Announcing Railroad, the Theoretical Journal of the (New) Communist Party of Canada
After more than three years of determined work spanning 2021-24, the (New) Communist Party of Canada ((N)CPC) proudly announces its new theoretical publication, Railroad. Since 2021, the Party has engaged in (i) regrouping and rectifying what remained of the collapsed Maoist party-building organizations in Canada from the 2000s and 2010s,1 (ii) consolidating and training a new generation of proletarian revolutionaries, (iii) embarking on new political work among the masses, (iv) forging the beginnings of a revolutionary strategy and, finally (v), drafting, debating and adopting The Political Program of the (New) Communist Party of Canada,2 all of which came together in (vi) the Founding Congress of the (N)CPC in 2023. While we continue to consolidate and expand on this preliminary work, the Party now sets a new objective of further sharpening and broadening the theoretical and ideological tools that must be developed in order to advance proletarian revolution in this country. Hence, the (N)CPC mandates Railroad to assume the tasks of theoretical elaboration and ideological propagation for the Party,with the dual aims of advancing a theory of proletarian revolution in Canada and raising a new generation of proletarian revolutionaries.
Putting the revolution back on track
From the early 1980s until just a few years ago, there was no revolutionary vanguard party of the proletariat in this country—no conductor of the proletarian revolution. While the organizations of the Third Party-Building Movement in the preceding two decades tried in earnest to rectify this situation—amassing critical experience along the way—certain limitations held them back. The absence of this great protagonist from the political scene in Canada—following the great reversals of the international communist movement in the world after Mao Zedong’s death and the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism in China in the late 1970s—has been nothing short of catastrophic for the proletariat, as well as for the broader masses of people.
The masses have paid with their blood, sweat, tears, lives and futures through every decade that they’ve been made to toil and suffer without being able to brandish the threat of proletarian revolution. The most wicked monsters imaginable have been left to stalk and ravage the planet without restraint, while they insidiously don their masks of progress. For instance, among the bank-rollers of the genocide in Gaza are some of the same promoters of faux-progressive “woke” politics in Canada—chief among these chameleons, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In these decades of popular decline since the triumph of the Dengist counter-revolution in China after 1978, social democrats, revisionists, reformists, Trotskyites, anarchists, and even rad-libs and other postmodern-Leftists, have all tried their hand at initiating, leading, or attempting to lead the masses through one period of popular discontent or another. But each and every one of these political trends has failed to halt or slow the offensive of the bourgeoisie just as much as they’ve failed to build or sustain a popular revolutionary movement against the chronic and acute crises of the declining capitalist-imperialist world system. Even worse, many of these trends have pioneered new ways to compromise, capitulate, and co-exist with capitalism-imperialism, altogether shrinking from the historic tasks in front of them.
To be clear, against the regressive currents of postmodernism and right-wing reaction, the people haven’t needed a vanguard party to rebel over the last half-century (on this point, we can agree wholeheartedly with the anarchists). We’ve seen a great many explosions of popular discontent and mass-proletarian resistance punctuate these past few generations of unmitigated counter-revolution. From the Mohawk uprising at Oka in 1990 (not to mention subsequent militant Native standoffs at Burnt Church, Ipperwash Provincial Park and Gustafsen Lake); to the anti-globalization protests of the late ‘90s / early 2000s; the resurgence of workers’ labour militancy in recent years; and the great popular movement for the liberation of Palestine that has continuously filled the streets over the past year, the masses are propelled into spontaneous action—sometimes remarkably sustained and determined action—regardless of the presence or absence of viable class leadership and political direction. What the masses have needed and been without, however, is a vehicle to cohere and guide their movements into a scientific, strategic and necessarily conscious revolutionary process. Such a vehicle is a genuine proletarian communist vanguard party, the only vehicle capable of navigating through twists and turns, advances and retreats on the road to a proletarian-led popular seizure of power. Railroad lays the theoretical tracks for the (N)CPC to seriously and soberly take up such a monumental task.
Why “Railroad”?
For more reasons than one, it’s a watchword worthy of our Party’s intentions.
As both noun and verb, “railroad” (at least in English) embodies many of the contradictions that constitute this country and its peoples, carrying as much historical weight for the proletariat and oppressed nations in the development of Canada as it does for this country’s parasitical ruling class.
The ties that bind
The Canadian state was quite literally railroaded into formation in 1867 to underwrite the costs of the transcontinental railway system that had as its main aim the unification and expansion of Britain’s North American colonies, which British imperialism pursued with genocidal intent and design. After the War of 1812, competition between the British in North America and their Yankee rivals to the south took the form of a race to conquer and settle the still-vast and uncolonized western and northwestern stretches of the continent. Rail became the principal means of accomplishing this.
As one of the world’s largest infrastructural projects at the time, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) summoned the great antagonistic classes of the emerging capitalist-imperialist system and brought them into concentrated opposition to one another. On the one hand, this gargantuan monopoly-capitalist endeavour constituted the backbone of the new Canadian state, laying down the skeletal infrastructure for the colonization and plunder of the northern half of the continent and its peoples. On the other hand, the arduous, back-breaking labour that this transcontinental throughway required spurred the formation of the industrial proletariat in Canada. On the rails alone, an industrial proletariat was assembled that consisted of thousands of workers from Britain, continental Europe, and most especially from oppressed nations and countries. The greatest proportion of these workers, some 17,000, came from China, a country that was being prevailed upon by all the imperialist powers in the world at the time, most especially the British (see the “Opium Wars”). Following the railway’s completion, tens, and eventually hundreds, of thousands of industrial workers were concentrated in the extractive and manufacturing industries that would form in the domestic market forged out of this colonial endeavour.
As the railway supercharged Canada’s industrialization, it also facilitated the dramatic advance in the colonization and oppression of Indigenous peoples. The CPR sealed the emergent Canadian state-building project by ensuring British Columbia’s entry into Confederation, while accelerating the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the forcible removal of whole nations onto reserves (a process begun in earnest in the 1870s), particularly across the Prairies. Following closely in the railway’s wake, the genocidal Indian Residential School system, designed to dismantle Indigenous nations from the inside out, aided the hastened pace of settlement into territories that Britain had until that point in time only claimed but not yet effectively conquered or colonized. This transportation infrastructure proved decisive in facilitating the Canadian state’s defeat of the North-West Resistance of 1885, which it suppressed by deploying 5,000 militiamen, leading to the defeat of the resistance and the execution of its Métis leader Louis Riel, among others. By comparison, the new Canadian state faced much greater difficulty in suppressing the Red River Resistance a decade and a half earlier in 1869, in the time before the completion of the transcontinental railway system.
Along with colonization, confederation and counter-revolution, of utmost concern for British financiers and the new Canadian bourgeoisie in the development of the transcontinental railway system was, of course, capital accumulation. Rail was then and remains today (even if supplemented by the rest of Canada’s logistics industry) a linchpin of Canada’s extraction-heavy economy.3 Canada now ranks among the mineral and energy superpowers of the world, a feature of its economy that’s helped Canada clinch and maintain its status among the world’s imperialist powers (albeit in the second tier and locked in strategic alliance under the command of US imperialism).
The navvies4 are taking over
Yet, rail hasn’t been the tool and weapon of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class exclusively. As Marx and Engels famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie raises its own gravediggers—but we could add that it also furnishes them with many of the tools and weapons necessary to dig the bourgeoisie’s grave.
Native rebellion in this country has shown us time and time again how vulnerable Canada’s expansive, and mostly unprotected, inland logistics and energy infrastructure is to popular disruption. In early 2020, the Wet’suwet’en people rose in opposition to the Coastal GasLink liquified natural gas pipeline that was being—well, railroaded—through their unceded ancestral lands, sparking solidarity protests and blockades all across the country, including one very significant blockade by the Mohawks of Tyendinaga on the CN rail.
Other popular resistance movements in recent years have also deployed the tactic of taking to the rails (and roads) in protest. We are thinking of: the rebellious young people in Malton (a proletarian region of Mississauga, just west of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport) who in June 2020 blocked a railway, a major intersection and almost took over a highway in the wake of Peel police shooting to death a mentally-distressed older man, Ejaz Choudry; as well as those rail and road blockades and disruptions organized by the popular movement in support of the liberation of Palestine and against the genocide in Gaza.
Tracing back further in Canadian history to a time when the proletariat was led by a revolutionary vanguard, there was also a time when workers took to the rails with an equally insurrectionary zeal—not with blockades but in boxcars.
In 1935, after months of unemployed workers protesting the deplorable conditions in Canada’s labour camps—the euphemistically named Unemployment Relief Camps—the Communist-led Workers’ Unity League upped their ante with their “On to Ottawa Trek.” “The Trek” was a bold tactical escalation in the proletarian struggle of unemployed workers at the time, one that saw over a thousand workers commandeer freight trains in Vancouver on June 3, 1935 with the intention of converging thousands of militant workers onto Canada’s capital. Despite failing to reach Ottawa,5 the Trek furnished the proletariat in Canada with invaluable experience in confronting the Canadian state.6
What the sum of these examples reveal is that people’s struggles in this country, time and time again, continue awakening to the historical necessity of coercing our class enemies—railroading them—into submission. This is a vulnerability that the Canadian state and its repressive apparatus knows very well and has been working to mitigate in recent years.
Off the rails
In 2013, in the immediate wake of the Idle No More movement and just a few years after the Native resistance movements and stand-offs that arose in Elsipogtog First Nation and in the Haudenosaunee community of the Six Nations of the Grand River, one of Canada’s leading counter-insurgency theorists, Douglas Bland, wrote a report for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a non-partisan ruling-class think tank in Canada, entitled “Canada and the First Nations: Cooperation or Conflict?”7 In this report, Bland analyzed and warned of a growing “warrior cohort” among disenfranchised Native people and the “insurgency” risk they posed to both the country’s image and its vast and undefended infrastructure. Bland lamented that “the era of passive acceptance within the Aboriginal community of the exploitation of [their] resources is ending” and how Native protests in the preceding years had “changed domestic law enforcement situation[s] into… international confrontation[s].”
With surprising candour, however, Bland’s report concedes the moral high-ground to Indigenous peoples for having suffered so many generations of genocidal oppression at the hands of the Canadian government, thereby setting the stage for the shifts in colonial policy that were to follow under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government. But make no mistake about it: Bland’s report is not a liberal mea culpa.8 Rather, what this counter-revolutionary-by-trade was gunning for was a whole new strategy in relation to the Native national question—Bland refers to US imperialism’s Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe to give us a sense of the scope of what he was calling for9—in order to better dissipate the existential threat that Natives posed to Canadian ruling-class interests. An aspect of this plan was “developing means to increase significantly resources to safeguard Canada’s truly critical transportation infrastructure in vulnerable locations.” The new colonial strategy implemented by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government after its election in 201510 directly follows from the political-military arguments set forth by Bland just a couple years earlier.
Many activists in recent years have become more aware of and condemned the blood-soaked and brutally constitutive component of Canadian history that the railway has amounted to. But what the more postmodern-influenced among them fail to apprehend, however, is that forces of production are not moral categories or mere symbolic representations. We communists, by contrast, as dialectical and historical materialists, fully agree with what the highest echelons of the regime of preventive counter-revolution in this country conveniently admitted to us in Bland’s report: the great liability that exists for the bourgeoisie—and the great opportunity for the proletariat and oppressed nations—in this vast infrastructure that has been press-ganged into existence.
However, that strategic possibility will not be realized by one section of the people or another rising in isolation. The demographic reality of this country and its interspersed multinational character, as the Political Program of the (N)CPC argues, require that the multinational proletariat act in unison if we are to overthrow the imperialist bourgeoisie (rather than just making a moral show of force from time to time that only mildly inconveniences the bourgeoisie). Both the Native and non-Native proletariat and popular masses in this country have given us a history replete with resistance that we can and must draw upon and learn from if we are to orchestrate the multinational revolutionary unity of popular forces that will be required to conquer proletarian revolution.
In this spirit, we must not overlook the tracks of multinational unity already embedded in this continent, in spite of reactionary efforts to rewrite this people’s history. In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans fled slavery in the US south via the “underground railroad,” a network of safe houses enabling escaped slaves to make their way to emancipation in northern states across the Dixie line. Escapees often traveled at night, following the north star for guidance from one safe house to the next. Tens of thousands of escapees traveled further and made Canada (or what would become Canada) their final destination. This chapter of solidarity and struggle against exploitation and oppression is remarkable not only for its role in liberating a half-million Africans from human bondage in the US alone,11 but also for the historic part it played in hastening the demise of that hideous institution from the US, the hemisphere and the world. As with that revolutionary underground movement for liberation, ours too follows a north star—the north star of communism, that beacon of total human liberation—which guides us on the tracks of proletarian socialist revolution.
To put it all together, then: Railroad’s editorial line will be guided by the two main tracks of the (N)CPC’s Political Program—workers’ centrality and the multinational socialist confederacy—orienting us to the task of liberating both the forces of production and the exploited and oppressed masses who are currently trapped and contained by the prison house of nations that presently constitute capitalist-imperialist Canada.
Immediate plans for Railroad
Now, moving on from metaphors and meanings to concrete plans: Railroad seeks to become a theoretical forge of both the proletarian revolution in Canada and of proletarian revolutionaries. To do this, we assume the dual mandate of (1) theoretical elaboration and (2) ideological propagation. Beyond publishing select statements from the (N)CPC and its Central Committee, our Editorial Staff will develop and commission original content from the (N)CPC’s membership, supporters and fellow travelers, ranging from the theoretical and the analytical to research-based publications and other kinds of investigations; as well as interviews, polemics and whatever other forms of literary, artistic and cultural content we deem necessary to fulfill our mandate. It may take us a few issues to get the full range of these contributions into motion, but this is our plan. These contributions will be in addition to the Railroad’s Editorial Staff developing and deploying its own editorial voice whenever needed in the service of its mandate and under the direction of the political lines of the (N)CPC.
Following the example set by the (N)CPC’s previous theoretical collaboration, kites, Railroad will also solicit contributions from other comrades and revolutionary organizations across the world in order to bring them into conversation with the proletarian revolution in our country and to bring our members and readers into conversation with the leading forces and voices of the international proletarian revolution. Our journal is especially interested in connecting with proletarian revolutionary forces in: (1) those countries within what we have theorized and taken to calling the US-led Anglo-American Imperialist Alliance (or “AAIA”), which Canadian imperialism is unwaveringly committed to along with the UK, Australia, and New Zealand); (2) the other allied imperialist powers and regional powers (EU, Japan, Türkiye, India, etc.); and (3) those countries oppressed by AAIA and its allies, especially those with a large presence of Canadian imperialist capital and those that have large diasporas in Canada whose popular classes can be mobilized through anti-imperialism and class struggle to the proletarian revolution in Canada.
As for our production cycle, the Editorial Staff intends to publish at least one volume at the beginning of each year, and possibly more when there’s content to warrant it. These numbered issues of Railroad will be supplemented by special editions from time to time under the name of Railroad Publications.
Railroad #1 is expected to be released in January 2025 and will contain, alongside this founding announcement of our journal, the Political Program of the (N)CPC (appearing for the first time in print), a featured statement from the Central Committee and two substantial and new pieces defending and elaborating upon the (N)CPC’s position of workers’ centrality and its strategy and tactics in relation to organizing workers in Canada.
Sometime later in 2025, we plan to publish our two major (and long-awaited) summations from the two camps of the Third Party-Building Movement in Canada—that of RI and the PCR-RCP—as well as some other summation material that we’ve put together on the Second Party-Building Movement, particularly in relation to the Workers’ Communist Party. That second wave of communist party-building and proletarian upsurge in Canada reached heights that are at least an order-of-magnitude beyond where our movement stands today and we will do well to continue learning the positive and negative lessons out of that second go at proletarian revolution in this country. In the future, we hope that a deeper reconnaissance of the revolutionary organizations of the second wave of proletarian revolutionary struggle in Canada (which would minimally also include In Struggle! / En Lutte!), as well as that of the whole revolutionary period of the first Communist Party in this country between the 1920s–30s, will be within our grasp. We have no concrete timelines for the commencement of projects covering those experiences and periods as of yet, though we do consider that work to be an integral part of summing up the history of proletarian revolution in Canada.
Following the publication of these projects currently under development (or perhaps alongside them, as the situation demands), we will begin publishing a series of other pieces of research, investigation, theoretical elaboration, and strategic thinking that comrades in our Party have been cooking up and circulating within our internal channels over the past three years.
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the immediate theoretical and ideological antecedents to our new journal: Arsenal, Uprising and kites. Whatever the limitations or deviations of this or that line, or this or that piece, or this or that author, across these earlier theoretical projects, it’s worth noting that we’re not starting from scratch and that we have a whole generation of earnest and significant communist theorizing and ideological work that precedes us to build upon and that will continue to serve as important reference points going forward—most especially kites, which was for over two years under the co-direction of the (N)CPC.
Railroad will be hosted on the website of the (N)CPC (www.ncpc-npcc.ca) in a dedicated section of that website. Print copies will be available soon for purchase at Kersplebedeb over at http://www.LeftWingBooks.net.
If you’re a communist in Canada, if you appreciate what you’re reading in Railroad and coming out of the (N)CPC, and if the crises of the capitalist-imperialist world system that are gripping the world compel youto throw yourself into the proletarian revolutionary cause, then get on board! If you have questions of a theoretical or ideological nature, or have a submission proposal that you want to make to Railroad, then email us at railroad[dot]journal[at]proton[dot]me. If your interest is in supporting or joining the (N)CPC and you want to learn more about how you can get involved, reach out directly to the Party at ncpc-npcc[at]protonmail[dot]com.
ENDNOTES
1 These were the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) and Revolutionary Initiative (RI), which were distinct organizations with distinct lines in Canada that developed and existed parallel to one another from about 2006–2020.
2 The Political Program was released publicly in January 2024.
3 At present, approximately half of Canada’s yearly exports and some $350 billion in goods annually are hauled across the country by rail.
4 “Navvy” is old British slang for an unskilled manual labourer, particularly one that worked on large-scale infrastructural projects, like railways.
5 As the Trekkers amassed more and more workers along their eastward journey, the total number who were packed into and riding atop railcars swelled to 2,000 by the time they reached Regina on June 14, 1935. The Trekkers would go no further, however, as they were halted on the order of Prime Minister Bennett. After a period of negotiations that saw no advance for the movement of unemployed workers, on July 1 a protest was organized in Regina that was attacked by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) squads that were attempting to arrest the protest’s main organizers. What came to be known as the “Regina Riot” led to two deaths, hundreds of injuries and 130 arrests.
6 It’s a crying shame that far-rightists and right-wing populists today, in the wake of the Freedom Convoy movement of early 2022, can claim a monopoly on this siege-upon-the-capital mentality. It’s high time that communists reclaim that kind of audacity. For a communist account of the right-wing “Freedom Convoy” movement that converged on Ottawa in early 2022, see “War in the enemy’s camp: An investigation into the ‘Freedom Convoy’ movement” in kites #7. A remarkable feature of this social investigation project is just how sharply its analysis of events and the composition of the protests veered from the prevalent, out-of-touch Leftist pontifications about that whole movement (which were, tellingly, identical to the Trudeau Federal government’s position on the Freedom Convoy movement).
7 Available at: macdonaldlaurier.ca/files/pdf/2013.01.05-MLI-Canada_FirstNations_BLAND_vWEB.pdf
8 That mea culpa would come just a couple years later in the form of the deceptive politics of “reconciliation” ushered in by Justin Trudeau’s federal government after 2015. Bland’s report for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute played at least some part in shifting ruling-class consensus toward “reconciliation” by making a compelling political-military argument in favour of it.
9 This report was truly a harbinger of things to come, arguing that the key to “disarming the warrior cohort” would be “a broad national economic and social program”, to be “implemented immediately”, consisting, among other things, of “a comprehensive First Nations resettlement program” (i.e., removing Native people from their resource-rich ancestral lands), which could be achieved with the promise of jobs, healthcare and education opportunities off-reserve (pp.39-40).
10 For a contemporary account of Canada’s colonial strategy against Native people since the election of Justin Trudeau—which the cult-like mantras of liberal “land acknowledgements” and the disingenuous politics of “reconciliation” effectively obscure—see the interview and written submission from the Red Power-era veteran Ray Bobb, which were published in kites online in August 2023 (presently available at kites-journal.org and to be republished by Railroad in the future). With that said, we should also give the disclaimer that while the specific positions and prescriptions offered by Ray Bobb concerning the Native national question today are certainly worthy of study and consideration by communists, this is not a settled question for the (N)CPC and requires further investigation, practical experience and struggle.
11 This higher figure is an estimate of the number of enslaved Africans who escaped in all directions.
kites-journal.org 