15 June 1999
If the history of the left-wing in Canada is ever written, perhaps the most amusing, yet appalling would be the role of the Leninist left. The twists and turns of Leninist tactics, strategies and philosophy would read like so much mumbo jumbo.The past Ontario provincial election is a case in point.
There, those describing themselves as linked to the tradition of Leon Trotsky called upon workers to support the NDP and to build within it a "worker's agenda". As to what a "worker's agenda" is remains unclear. Most likely it means electing a Trotskyist leadership as opposed to the "misleaders" of the social democratic variety.
But the most pathetic muddleheadedness lies with the so-called Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). In the name of a vulgarized "dialectics" they have changed the party line again and again in the past two decades.
As a student in the late 1960's, I recall meeting CPC-ML members, wearing buttons of China's Chairman Mao Tse-tung and carrying his "little red book" of quotations which they memorized like a book of sacred text. The "wisdom" of the Chairman, considered so profound, was no more than a Farmer's Almanac for theoretically poor would be "vanguard revolutionaries".
In the early 1970s, CPC-ML's favourite slogan was "Don't Vote! They're All the Same!"
A few years later, fielding it's own set of candidates the slogan became, "Make the Rich Pay!"
Today they have toned down the rhetoric of the self-promoting "vanguard" party and are urging a "People's Front" of all non-major political parties.
In their newspaper, "TML Weekly - The Marxist-Leninist Weekly" (March 23 & 30), they write that the Progressive Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats have imposed an "anti-social offensive". The only chance at "political renewal" is if independent and small parties were elected as a majority in the Ontario Legislature:
In other words, for the first time in the history of Ontario and Canada, a majority in the Parliament could demand that legislation should be formulated by those who are knowledgeable about the needs of the people in every field and submitted for the approval of the entire society.
Working people "can vote for an independent or small party candidate and embark on the road which will objectively occupy the space for change in Ontario." In that way, voters would maintain their "right to conscience".
According to CPC-ML, a majority of independent parties elected to office - a "People's Front" of the pro-environment Green Party, the right-wing Family Coalition Party, the advocates of unrestrained capitalism in the Libertarian Party, and the absurdist Natural Law Party which believes that we can chant mantras to fly ourselves over economic problems, along with the Leninists - would be more representative of the people and their wishes than the PCs, Liberals and NDP!
The view is absurd.
While I can agree that an elected independent party candidate might "objectively" occupy a seat in the legislature, I cannot believe that the working class be any further ahead along the road to "change". Once elected, no political party can dictate the way capitalism is run. It is capitalism that dictates what can be done.
But to CPC-ML, the major political parties are the source of the problem because they "do not wish to discuss the programmes to end the anti-social offensive and empower the working class and people."
To refer to the "working class and people" itself reveals CPC-ML's profound lack of clarity. And what, you may ask, is the "anti-social offensive"?
According to CPC-ML, this is a system whereby people's "basic rights as human beings" are not met. The major parties "alone and in combination, conspire to keep the people marginalized so that they can carry on serving the rich."
To Socialists, CPC-ML's strategy is pure bunkum that only serves to confuse.
Socialists argue that the problem is not the rich. The problem is capitalism itself. It is not a problem of rich people versus poor. The problem is a system based on the production of profit for a few. The solution is not making the rich pay more. The solution is replacing the system with one of production for use based on common ownership.
Change will not come from voting for independent small parties (left or right wing). Change will come by the vast majority of the working class understanding Socialism, demanding it and democratically implementing it.
The problem is not of an "anti-social offensive" on the part of the major political parties acting in conspiracy. It is that people's needs can never be met until capitalism is replaced by a system of common ownership with production for use.
CPC-ML styles itself as a "revolutionary"party wishing to become "mass based" and advocating "communism". It is strangely silent on these points Socialists raise. Perhaps it is best they are considering their delusional hero-ization of such "communist" (state capitalist) dictators as Stalin, Mao, Albania's Enver Hoxha and Korea's Kim Il Sung - all enemies of what Socialism means and must be.
There is no Marxism in CPC-ML and nothing discernable as "socialism" or "communism".
Workers have nothing to gain from CPC-ML's delusions, their high sounding
phrases and slogans that only reveal a real lack of clear thinking.