COULD THERE BE A COMMUNIST REVOLUTION IN CANADA?

Alone or with several other capitalist countries, the working class will make the leap in Canada

Daniel Paquet                                            dpaquet1871@gmail.com

Future is rather bleak in Canada.  “Both the manufacturing and natural resources industries have already eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs.  Off shoring, technology and the Great Recession contributed to losses among manufactures.  Meanwhile, the commodities slump and slowing demand whacked natural-resource positions.  Other industries predisposed to automation include accommodation, food services, transportation, warehousing and agriculture.” (Younglai, Rachelle, Automation could halve Canadian work force, The Globe and Mail, Report on Business, Thursday, Toronto, June 8,   2017, page B11).

There is actually a fight back from the Communist Party of Canada and other Canadian people’s organizations.  For instance, the Council of Canadians declared that “together this year we will challenge trade agreements, like NAFTA, which are really corporate rights deals with benefit big business and place corporate profit above the rights of families and communities.  We will support communities taking on Big Oil & Gas, whose pipelines and fracking operations are a direct threat to our watersheds, land and air.  We will take on corporate giants like Nestlé and be an even stronger advocate for the protection of our lakes, rivers and drink water.  And we will amplify the call for a national pharmacare program so that the most vulnerable in our society don’t have to choose between groceries and the prescription drugs they need to live.” (Ottawa, Open letter, May 26, 2017).

The bourgeoisie does not expect the Canadian people to react on their regressive measures adopted to deliver even more profits.  Why?  Because “growth in consumer spending should remain solid in 2017, supported by steady gains in labour income as well as elevated housing and financial wealth.  Looking ahead, consumption growth is expected to moderate broadly in line with growth in disposable income.  Elevated debt will also restrain expenditures somewhat.  The overall ratio of debt to disposable income is expected to edge higher.” (Bank of Canada, Canadian Economy, Monetary Policy Report, Ottawa, April 2017, page 19).

For bourgeois ideologists, Canadian working class will never embrace the Marxist ideas and struggle under the leadership of the Communist party.  However, after World War II (partly due to the role of the Red Army in the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany), hence “at the time of the foundation of the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP, Communist Party of Canada, -Ed.), there were 90,000 workers in unions which had elected Communists as their leaders.  Some were new unions.  Our position, A Labor Policy for Victory,   which I submitted to the National Inquiry into Wages and Labour Relations, the McTague Commission, had a positive influence on the labour movement in the sense that a very large number of leading trade unionists who normally disagreed with us, and who saw our Party only in terms of their political differences, acknowledged quite freely that our submission laid down the line that the labour movement should pursue.”(Reminiscences of Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, NC Press Limited, Toronto, 1977, page 325).

The following lines of Frederick Engels are still very pertinent: “As long as the oppressed class, in our case therefore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate itself, it will in its majority regard the exiting order of society as the only one possible and, politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme Left wing.  To the extent, however, that this class matures for its self- emancipation, it constitutes itself as its own party and elects its own representatives, and not those of the capitalists.  Thus universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class.  It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state; but that is sufficient.  On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know what to do.  (…) The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belongs: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” (Tucker C., Robert, The Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton&Norton, New York-London, 1978, pages 754-755).

Many workers and other strata of working people argue that in Canada, we have  - at least (!)- freedom and democracy and that “Russia as a communist state was never a free state”.  And they repeat ad nauseam, that “Stalin was a blood-thirsty dictator”.

Let’s see first what the first leader of Soviet Union, Lenin, said about the dictatorship of the proletariat:  “Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to Communism suppression is still necessary; but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority.  A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state’, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state; it is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed that the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage labourers, and it will cost mankind far less.  And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an over whelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.  The exploiters are naturally unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine’ almost without  a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed massed (such as the Soviets of Workers, and Soldiers’ Deputies, let us remark, anticipating somewhat).” (Lenin, The State and Revolution, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1970, page 77).

Just a few weeks ago the war-machine propaganda of NATO predicted an imminent attack of North Korea onto the West.  It was the end of it for the majority of petits-bourgeois, starting within South Korea.  Now, Financial Times says:  “South Korea suspends deployment of US missile shield.” (London, Thursday, 8 June, 2017, page 2). 

The reaction of US imperialism is, as everyone expected very negative:  “… Other analysts warned that Mr. Moon’s (the new South Korean president –Ed.) decision could affect the regions’ strategic balance, to the US’s disadvantage.  ‘China’s playing a very dangerous game using North Korea to drive a wedge between the US and South Korea,’ said Thomas Karako, missile defence expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.” (Ibidem,  page 2).

Why being exploited, the working class is not taking the lead to change the whole world?  Probably, the reason is that all of those organizations and mass-media around the world, financed to discredit socialism, especially Soviet Union and particularly the Stalin years contributed to stain durably communism and its Marxist-leninist ideology.  It is worthy to think over again about the dictatorship of proletariat.  Marx and Engels were clear on this necessary episode in the construction of communism.  We saw that Lenin fully shared this point of view; Stalin was, after Lenin, in command of the historic necessity to instigate it.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat arises not on the basis of the bourgeois order, but in the process of the breaking up of this order, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, in the process of the expropriation of the landlords and capitalists, in the process of the socialization of the principal instruments and means of production, in the process of violent proletarian revolution.  The dictatorship of the proletariat is a revolutionary power based on the use of force against the bourgeoisie. (…)   The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be ‘complete’ democracy, democracy for all, for the rich as well as for the poor; the dictatorship of the proletariat ‘must be a state that is democratic in a new way (my italics – J. St.) the proletarians and the non-propertied in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against (- my italics –J. St.) the bourgeoisie).” (Stalin, J., The foundations of Leninism, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975, pages 42-43). 

Is it that society is doomed to never change?  No, “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers from without, that is, only from outside of the economic struggle, from outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” (Lenin, What is to be done, Foreign languages Press, Peking, 1973, page 73).

Most of us have still in mind the huge  2012 demonstration in the streets of Montréal, that brought 200 000 young and older people in protest against social injustices, - especially financial- for the post-secondary students; at the end of the day, one could have wrongly uttered that: “A committee of students is no good.  It is not stable. Quite true.  But, the conclusion to be drawn from this is that we must have a committee of professional revolutionaries and it does not matter whether a student or a worker is capable of becoming a professional revolutionary.” (Lenin, V.I., What is to be done, Foreign languages Press, Peking, 1973, page 111).

 

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