A New Beginning Requires
New Thinking and Forms
- Statement of the 5th Plenum
of the 8th Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) -
August 11, 2010
Canadians have a great deal to think about, as objective developments accelerate the descent into state-organized fascism. Three of the most significant aspects of this growing fascism are:
Canada's participation in and encouragement of U.S.-led wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the threats and preparations to wage war against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran and Lebanon; the unprecedented police repression of dissent and the right to conscience at the G20 Summit in Toronto; and, the final nail in the coffin of the post-WWII social contract between labour and capital.
Objective conditions are in constant change, development and motion. Our thinking and forms of resistance should reflect this reality of change and confront whatever the objective conditions throw at us. This means that we cannot be hankering after a more tranquil past or a situation once considered more favourable. We have to face up to the situation as it presents itself even if this requires reassessing our past thinking and forms of the Canadian working class movement and politics.
The Necessity for an Anti-War Government
The endless U.S. wars in West and Central Asia, the U.S.-supported Israeli aggression against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and current provocations against Lebanon, the transformation of the covert dirty wars of previous U.S. administrations to overt violent black-ops active in over 65 countries, and the movement of U.S. naval armadas to attacking positions around the Korean Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf and off the east coast of South America are forcing Canadians to realize that to play a positive role in the world today, they and their government must be an active force against war. U.S. imperialism has to be stopped in its worldwide aggression. To accomplish this historic task, a united front of states and people must be built that is determined to force the United States to dismantle its global military bases and return its troops and weapons of mass destruction to within its own boundaries and stop threatening the world's peoples and their right to be. An anti-war government must be established on the basis of mobilizing the people to demand that all military alliances, agreements and cooperation with U.S. imperialism be annulled, Canada withdraw from NATO, NORAD and Northern Command, and actively campaign against war as a method to solve international disputes and problems.
The Necessity to Resist State-Organized Fascism
The police repression in Toronto was of such ferocity and so extensive that it served in the manner of a wake-up call. The fundamental question on the minds of many is what the state is up to. The state is changing its persona from that of an allegedly impartial democracy above class struggle to one that acknowledges it is an instrument of wealthy and powerful class forces. The institutions of the state, including the mass media, are openly intervening to suppress resistance to the ruling elite on the economic, political, cultural, ideological and social fronts. The people's newfound consciousness of the role of the state needs to be consolidated within an organized united front of resistance to state fascism. In this regard, a people's inquiry into the modus operandi of the state-organized attacks is required. One aim should be to reveal the state's conception of security as well as its role in organizing the violence to provide its criminalization of the forces fighting for a just world with a fraudulent justification.
The Necessity to Build a Nation-Wide Workers' Opposition
The social contract between labour and capital is dead. Owners of capital buried the corpse this year by forcing concessions on workers at Vale-Inco, Essar Steel Algoma and U.S. Steel's Lake Erie Works. The official labour movement declared the social contract dead with its acceptance of the line of the rich and their global monopolies that Canada now has an economy without borders and that workers must join internationally with other established unions abroad in global opposition to the monopolies. This means concretely that workers will be further marginalized within their own organizations and blocked from participating in their own trade union movement in defence of their rights. A result of this submersion within so-called global trade union cooperation will be the liquidation of the workers' own initiative in resisting, organizing and developing their consciousness independently of the ruling elite, and an eventual lining up with "our" monopolies and international trade unions in opposition to "their" monopolies and international trade unions in ever bigger U.S.-led imperialist wars.
The labour movement spearheaded by industrial workers upon the conclusion of the Second World War has now been overwhelmed by the anti-social offensive unleashed since the 1989-90 period. Most of the standards of living achieved since the fifties and sixties have now been overturned as the working class movement is in headlong retreat. Trade union forms developed during that post-war struggle and within the social contract are no longer capable of defending the rights of workers. New forms, thinking and tactics are necessary to deal with the current conditions. This is not an indictment of what went on before but a statement of fact on the current objective conditions facing the working class and the necessity for new thinking, forms and tactics. What is the use of defending the old social contract when it is already a corpse? Every workplace must start anew based on the objective conditions and in defence of their rights and not on some hankering for the past and the security it may have afforded. It can be done by elaborating the kind of society that must be brought into being, a society which will provide the rights of all with a guarantee.
The most important feature of the objective developments is the necessity for new thinking and organized forms of resistance. That new thinking and forms will develop with the mass ideological and political mobilization of workers and their conscious participation in working out the aims, demands and tactics of their organizations, and their conscious participation in taking up the responsibility for the work to defend those aims, demands and tactics in practice. Without workers themselves participating in the work to develop new forms, thinking and tactics nothing will change; their thinking and social consciousness will not develop; their capacity to defend their rights and the rights of all will stagnate, and those new forms necessary to confront the contemporary objective conditions will not be built. Workers can turn the situation around through conscious participation in acts of finding out what is necessary to do to defend their rights and to build a nation-wide Workers' Opposition.
Conscious Participation in Acts of Finding Out
Police repression, imperialist war and the death of the social contract form together an objective reality that requires new thinking and forms of resistance. Human beings have always been capable of coping with changed conditions by developing their subjective conditions to the level required to defend their right to be and open the door to progress. In this way, we will also enable the long-suffering Aboriginal Nations of the Americas to realize their striving to be free. They too are fighting courageously for their hereditary rights of which the most fundamental is the right to be.
A new beginning requires new thinking and forms. Join with CPC(M-L) in working out the thinking and forms required by the objective conditions. CPC(M-L) is starting a new publication called TML Weekly Information Project on the objective conditions and what is required of the communist and workers' movement to meet those conditions with courage, determination and unity. For information or to join this project, contact CPC(M-L) at office@cpcml.ca. Conscious participation in acts of finding out is the key to building the new.
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