From the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US)
February 2024
We are writing to congratulate the comrades in Canada who have come together to form the most indispensable weapon for making revolution and leading the socialist transition to communism: the communist vanguard party. We have been eyeing the developments towards the formation of the (New) Communist Party of Canada with great enthusiasm, and we thank you comrades for allowing us to observe and participate in this process in the appropriate ways. We have taken many lessons from the moves you comrades have made, and have greatly benefited from the collaborative relationship we have developed with you comrades and the critical exchanges we have had between our organizations.
In opposition to the plethora of revisionist organizations claiming the mantle of communism while betraying its core principles, in contrast to the utter lack of seriousness of the Left in our countries, and in rejection of the postmodernist ideology that has become hegemonic in so-called radical politics these days, the (New) Communist Party of Canada (hereafter (N)CPC) represents a serious determination to overthrow Canadian imperialism and build a new, liberated society on the ashes of the old. The comrades who have formed the (N)CPC have moved with discipline, collective unity, and rigorous study and struggle to form an organization capable of integrating with the masses and developing and carrying out a unified strategic plan towards real revolutionary objectives. We especially appreciate how comrades in the (N)CPC have been learning from their past experiences, positive and negative, in prior organizations, refusing to give up in the face of difficult challenges, and creatively developing an analysis of Canadian society so as to find the revolutionary path forward.
As the culmination of efforts to form a new vanguard party in Canada, the publication of the (N)CPC Program sends an important message, to the masses in your country and to revolutionary-minded people around the world, that there is a serious force for revolution in Canada. We look forward to the reverberations your Program will have in the US, where it may help combat and contend with the growth of the Left and hegemony of postmodernism, and perhaps push a few in the new generation to get serious themselves.
We believe the (N)CPC Program represents a revolutionary line, with several important strengths we want to highlight. It puts the Party on the serious mission of revolution, setting high standards for Party members to devote their lives to this mission and for the Party and its membership to professionalize and function under real democratic centralism to make good on this mission. It concedes nothing to Leftist or postmodernist politics, and correctly identifies the Left and postmodernism among the obstacles and opponents to revolution. And it lays out the beginnings of a strategy for revolution in Canada, which comrades in the (N)CPC will no doubt further develop through practice and theory.
Rather than resting content with giving pat answers, regurgitating Marxist-Leninist-Maoist categories, or simply rehashing general principles, the (N)CPC Program makes an analysis of Canada and its place in the world in its motion and development. The Program’s analysis of imperialism in the present, classes in Canada, the history of Canada, and the national questions in Canada employs a fundamentally dialectical method, focusing on the contradictions inherent in things rather than things in themselves. This analysis is rooted in concrete research and investigation, which in turn brings to life the motion and development of the things in question.
The (N)CPC Program’s analysis of the national question in Canada represents a creative solution to a key contradiction that revolution must resolve in your country, using a scientific analysis of nations in their motion and development to arrive at the solution of a multinational socialist confederacy. While we cannot measure the correctness of line simply by how much our enemies will hate it, the fact that postmodernists and Leftists will hate your Program’s analysis of the national question is a good sign.
Besides clearly identifying Canada as an imperialist country, the (N)CPC Program clarifies the present state of imperialist rivalry between the four great powers. We have already begun adopting your Program’s analysis of the Anglo-American Imperialist Alliance for our own purposes, as a means of understanding how our principal class enemies are collaborating and contending with their rivals. In addition, the (N)CPC Program’s analysis of imperialism in the present provides greater nuance and complexity than a simple division of the world between imperialist and oppressed nations, without in any way losing sight of the importance of this basic division.
Perhaps the greatest strength of the (N)CPC Program is that, in opposition to prevailing trends among revisionists and many genuine communists in imperialist countries, it makes clear that revolution in imperialist countries is not a matter of waiting for a grand crisis—a radical change in the objective situation—but of systematically working to build up the subjective forces for revolution to seize on and create the openings for the revolutionary seizure of power.
While we believe the (N)CPC Program represents an overall revolutionary line, we would not be true comrades if we did not bring up secondary instances where its line does not live up to the most advanced principles fought for by the international communist movement. In private correspondence, we provided detailed feedback on the draft of your Program. For the benefit of readers of the journal kites, we will draw attention to two areas of more substantial disagreement that the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US) has with the (N)CPC Program. We do this because we have confidence in the comradely relationship we have with the (N)CPC, in order to model the kind of comradely debate needed among communists, and to help readers of kites develop their ability to discern line.
Our secondary disagreements with the (N)CPC Program flow from what we would call our commitment to RIMist principles, namely the principles articulated in the 1984 Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and their further elaboration in the pages of the journal A World To Win. We believe these RIMist principles, drawn especially from the great advances of the socialist years in China under Mao’s leadership and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in particular, to be the highest synthesis of a general line for the international communist movement yet achieved. We do not treat the line of the RIM Declaration as an end point, however, but as a point of departure from which to further develop communist principles in order to meet the challenges of making revolution in the present.
Imperialism and the split in the working class
The work that went into the section “Social Classes in Canada” of the (N)CPC Program in concretely identifying the various classes in Canada and their relation to the means of production is a welcome contrast to pat Leftist answers that sometimes pass as “class analysis” these days. However, while the (N)CPC Program clearly identifies Canada as an imperialist country, its class analysis stands in contrast to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the split in the working class and its ramifications for revolutionary strategy.
The RIM Declaration summed up that “Lenin demonstrated that imperialism inevitably leads to a ‘shift in class relations,’ to a split in the working class in the imperialist countries between the oppressed and exploited proletariat and an upper section of the workers benefiting from and in league with the imperialist bourgeoisie.” The success of the Bolsheviks was predicated, in part, on Lenin’s analysis of the split in the working class, and the revolution they led was based on the “lower and deeper” sections of the proletariat who constituted a firm base for proletarian internationalism. The revisionists of the Second International, by contrast, betrayed revolution and tailed imperialist chauvinism among the masses in part by not grasping the split in the working class in imperialist countries and basing themselves on those sections of the working class who had gained a material stake in imperialism.
The Bolsheviks did not stop at the lower and deeper sections of the working class, and carried out all-around agitation among all sections of the people, unlike today’s “Third Worldists,” who use Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the split in the working class to justify their own capitulation—their refusal to try to make revolution in imperialist countries. While the (N)CPC rightfully rejects “Third Worldist” capitulationism and insists on carrying out political work among the working class as a whole, we find the absence of any analysis of the split in the working class in your your Program to be a substantial weakness. The (N)CPC Program clearly identifies the imperialist nature of Canada, but it stops short of the Leninist1 understanding that the seal of parasitism is stamped on all of imperialist society, and that the spoils of imperialism are used to bribe and bourgeoisify whole sections of the working class. It is only by ignoring Lenin’s analysis that your Program can include, without any qualification, 60% of the population in Canada in the proletariat.
To be clear, we are not making a moralistic argument, but a strategic one: that communists in the imperialist countries must base themselves on the lower and deeper, most exploited and oppressed, sections of the masses who constitute the bedrock social base for revolution and proletarian internationalism owing to their life conditions. And we would add to that Leninist understanding an emphasis on those sections of the masses coming into greatest antagonistic conflict with the motions of capital, whether that is through exploitation, dispossession, migration, or being cast off into the reserve army of labor. With our feet firmly planted among those masses, we can and should carry out political work among all other sections of the popular classes. But grasping the split in the working class will inevitably change who we understand to be the most strategic sections of the masses for revolution in imperialist countries, and, indeed, who we include in the proletariat. That certainly will encompass proletarians engaged in production, and we do not equate industrial workers with bourgeoisified workers, though we do recognize that there is considerable overlap between the two in imperialist countries. We also understand that there is a substantial portion of industrial workers with a history of militant struggle concentrated in Quebec, which makes them of more strategic importance there. In addition, we would not consider people in occupations that require college degrees and significant intellectual training and receive salaries based on that education and training, such as teachers and nurses, to be part of the proletariat, but part of the petty-bourgeoisie, albeit sections of the petty-bourgeoisie who we should strive to win over and who occupy important strategic positions in society.
Consequently, coming from a Leninist analysis of imperialism and the split in the working class, we disagree with the principle of “workers’ centrality” articulated in the (N)CPC Program. It is worth noting that this was the operational principle guiding most, if not all, of the “ML” (in the Maoist sense) movement in the imperialist countries in the 1970s, and following that principle led those organizations down the path of economism, reformism, and revisionism.2
We believe there are some economist tendencies in the (N)CPC Program that likely flow from the “workers’ centrality” principle. For example, the oppression of women gets less attention in your Program than it typically has in the Maoist tradition. And when it is addressed, it gets an economist resolution: “It would be much easier to curtail domestic abuse directed against women if there was a universal right to housing that could enable them to leave a dangerous partner at any time without risking homelessness, poverty, or having to rely on charities.” While we do not think the overall character of the (N)CPC Program is economism, we would be remiss if we ignored even small tendencies in this direction among our comrades given the whole history, especially in imperialist countries, of economism taking hold within and ruining the revolutionary character of communist parties.
The GPCR as our crystal ball for the socialist transition to communism
As RIMists, we believe that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China was the highest pinnacle of achievement for the proletariat as a class and for the international communist movement. Summing up the experience of proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet Union and China, Mao recognized that the key struggle in socialist society, after proletarian power was consolidated, was to further revolutionize society in the direction of communism in opposition to the attempts of a newly generated bourgeoisie to take society back down the capitalist road. Through this struggle, the material conditions that make capitalist restoration possible can be eliminated step by step. In the course of the GPCR, concrete methods were developed to advance this struggle and move through the contradictions of socialist society, such as overcoming the division between mental and manual labor, revolutionizing the vanguard party while strengthening its institutionalized leadership role, and moving beyond “bourgeois right.” Given these achievements, the GPCR is something of a crystal ball through which to see what the future socialist society will look like. The historical experience of the GPCR, Mao’s theories that guided it, and summation of the GPCR by the RIM is what our organization has used to conceptualize what the socialist transition to communism will look like in our country (see our Manifesto).
The (N)CPC Program’s conception of socialism mentions some of the principles that flow from the GPCR, but its conception of socialism seems to be an eclectic mix rather than a set of policies firmly rooted in the most advanced experience of the proletariat in power. Many of the immediate measures for socialism in Canada presented in the (N)CPC Program, such as equality between nations, renouncing Canada’s imperialist role, and guaranteeing basic rights to work, housing, education, and healthcare are not only correct but an important indication of what proletarian state power makes possible right after the revolution. A few of these measures, however, seem to be drawn more from the Paris Commune than Maoist China, such as the “possibility to revoke all State officials at any time,” a possibility that capitalist roaders could surely take advantage of.
Beyond immediate measures, the (N)CPC Program presents socialism more as the extension of democracy than the elimination of class divisions. For example, the Program states that
Under socialism, democracy will be installed in workplaces. Manual workers will be invited to speak and think, intellectual workers will be invited to get on solid ground. Simultaneously, anarchy in production will be abolished. Individual factories, mines, hospitals, etc. will not be left to themselves, but will have to work within the frameworks of central plans decided upon democratically by the higher organs of working-class power following the recommendations of scientists and experts. Democratization of the economy will be the order of the day.
What is being described in the first two sentences of the above excerpt is not, in fact, democracy in the workplace, but overcoming the division between mental and manual labor, including the very real material basis for that division. In the second half of the above quote, in addition to the notable absence of the leading role of the vanguard party and the nebulous reference to “the higher organs of working class power,” there is an all-too-democratic treatment of scientists and experts that suggests a lack of understanding of the continued ideological and material strength of the bourgeoisie even under the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Lenin described this reality in Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, “For a long time after the revolution the exploiters inevitably continue to retain a number of great practical advantages: … they still have various connections, habits of organization, and management; knowledge of all the ‘secrets’ (customs, methods, means, and possibilities) of management; superior education; close connections with the higher technical personnel (who live and think like the bourgeoisie)…” (our added emphasis). Without the leadership of the vanguard party and the supervision of the masses (i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat), the recommendations of the scientists and experts you intend to follow will be bourgeois recommendations. That is why, in Maoist China, they insisted on the principle of red and expert and developed forms such as three-in-one committees to enact that principle.
We worry that some policies for socialism in the (N)CPC Program could wind up extending and strengthening, rather than restricting and eliminating, bourgeois right. For example, your Program advocates the “abolition of consumption and income taxes for common workers.” Taken together with the characterization of socialism as “where working people reap the fruits of their labour,” this sounds a bit like the old Lassallean concept of the right to the full proceeds of labor, which Marx and Engels took to task. We wonder how the state would function and social provisions be provided without taxing common workers. As we understand it, the socialist transition period is not the abolition of appropriation, but the abolition of private appropriation. In fact, the socialist transition period will involve an increase in social appropriation until social appropriation becomes absolute, and thus ceases to exist, under communism.
In regards to ownership under socialism, the (N)CPC program states that
the revolution will begin a vast process of socialization of the means of production (i.e., nationalization under democratic control). The economy will be taken from the hands of private individuals, firms and corporations and be given to the democratic institutions of the people.
In both the Soviet Union and Maoist China, social ownership of the means of production took the form of state ownership. We note that your Program substitutes ambiguous conceptions of democratization of the economy for the specific form of state ownership; the concrete means of involving the masses in determining the direction of the economy practiced during the historical experiences of proletarian dictatorship, especially during the GPCR; and the crucial importance of the institutionalized leadership role of the communist vanguard party in economic planning. Indeed, throughout the sections of your Program on socialism, there is a consistent downplaying or omission of the role of state ownership and the vanguard party, and an underestimation of the difficulties of exercising dictatorship over the overthrown bourgeoisie and newly generated bourgeois elements.
We draw attention to these questions of dictatorship and democracy for philosophical and practical reasons. On the former, we note that democracy, in conception and practice, has always been bound up with individual property rights. No democracy in human history ever worked to overcome class divisions at their root, though bourgeois-democracy, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles notwithstanding, did put an end to formal class privileges. On the latter, we call attention to the path taken by communists who upheld the more “democratic” measures of the Paris Commune over the more “dictatorial” measures of the Soviet Union and socialist China. Within the RIM, those who took this path, such as K Venu of the Central Reorganizing Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and Prachanda and Bhattarai of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), led their organizations down the road of bourgeois-democracy, revisionism, and capitulation. The great advances of the revolutionary people’s war in Nepal that brought the masses to the precipice of state power were sacrificed on the alter of democracy.3
Finally, we believe our differences with the (N)CPC Program’s conception of socialism are tied to the fact that the final aim of communism gets little mention within it, coming more as an afterthought tacked on at the end. A great strength of your Program is in how it sets the (N)CPC’s sights on the revolutionary war for the seizure of state power and insists on viewing the Party’s present work from that perspective. We believe that the socialist transition should be treated in a similar fashion, with our sights on communism. Doing so will force us to confront, in a more materialist and dialectical way, how to move through the contradictions of socialist society to a communist world and train the masses in understanding those contradictions.
In unity and struggle
Let us conclude this red salute on the formation of the (N)CPC with one last critical observation on the content of your Program, a critical observation that is also a compliment of your Party. Summing up the second wave of party building in Canada, your Program states that after the revolutionary high tide of the 1960s and 70s,
the tide was turning: the worldwide M-L movement went into full retreat following the counter-revolutionary developments in China, capitalist crisis intensified and eclectic, petty-bourgeois tendencies started to occupy more and more space on the political left at the expense of the revolutionaries.
While this assessment is mainly accurate, there was an important counterpoint to the “full retreat” it describes. In the wake of, and as a revolutionary response to, the 1976 counterrevolutionary coup in China, comrades in the Communist Party of Peru launched revolutionary people’s war in 1980, shining the path of audacious offensive rather than retreat and becoming a serious threat to bourgeois rule over the next decade. Comrades in the Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran), regrouping after failing to gain the initiative during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, led an armed uprising in the city of Amol in 1982, rejecting capitulation in the face of intense repression. From 1979–81, comrades in the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA mounted a political offensive, holding high the banner of Mao, opposing US imperialist moves on Iran, and fighting to re-establish May Day as a revolutionary holiday among the masses. These comrades in Peru, Iran, and the US were joined by others around the world who upheld the great advances represented by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and Mao’s revolutionary line to form the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement in 1984, refusing to allow the great setback in China to force us all into retreat. In doing so, the RIM demonstrated the truth of the (N)CPC Program’s insistence on the decisive role of the subjective factor in making revolutionary advances, rather than waiting for more “favorable” objective conditions.4
Since the RIM collapsed in the 2000s, it is up to a new wave of communists to, in the words of the Umberto Corti of the (new) Italian Communist Party, “banish pessimism and defeatism” and go on the offensive.5 The formation of the (N)CPC represents an important step forward in that process, breathing new life into our communist tradition and setting an important precedent for the formation and regroupment of communist parties and organizations around the world. The (N)CPC represents a refusal to give in to the pervasive trend of capitulation exemplified by revisionism, postmodernism, and the Left. The (N)CPC demonstrates not just the hope of revolution, but also the determination to make it happen in our lifetimes. We in the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries aim at nothing less than to be your comrades-in-arms, with the same determination and discipline, on the southern side of the US-Canada border. We look forward to a continued, collaborative relationship with you comrades of unity and struggle, learning from one another, and moving forward together to wipe capitalism-imperialism off of North America.
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Death to US and Canadian imperialism!
1When we call something Leninist or Maoist, we are simply specifying the origins of a specific principle that we consider fundamental to communism. There is no such thing as a genuine communist today who is not also a Leninist and Maoist, and we do not approach these as separate identities, but as components of an ongoing synthesis.
2For an elaboration of our line on the question of “workers’ centrality,” see relevant sections of our document The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today (published as kites #8 (2023)), namely pp. 58–61, 168–70, and 551–55. In addition, see The Specter That Still Haunts: Locating a Revolutionary Class within Contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism by Kenny Lake, published as a four-part series in kites #1–4.
3Democracy vs. proletarian dictatorship was a particularly contentious question within and between RIM parties and organizations in South Asia, and the documents from this debate are worth studying. We suggest spending some time reading A World To Win #17 (1992) and, by way of negative example, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)’s The Worker #9 (2004). Notably, comrade Kiran, who went against the bourgeois-democratic tide in the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), snapped a firm rebuke of what he thought was an attempt to promote the democratic measures of the Paris Commune above proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet Union and China in kites‘s interview with him. (The question had an entirely different intention than the one Kiran perceived, but it was poorly worded and did not take into account the debate among South Asian Maoists on the Paris Commune—our mistake.)
4Reports and analysis of the rapid advance of the people’s war in the Peru can be found throughout the pages of A World To Win during the 1980s and early 1990s. For a summation of the Amol uprising, see the Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran)’s “Defeated Armies Learn Well” in A World To Win #4 (1985). On the RCP, USA’s political offensive, see our summation in kites #8 (2023), pp. 369–87.
5See “’Banish Pessimism and Defeatism’: An Interview with Umberto Corti of the Central Committee of the (New) Italian Communist Party” in kites #5/6 (2022).
kites-journal.org 