand participants (considering the fact that that party has been off the revolutionary road for more than seventy years now!). This summation work is just a small part of the theoretical and ideological work that we are now assuming, and that work is just a small part of the much greater ideological, political, and organizational work that lays ahead of us.

To our comrades, revolutionary-minded people, and all struggling and exploited people in Canada who are sick of the world and this country in its present form and who are ready to consider a future under the leadership of the proletariat: we urge you to study and struggle with the new Program of the (N)CPC, make yourself fit and ready to join the communist vanguard party, and take a step into the enormous task of making the proletariat a protagonist in the future course of history once again.

To our comrades internationally, the would-be and the actual revolutionary leaders of the international proletariat:

Let’s hasten the work of reconstructing revolutionary communist parties everywhere where they do not exist!

Let’s rebuild the proletarian revolutionary movement, especially in the imperialist countries!

Let’s link arms with all those communist-led people’s wars and other communist revolutionary forces who have kept the torch of Marx, Lenin, and Mao lit and burning bright through the darkest hours of the international proletarian revolution, and rebuild the revolutionary international communist movement!

Central Committee of the (N)CPC

January 31, 2024

END NOTES

1 Fascism, Zionism and a myriad of other reactionary trends survive and thrive in the world both through the open support of the imperialist ruling classes and also due to the conditions they impose upon the world.

2 And since its founding, the (N)CPC has since further rallied around it much (but not all) of what else remained of genuine communist revolutionary elements who were part of the third party-building movement but not yet unified with it in 2021, with the only exceptions being: (1) a tiny number of ultra-leftists with a long rap sheet of wrecking behaviour who our Party walked wide circles around; (2) an equally tiny number of unremoulded big egos and lazy intellectuals who, notwithstanding whatever their previous status was in the third party-building movement and despite whatever social media personages they maintained after 2021, have proven to be skeptics and opponents of actually building a party in practice; and (3) the only promising fragment remaining, any of that small number of ex-RCP or ex-RI cadre who left the movement at its low points, not in bad-standing, who have not yet been recuperated, won to, or made aware of the existence of the (N)CPC but whom we believe can be struggled with to return to the revolutionary road.