Communists and the NDP

by David Lethbridge

I want to start with a quotation from Louis Althusser:

“The union or fusion of the workers’ movement and Marxist theory is the greatest event in the history of class societies. Beside it, the celebrated great scientific-technical ‘mutation’ constantly resounding in our ears is, despite its great importance, no more than a scientific and technical fact: these events are not of the same order of magnitude. ... This union is not an established fact but an endless struggle with its victories and defeats. A struggle in the union itself. With the 1914 war: the crisis of the Second International. At present: the crisis in the international Communist movement.” (Marx’s Relation to Hegel, 1970.)

The crisis we find ourselves in today is at the same time both similar and different from the crisis to which Althusser alluded. In 1970, the crisis had to do with the struggle within the Communist movement over reformism, which was hiding under the cover of “theoretical humanism,” and which had repercussions throughout the international Communist movement.

The crisis for us, in Canada today, is a crisis that involves the historical trajectory of social democracy; the politics of the NDP; the relation of the working class to both social democracy and the NDP; the relation of the Communist Party to social democracy, to the labour movement, and to the working class. This many-sided crisis has repercussions for the way the Communist Party works in many areas, including the Party’s work within the mass movements.

The place to begin is with the concrete material conditions of the working class. It is no longer the case that the working class has nothing to lose but its chains. Very clearly, over the last century, the material wealth of the working class in Canada (and the imperialist nations as a whole) increased substantially: at least until the mid-1970s. This increase in material wealth is certainly the result of mass action on the part of the working class in terms of wringing concessions from the exploiting class. The real threat of revolution, both at home and abroad, forced the bourgeoisie to deal with the workers’ demands.

While it may be true that the working class remains “dependent and excluded from political power” – as stated in the Thesis – it can be argued that, unfortunately, this has hardly been disturbing to many members the working class. Given the pervasive and all-embracing character of bourgeois ideology, the working class as a whole has been led since birth to believe that such dependence and exclusion from power is the natural course of things, and to believe that the existent relations between classes is natural and inevitable. And, at least in Canada and the US, working people have been taught that there are no classes, in any event. Furthermore, individualism, as a distinct aspect of bourgeois ideology, constantly attempts to teach working people that it is possible to work their way up in the capitalist system, and holds out the twin false promises of individual and collective prosperity.

Social democracy – whether left-wing or right-wing – expresses this same bourgeois ideology. It suggests that through step-by-step increases, the material conditions of the working people can constantly improve. For a relatively long period in Canadian history, social democracy has played the role of hand-maiden to imperialism. It has acted in the role of, on the one hand, “managing” the workers’ demands and “managing” the concessions wrung from the capitalists, while on the other hand preventing the fundamental social change and popular extension of democracy that socialism would bring about. In that sense, social democracy has always served the bourgeoisie very well.

Furthermore, in Canada, unlike in Italy or France for example, no alternative to the left of social democracy has seemed viable to the working class as a whole. Socialism has been painted by both capitalists and social democrats as inevitably authoritarian and murderous.

In the period between the end of World War II and at least the mid-1970s, the increasing material wealth gained by the working class, and the absence of widespread concrete privation, meant that the class struggle was fragmentary and largely dormant. (The significant exception here was the near-global explosion of counter-cultural and revolutionary activity of the late 1960s and early 1970s, predicated in North America largely on non-economic factors: it is worth noting in this context that both Gramsci and Althusser pointed to the relative autonomy of cultural and ideological factors in the class struggle.)

At the same time, imperialism’s consistent neo-colonialism allowed it to extract wealth from South America, Africa, and Asia. By materially, financially, and militarily supporting fascist regimes, in short through exporting fascism, the ruling class was able and willing to provide concessions to the working class at home. So that, despite some degree of real political repression, the Canadian working class has benefited materially and financially from imperialist policy, having the further effect of dampening working class militancy and class consciousness.

The situation has clearly begun to change, and has been changing for some years. The concessions that had been wrung from the ruling class have been reversed. Real material privation has begun to spread. It has become clear to increasing sectors of the working class that social democracy is no longer working. It has further become clear that the NDP has moved further and further away from a social-democratic direction, to the point where it is mirroring bourgeois policies. Working class alienation from the NDP, from social democracy, and from the political process as a whole, has left a political vacuum which continues to expand.

Under these conditions, if the Communist Party remains largely invisible or is perceived as little more than a slightly-left version of the NDP, or if it is seen as reformist or inconsequential or as a defeated tendency, working class anger, resentment, and militancy will go elsewhere. It will go to the right, as it has done in considerable numbers over the last decade. Some sectors of the working class have been seduced by the Reform party; others have been seduced by neo-fascism, as the global experience of the 1990s is proof. All of which benefits the ruling class mightily.

Only by offering a distinct and open and militant alternative to social democracy, and the NDP in particular, can we ever hope to draw the working class to us, or to infuse the class struggle with class consciousness and a desire and a pressing need for socialism. Such a position requires that we step up our criticism of the NDP and of social democracy as a whole, while simultaneously arguing within the organized labour movement for more militant positions and more militant action. Not for nothing has the Central Committee of our Party put out the call that our Party must be seen and it must be heard.

Unfortunately, the structure of bourgeois politics in Canada may appear to have us trapped. It is undeniable that the NDP provincial governments will ultimately always betray the working class and stand in the way of socialism. They have done so repeatedly and increasingly in the contemporary period. On the other hand, it is equally undeniable that an NDP government is preferable to a Liberal, Conservative, or Reform government. Open criticism of the NDP, then, would have the obvious effect of making center-right governments more likely. Therefore we are trapped. Or so it would appear.

What to do? Accept the consequences of the trap. Break the trap by moving our propaganda and agitation to the left. Accept that in the short-run we may lose some allies in the organized labour movement, and that in the short-run we may well have to endure center-right governments. But in the long run, our Party and the working class as a whole will benefit from being more open and more left. Nothing other than hard and open struggle will break the deadlock that we find ourselves in with social democracy and draw the working people to socialism. The only alternative is to accept the status quo, which is to adopt a centrist, and ultimately defeatist line in the class struggle.

Of course, this is a delicate thing. If the Party takes an open position too far to the left of the majority of the labour movement, we will not attract them. If we take a position that is too centrist, we will not attract them. The art is in finding the position that will draw more and more members of the labour movement towards class consciousness. But in the end, only by taking a consistent and militant left line can we demonstrate our Party’s true uniqueness and thus draw increasing sectors of the labour movement closer to our policies and to a socialist future.

The opportunity to make such a change in our own tactical direction may be right now, given the NDP’s quick march to the right, and the moral and political bankruptcy of social democracy throughout the world. In the 1930s, as Comrade Palme Dutt demonstrated conclusively and in much detail, social democracy played an active and conscious role in helping fascism to achieve state power. As imperialism lurches towards ever more fascistic policies, social democracy may yet play that role again.

I believe that it is time that we took the same road that Lenin once took when he realized that social democracy had collapsed irretrievably under the weight of bourgeois ideology. He struck out at them forcefully, and forged a new road ahead towards socialism.

In short, either we are a revolutionary party, or we are nothing.

Spark! #13-14, pp. 11-14

Why do Social Democrats

do what they do?

by Danny Goldstick

What makes them do it? Most of us know individual NDPers who work very hard for progressive goals in the labour movement and other people’s movements. As individuals they certainly aren’t “sell-out artists” by nature, in most cases. And those NDPers who get elected to office mostly are not so very different, as individuals, from other active NDPers. Why then have elected social-democratic governments been so disappointing?

In the first place, the record is variable, after all. The CCF government of Saskatchewan in the 1940s was very progressive indeed. So was the Salvador Allende coalition in Chile, which embraced a diverse range of political forces, from just-left-of-centre to the Communists. Allende himself gave his life defending democracy and the cause of the people in 1973. So the first lesson is that different conditions produce different kinds of governments, including social-democratic governments. Under favourable conditions even Liberal and Conservative governments can be pushed into pretty progressive policies by the labour and other people’s movements. Under favourable conditions social-democratic governments can be pushed by them and led on by them even more effectively. It is the first job of progressives to make those conditions as favourable as possible by mobilizing the people in defence of their needs and interests – at election times, at any time. The big business agenda thrusts in the opposite direction, and there is no guarantee of any progressive outcome, even with a social-democratic government in office.

Why is it, though, that NDP governments elected on progressive platforms are so very vulnerable to those pressures from big business which can make them turn right around and govern at the people’s expense? To answer this we must look at just who, in the main, the NDP are, and what that social-democratic ideology which those people find so attractive actually is.

For Marxists, “socialism” means the social ownership of the main economic levers of production in a country. Inside the NDP, though, “socialist” is what those who lean to the left generally call themselves, whether they go so far as to advocate overall social ownership or not. And “social democrat” is what those who lean to the right in the NDP like to call themselves. In Marxist parlance, on the other hand, a “social democrat” can even be a very left-wing advocate of socialism. What differentiates social democrats from revolutionary socialists is the fact that Marxists and other revolutionaries stress that the present-day capitalist rulers of our society are much more powerful and ferocious than the social democrats think, and the struggle required for a major people’s advance has to be much fiercer than the social democrats admit.

Why will they not admit it? Isn’t the history of the world in the twentieth century pretty good evidence for it? They won’t admit it because it is an unpleasant thought. They want an easy route to progressive advance, not a revolutionary but an “evolutionary” style of socialism – if, that is, they recognize the necessity for socialism at all. Instead of a massive confrontation between opposing historical forces, they are afraid of any showdown, and think they can achieve their goals gradually, just by means of small victories here and there. They think electoral democracy is sufficient, and underestimate the need for people’s mobilization outside of parliament.

Marxist revolutionaries do not deny the importance of parliament and the electoral process in focusing public debate. They do not even say that social revolution must occur illegally, by means of civil war. That will have to depend. At a moment of mass popular arousal the people may be strong enough to enforce their revolutionary will more or less peacefully by cowing the capitalist minority into going along with the people’s verdict – but there can be absolutely no guarantee of that, except the strength of their mass mobilization.

The evidence for a conclusion like this does seem overwhelming. And so what kind of political people would fail to see it, despite being generally progressive-minded and opposed to big business politics? The answer is, people committed to a relatively easy path of social advancement.

Just who does belong to the NDP? For the most part, three kinds of people: labour people, white-collar hobbyists, and professional politicians. At times when the trade union membership are aroused and militant, most labour leaders will be apt to reflect that in their actions. At other times, a lot of them act more like brokers: go-betweens who have to reconcile the conflicting interests and demands of their membership, on the one hand, and their management negotiating partners, on the other. Is it any wonder they have a strong inclination to avoid heavy confrontation between the classes, if they can? It may be unfair to speak of white-collar “hobbyists” as if it were not the case that quite a few are very dedicated indeed to the different progressive causes which they support. But most moderately active NDP members are not overly serious in their commitment to people’s politics. They may be indignant at a particular political sell-out by their leaders, but their reaction may just be to drop out instead of fiercely fighting back. The leaders know from experience that the whole thing can blow over in time with no serious challenge to their position. Of course, this may be a miscalculation. The professional politicians who lead the NDP have to reckon on what they can get away with in the Party, among the voting public, and in their dealings with the business class. Like labour leaders and white-collar hobbyists, they too may much prefer an easy political path which avoids any heavy confrontation – but then again that may not be in the cards for them.

When working people get pushed and pushed too far, they become dissatisfied. They start acting for themselves, and demanding more from their leaders and their governments than they have been getting. Determined revolutionaries have a crucial role to play in every phase of that process.

Spark! #13-14, pp. 10-11

Canada or Capitalism! Theses on the Canadian Capitalist Class

by R. J. Reierson

1. Canada arose from white settler colonies to an imperialist state ruled by a binational Canadian capitalist class. The capitalists rule based on their ownership and control of the vast majority of the industrial, resource, and commercial wealth of Canada, which they have amassed through the exploitation and robbery of the working people and natural resources of Canada and of other countries.

2. Despite its immense and increasing wealth, the Canadian capitalist class is a small and historically diminishing element of society – less than 5 percent of the population. Indeed, capital has become so concentrated and centralized that the decisive power within the capitalist class rests in the hands of a financial oligarchy of a few thousand families whose transnational banking and industrial corporations dominate the general direction of both the Canadian economy and state.

3. While Canadian transnational corporations wield the paramount power in most key economic sectors as well as in the Canadian state, Canadian big business has a long history of collaboration with US, British, Japanese, and other foreign capitalists to sell out large portions of Canadian industry, resources, and culture, in flagrant disregard for the economic and political independence of Canada. Canada’s extremely high level of foreign ownership, international indebtedness, and technological dependence – by far the highest among the developed capitalist countries and many less developed countries – has added to the exploitation of Canadian working people and resources, and weakened Canadian economic and cultural development, and impaired Canada’s political sovereignty, especially in the face of US imperialism.

4. In Canada and internationally, transnational corporations have become the primary conduit of capitalist exploitation and imperialism. Transnationals, the highest form of monopoly capital, are the extreme of the concentration and centralization of capitalist wealth; some transnationals possess greater wealth and control more resources than entire governments. Transnationals are the leading capitalist force behind global impoverishment and war, the reproduction of sexism, racism, national chauvinism, and militarism, the degradation of nature, culture, and science, and the monopolistic control of technology and mass communications. The transnational corporations have stretched to the breaking point capitalism’s fundamental contradiction between private appropriation and social production.

5. Contrary to claims about “supra-national” capitalism and “globalized” capital, the ownership, control, and profit flows of transnational corporations remain concentrated in and tied to the capitalist classes of particular nations and regions. However, in recent decades the production, financial activities, and sales of these corporations have shifted significantly outside their restricted home markets. This occurred as a result of the rising scale of capitalist accumulation and export, the revolution in communications and transportation, and intensified international competition driven by the deepening crisis of capitalism.

6. Transnational corporations have not disengaged from or abandoned the use of states or state power. They require the capitalist state power of particular national and subnational governments to perform its core exploitative function: maintaining capitalist property and exploitation, particularly by controlling and suppressing whenever necessary labour movements and other democratic forces. However, the transnationals pursue the political direction of anti-democratic internationalization to reduce and eliminate the democratic sovereignty of existing national states such as Canada and to transfer state power to larger-scale capitalist blocs and international organizations further removed from democratic control.

7. In Canada, the dominance of Canadian transnationals and the trend of anti-democratic internationalization underlies a fundamental shift in the political direction of the Canadian state: the shift from National Policy protectionism and bourgeois national development strategy to continental ‘free trade,’ in particular, and neoliberalism, in general. Though driven by the transnationals, this historic shift was supported overwhelming by the non-transnational sectors of the Canadian capitalist class, who do not have a general class political direction independent of the transnationals. Only the working class and some groups of farmers, fishers, and other small proprietors were collectively opposed to free trade and neoliberalism.

8. The neoliberal “corporate agenda” of free trade, privatization, deregulation, and the destruction of universal, high-quality social programs is not simply a temporary or opportune “policy” but a new phase or central tendency in the expansion of modern imperialism. To reverse this trend, to reclaim and advance democracy, sovereignty, and social reform for the benefit of working people requires a fundamental realignment in class power to break the grip of transnational corporations, beginning with the Canadian transnationals. Such measures as strengthened international trade-union bargaining, and strengthened minimum labour and environmental standards in international trade agreements can moderate the worst symptoms of imperialist expansion; but taken alone they are incapable of reversing the general direction of neoliberalism and imperialist expansion. All transnationals must be publicly taken over, gradually divested of their foreign holdings, and reorganized on a smaller scale under social ownership and democratic national, regional, and local control appropriate to an efficient scale of production and to ecological conditions.

9. The struggle against neoliberalism and the ‘corporate agenda’ is a democratic and anti-imperialist struggle that depends first and foremost on the leadership and mass engagement of Canada’s multinational, multiracial, female-male working class, which today constitutes the vast majority of Canada’s population. A democratic, anti-transnational alliance of political forces based in and around the working class is necessary to take public control of the Canadian transnationals and, hence, the commanding heights of the Canadian economy, to begin a process of profound democratization of the Canadian economy and state, and to renegotiate and transform Canada’s international economic relations.

10. Key international goals of Canada’s new international economic relations would be: on the one hand, increased national and regional self-sufficiency in production, consumption, and resource use, and the gradual ending of foreign ownership and indebtedness, and; on the other, an expansion of equal and mutually beneficial international exchange and sharing at the level of culture, research, technology and, when desirable, mutually owned and controlled joint production. Canada would work actively towards establishing non-imperialist international economic institutions outside the imperialist frameworks of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization.

11. In taking control of the commanding heights of the Canadian economy and in initiating a process of the democratization of the state and economic power, the anti-transnational alliance would turn the general direction of the Canadian economy and state away from neoliberalism and imperialism towards socialism. This anti-transnational period would not be socialism, because medium and small-scale capitalist ownership and capitalistic commodity money relations would still exist widely as, for a time, would foreign transnational ownership and commerce. But neither would it be to return to an earlier form of national competitive capitalism, nor to establish, beyond the initial transitional period, a form of highly monopolized and centralized state capitalism. Rather it would be a transition period, not a stable condition or a final result, in which the political process itself, particularly the hostile, anti-democratic activities of capitalist interests, would clarify the necessity of the political leadership of the working class and its allies – and of socialism.

Spark! #9 – pgs. 3-5

Positioning for Advance

By William Stewart

The obstacle is imperialism and neo-conservatism, the shape of capitalism. It cannot be modified, downsized, democratized, or civilized. It must be displaced.

1. This is the challenge facing the working class and its allies the world over. Until we are able to face this reality, the future holds only ceaseless struggles, poverty, insecurity and wars.

2. Communist parties evolve to assist the working class in understanding and addressing this unrelenting truth. They are joined in this undertaking by other socialist and left forces. Other political parties who do not understand or support the need for fundamental social change for socialism, seek to obscure this social reality.

The scientific elaboration of Marx and Engels that the working class is the grave-digger of capitalism remains at the heart of revolutionary strategy. This is the aspect of Marxist-Leninist science that has been the target of the main fire of capitalist ideologues since 1850.

It was most illustrative that the betrayers of socialist power in the Soviet Union grouped around Mikhail Gorbachov hastened to heap ridicule on the concept of working class power as they scrambled for the spoils of their counter-revolutionary efforts. Nor was it incidental that one of Yeltsin’s first acts was to illegalize Communist organization in factories and enterprises.

No other social group in capitalist society can or will lead the way to socialism. The working class will undertake this task as consciousness of its role and its unity around this consciousness develops. This is a process.

It is a process which is honed in the day-to-day struggle for its own ends. This is a spontaneous struggle which tends to ebb and flow with the ups and downs of the system. The rising militancy of the working class and people’s movement in Canada testifies to the law of class struggle. For example, the strike movement headed by the showdown between the Canadian Auto Workers Union and General Motors; the angry upsurge in the Maritimes; and the nurses’ victory in Alberta. And of course the historic Toronto Queen’s Park Rally culminating the Days of Action of October 1996.

However, spontaneous class struggle is one thing. Class consciousness is another. Class consciousness implies a coming together of struggle (practice) with theory; and understanding of the laws of social development; the methodology of social change; recognition of the need for a political party based on working class principles.

Continuation and building on the Days of Action is by no means certain. The entrenched forces of outright capitalist ideology and “modern” social reformism (the same thing without a top hat) are still considerably stronger than the left-centre forces (perhaps not numerically, but through position and power.)

What experience, here and abroad can we draw on to help change this situation? In the era of neo–liberalism, a major debate is engaged in, in Communist and Workers Parties, in left and progressive circles around the world, centering on the practice of social democracy. Can it be regarded as an integral part of the labour movement, that is, a party of social change or has it become a conduit for capitalist ideology and neoliberal policies? Communist parties in Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Portugal and Germany, regard social democracy as the major obstacle to achieving a democratic alternative to neo-liberalism (the world term for neo-conservatism).

In France, Norway, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Spain, parties are not so categorical in their critique. The same is the case in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, the party takes a fully negative attitude to the social democrats.

Communist parties in Greece, Portugal, France, Spain and Italy are mass parties with major influence in the unions as well as deputies in parliament, senates and the European Parliament. They also hold mayoralties and other elective positions in many municipalities. They have all witnessed many years of social democratic governments.

Aside from such differences in time, shape and place, there is a common concern crossing all lines. That is whether the struggle against capitalist politics in the working class and people’s movements can be effectively countered without a sharp critique and exposure of social democracy.

Recent events in Canada have brought this into open debate: the debacle of the Rae government in Ontario, where a seeming significant victory was turned into a disaster; the behind-the-scenes and open friction over preparations for the Days of Action; and the somewhat similar developments in B.C. where the NDP won the election on a firm anti-neoconservative campaign and has since caved in on too many matters to right-wing pressures.

Neither has the record of the Romanow government in Saskatchewan departed from the main line of the neo-conservative push.

It is useful to recall that social democracy emerged from the womb of the world revolutionary movement. In reacting to the pressures of capitalist ideology, it broke with revolutionary tradition entirely and invented a philosophy in which revolutionary change was replaced with step-by-step reform of capitalism until socialism would emerge. Envisaged was a form of peaceful co-existence between workers and capital.

In this contest, according to their outlook, government serves as mediator between capital and labour. If a government favours capital, workers suffer, but if government honestly acts in the interests of both capital and labour, both sides win. Therefore the election of social democratic governments is the total (obvious) answer.

Like in Britain? Sweden? Germany? Finland? Australia? New Zealand? Like in Spain? Chile? Grenada?

A glaring reality is denied by social democracy. There is a world of difference between government and the state. If you have a capitalist system with all its economic and political levers of power, you either have a capitalist government to administer it, which social democracy has tried unsuccessfully to do since its birth, or a government which challenges the dictates of capital – witness Chile.

This requires dealing with an army sworn to defend the capitalist state, a police force likewise, a judiciary and a set of laws predicated on the defense of capitalist property (witness the Helms-Burton Bill) as well as a range of NGOs which are politically committed to capitalist rule, plus a powerful imperialist, military political force – primarily the USA.

Refusal to accept this reality consigns them to the role of being just another tweedledee-tweedledum in the process of capitalist politics.

Here another contradiction appears – not just between the NDP and the working class and people’s movement, but in its own ranks. The linkage to labour through its organizational connection with the CLC brings it into direct collision with the needs and wishes of the working class. Its constituency organizations, which have shed their original socialist character, more easily capitulate to the lure and glitter of capitalist politics and the personal rewards suggested. Add to this the contented labour lieutenants co-opted by right wing social democracy and other forms of capitalist ideology.

Nonetheless, the majority of working people inside the NDP net constitute an important component of the left and progressive forces, and a major component of the working class. As well, they are experienced in the art of political campaigning.

However it is to be done, it would seem that the most advisable course to follow inside and outside the NDP, would be a systematic, relentless exposure of right-wing social democracy with the aim of breaking its influence on the program and policies of the NDP and the trade union movement. If this proves ultimately unrealizable, this struggle will have created the best possible conditions for winning from its ranks the left and progressive forces.

The Communist Party has long called for an end to the organizational linkage between the trade union movement and the NDP, whereby the unions declare the NDP as their political arm. Unions should not delegate that responsibility to any party, while they may well favour the NDP in given elections, depending on a satisfactory program. After all, the immediate alternative is even bleaker.

Primarily however, the exposure and defeat of the right wing needs to centre on elaborating and fighting for an alternative program.

Such a program should resolve the following dilemma so as to be clearly understood by the working class and the people: How to break with the neo–conservative agenda, which is global in its scope, without breaking entirely with the capitalist system? Such a break appears beyond the bounds of realistic politics in today’s Canada.

The Communist Party of Canada calls for a democratic renovation: a new “democratic” government, pledged to reverse and replace the neo-conservative program. Such a government would need to be made up of the various strands of the labour and peoples’ movement, including but not dominated by the NDP, with full input into its program. Its candidates would be decided on a pro-rata and historical conditions basis. It would be drawn from and directly answerable to the people.

Its mandate should include:

· a program to establish full employment in Canada, including a massive social spending program;

· restoration of all social funding to its level prior to cuts;

· restoration of the public sector;

· restoring the level of currency production by the Bank of Canada to 20%;

· control over the export of capital;

· a new tax system making corporations pay their full share and all back taxes;

· reducing the work day and week; curtailing overtime;

· raising UIC benefit rates to 90% of previous earnings and reducing qualifying time;

· overhauling the Workmen’s Compensation Acts to protect injured workers and not corporations;

· making education a full and free right for all at all levels;

· eliminating all poverty quickly and child poverty immediately;

· implementing full gender equity and affirmative action to guarantee immigrant access to meaningful well paid jobs;

· making work ghettos illegal;

· amending the constitution to provide full national rights to our French Canadian fellow nation;

· protecting full aboriginal rights of native Canadians and according them full self government on their lands;

· expanding budgets significantly for culture and the arts, including the CBC, whose television should shed all private advertising. Giving significant grants to public radio and TV;

· financially encouraging the publication of community, labour and peoples’ print media to provide an antidote to the press of the Conrad Blacks et al; breaking up media monopolies;

· abolishing the senate and replacing it with an elected house of provinces, aboriginals and French Canada;

· abolishing all discrimination against gays and lesbians;

· tightening all laws to protect the environment and establishing a commission to determine the long term rational use of resources compatible with environmental needs;

· getting out of NAFTA, NATO, NORAD and all US imperialist and military alliances;

· declaring Canada a nuclear–free zone and establishing a neutral non–aligned foreign policy of peace.

This program, upgraded and amended by the members of such a political coalition, could form the basis of political campaigning for a new democratic government and alternative within the bounds of capitalism.

It would not win the majority of Canadians if placed before them today. It would first have to become the program of the left and peoples’ organizations.

It would have to be fought for day in and day out, until it captures the hearts and minds of the Canadian people. Social change cannot be achieved through elections until it has been won in the factories, streets, offices and communities.

If this process is not undertaken consciously, it will not just grow out of misery and suffering. What will arise out of misery and suffering, unaddressed by a conscious alternative, is more misery and suffering.

Victory for such a coalition would not bring an end to the struggle against capital. In the short term, it would likely intensify as capital, in the name of democracy and the sanctity of capital, would fight to protect and regain its lost positions of strength.

The only guarantee would be the eternal vigilance of the working class and peoples’ movements. So long as capital rules, there can be no end to the class struggle.

Only the socialist re-organization of society based on the peoples’ needs, not the profits of capital, can resolve this struggle. And as events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe demonstrated, even the winning of people’s power does not ensure the uninterrupted development of democracy and socialism in a hostile imperialist world.

Together, the working class, its political party, and the peoples’ organizations are the sole guarantee of extending and protecting democracy, winning and ensuring the firm establishment and continuity of socialism.

The labour and peoples’ movement in France, Germany and other European countries are blocking the worst excesses of the neo–conservative onslaught. Black and white American labour, women, youth and students, are mounting a spirited fight back. Cuba is standing firm as a socialist state, withstanding the despicable attempts of US imperialism to crush it. Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Chile in fact most of Latin America, is struggling for freedom and sovereignty.

We can draw great confidence and strength from the knowledge that the working class and democratic forces around the world are fighting for similar policies. In different ways – perhaps not always understood or accepted by us.

Communist and workers’ parties are undertaking the construction of socialism and the building of democracy in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos. In India, the Communist Party is elected in areas representing more than 100 million people. The Communist Party of Japan scored a major success in recent elections. In the East European countries, communists and workers are drawing painful lessons from their downfall and are winning the growing support of their people.

In South Africa, the National African Congress, in close cooperation with the South African Communist Party is forging the core of a new liberated African continent. Socialism and the onwards march of the world’s peoples has not been halted, and history continues to unfold. The future belongs to the people, not capital.

Spark! #9 - pgs. 6-11

Same old Liberal Drivel

Pierre S. Pettigrew, The New Politics of Confidence, Stoddart, 1999, $29.95.

Review by Howard Cukoff

Pierre Pettigrew was the beneficiary of a fortuitous cabinet shuffle: he left poor Jane Stewart holding the bag in the billion dollar boondoggle (or was it three billion?) at the Human Resources Department (HRDC). Pettigrew transferred to the International Trade portfolio – he was our representative at the WTO conference in Seattle – a step up the ladder. Any Prime Ministerial ambitions he may have are presumably still intact. It doesn’t do to show too much talent in the Liberal party, after all. Prime Minister Chrétien is a bit touchy about that... how else can you explain the career of Sheila Copps? If only we had voted for Kim Campbell!

Pettigrew has published a book which amounts to an attempt to present the federalist case on the ‘national unity’ question, the substance of which is in the last chapter. The reader has this reviewer’s permission to skip the rest without feeling guilty about it. The text is a reworked collection of speeches and papers stemming from the period before Pettigrew joined the government. The author was a management consultant, and has written the book in the tedious and barely readable style of that profession. The style fits the bill, however, in a book about national unity, a problem which the federal government hopes to ‘manage’ out of existence since it has no intention of solving it. The strategy of evasion, inertia, and occasional bully tactics has kept the country together so far, it is true.

Canada is a big player in the world, it is a member of many international organizations, including the U.N. Security Council several times, it has far-ranging trade pacts and the prospect of further advances, and it has the respect of the international community (does Yugoslavia still respect us?). So runs Pettigrew’s argument, and he is undoubtedly right that an independent Quebec would face a decline of prestige and presence in our (forgive me) global economy. Quebec would lose its geographical bridge to the once and future burgeoning Pacific Rim. Pettigrew is also correct to point out an often-overlooked matter. Quebec carries on an extensive interprovincial trade which would almost certainly be disrupted in the wake of secession. In economic terms, the sovereigntist project would hardly be a cake walk, despite the assurances to the contrary of Lucien Bouchard, whose pitch in the last referendum campaign was that sovereignty would be so easy to achieve that no one would notice it had been.

Pettigrew holds that the federal system is flexible and adaptive, qualities which effectively position the country to compete in contemporary market conditions. Flexibility is enhanced by the constant squabbling between federal and provincial jurisdictions, since the levels of government compete to provide better services and a better economic climate. These advantages would be lost in the centralized model of government an independent Quebec would follow. As examples, Pettigrew mentions the bureaucratic bungling in Quebec’s manpower training department, which the province wrested from federal control a few years ago, and the short shrift municipalities get in Quebec. Pettigrew maintains that the Quebec government is inept at regional development and has been unable to arrest the decades-long decline of the city of Montreal.

As Pettigrew sees it, the sovereigntist movement is parochial and out-of-step with economic reality. Nationalism is about much more than economics, needless to say. The French fact in Canada has entered a demographic crisis. The proportion of francophones in the country is declining, and political power (in a democracy, at least) follows the demographic trend. The insecurity of francophones both in Quebec and in the Rest of Canada (where the cultural assimilation of francophone communities is a critical danger) – of which the sovereigntist movement is one expression – is real, the future of the French language and culture is not assured. As long as Canada’s constitutional arrangement is not adjusted to meet the problem – it does not even presently recognize that there is a problem – Pettigrew’s brand of economic federalism will ring hollow.

Economic flexibility means flexibility in the labour market. Apart from the insecurity francophones experience as a national minority in Canada and as a nation in Quebec, the working class section of the nationality shares the growing economic insecurity of Canadian workers – and not only workers. Nationalism in Quebec won’t go away, the sovereigntist movement in Quebec is far from extinct, as a recent headline in the National Post stupidly claimed. Wasn’t it pronounced dead a few months before the last referendum campaign? The social tension which comes with the new economic reality combined with the apparent improbability of constitutional reform – not much flexibility there – will continue to feed separatist tendencies. Is the ‘everyone in his own back yard’ philosophy of the Reform party (rather, the former Reform party) really so different from that of the Péquistes? Reform leader Preston Manning¹ briefly contemplated a political alliance with the sovereigntists to further his goal of dismantling the power of the federal government. Pettigrew’s New Politics of Confidence are a hope or a prayer that Liberals will somehow muddle through, as they always have. One hopes that the consultant gave his corporate clients better advice.

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1 – Editor's Note: Preston Manning has now been replaced as leader of the Canadian Alliance [a.k.a. the Reform Party] by Stockwell Day, the former treasurer under the Alberta Tory regime of Ralph Klein. Interestingly, Day and the new Alliance leadership have also been courting Quebec sovereigntists of late.

Spark! #13-14, pp. 69-70

Canada’s Place in the Imperialist System, and the Struggle for Sovereignty and an Independent Foreign Policy of Peace and Disarmament

Presented by Kimball Cariou, editor of People's Voice and member of the Central Executive Committee CPC, at the seminar on "Anti-Imperialism and Peace," June 25, 2006, Vancouver, British Columbia.

My presentation today is largely based on some earlier work by comrade Miguel Figueroa, leader of the Communist Party of Canada. Together with Miguel, I have added some comments in regard to issues being debated within the anti-war movement in the new context of the Harper Conservative minority government.

The CPC has a long history of involvement in the anti-war struggles. Our party was formed in 1921 by representatives of the socialist movements in North America which were most strongly opposed to participation in the First World War, which saw millions of European workers slaughter each other for the sake of the competing colonial ambitions of their masters. Ever since that time, the Communist Party has played an important role in the movements against war and for peace and disarmament. During the most difficult years of the Cold War, the Communists, along with some left-oriented social democrats, were virtually the only political force campaigning against the imperialist domination of the US and the European colonial powers.

Even at the present, when our Party is quite small, we place a high priority on building a broad and powerful struggle against imperialist war, from local grassroots coalitions to alliances on a country-wide and international scale.

To give just a couple of local examples, the Communist Party was one of the very first organizations to affiliate to the StopWar coalition here in Vancouver. We were deeply involved in the Coalition of Progressive Electors, whose elected officials took the initiative to launch the World Peace Forum. On a country-wide scale, we were among the groups which built the Canadian Peace Congress, and which helped to launch the Canadian Peace Alliance during the 1980s. We have been among those political forces which aim to build up mass opposition to the occupation of Iraq and Palestine, and to resist Canada's shameful role in the occupation of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Haiti.

I want to speak about some of this context first, and then deal briefly with the theoretical issues faced by the peace movement.

Two months ago, on the third anniversary of the U.S.‑led invasion of Iraq, protests were organized around the world, including in over thirty cities and towns across Canada. With the dangers to peace multiplying, Canada's peace movement is faced with the necessity to redouble our efforts to block this country's tilt towards support for U.S. imperialism.

The election of the minority Conservative government is a dangerous development, directly counter to the interests of the majority of people in Canada.

In recent years, Canada has participated in a number of imperialist aggressions, violating the fundamental, democratic principles of international law: Iraq (enforcing sanctions, 1990 to 2003), Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1993 to present), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001 to present) and Haiti (2004 to present).

Prior to this period, Canada projected an image as a "neutral" party in world affairs. Canada was clearly on the same side as the United States, but we were usually seen as "peacekeepers" rather than participants in military actions. Under enormous pressure from the peace movement, particularly in Quebec, the Chrétien government declined to take part in the invasion of Iraq, a move which temporarily restored this tarnished image.

Overall, however, this more aggressive recent trend emerged following the serious setbacks to socialism in the Soviet Union and its allies, which acted as a counterweight to imperialism's constant and inherent drive for world domination.

Canada's new imperialist record has shocked many people, but it should be no surprise. Acting on behalf of Canadian banks and transnationals, and backed by the corporate media, successive federal governments have increasingly aligned Canada's foreign policy and military doctrine with that of the U.S. One important exception has been Ottawa's disagreement with the illegal U.S. economic blockade of Cuba.

Now, on a whole range of foreign policy issues, the Harper government threatens to involve Canada in ever more dangerous aggressions and war preparations.

In defiance of public opinion, the Harper government wants to reverse the 2004 decision against official participation in U.S. plans to deploy weapons in space (missile defence). With the aim of taking part in more foreign aggressions, the Harper government will increase military spending to nearly $25 billion over the next five years, up from today's $11.6 billion.

Canada's leading role in the occupation of Afghanistan is the greatest and most immediate problem confronting the peace movement. Last year the Martin Liberals – with the full support of the Harper Tories – escalated Canada's troop deployment to Afghanistan into the largest foreign operation in fifty years. Last month, on just 36 hours notice, the Conservatives pushed through a Parliamentary vote to extend the Afghan mission for two more years. But the vote was just 149-145, thanks largely to a last minute campaign by anti-war groups to flood MPs with e-mail messages.

This struggle will continue despite the Parliamentary vote, and it will almost certainly escalate as two things happen: more Canadian troops will suffer casualties in the Kandahar area, and more Afghans will be killed by the occupation forces. The battle to win "hearts and minds" over this issue is being fought here in Canada by such means as the arrests of 17 young men in Toronto, who are now facing terrorism charges. According to Harper and "Public Safety" Minister Stockwell Day, these men are already presumed guilty. We can be certain that the timing of these arrests had more to do with winning support for the Afghan mission than with any real immediate danger of a terrorist action.

This deployment has nothing to do with improving the lives of people in Afghanistan or fighting terrorism. The real purpose is to allow the U.S. to keep more of its soldiers in Iraq, and to safeguard U.S. investments, like Unocal corporation's proposed oil pipeline through Afghanistan from Central Asia. But the presence of Canadian troops in the region will make Canada an even more important target and enemy of the peoples struggling to end unjust occupations.

The seriousness of tensions in the region cannot be underestimated. The use of nuclear weapons or devastating attacks by the U.S. or another imperialist power may well provoke a far greater and widespread war with millions of casualties over many years.

Unfortunately, the Afghanistan deployment vote revealed the lack of a powerful Parliamentary opposition to the Tories' foreign and military strategy. There was plenty of talk of "supporting our troops" and "getting back to building infrastructure," but even the NDP members of parliament accepted the underlying assumption that Canada has a "responsibility to protect" the weak and powerless through the projection of our military strength. In effect, the NDP, as well as Liberal and Bloc Quebecois opponents of the war, are reluctant to challenge the imperialist nature of this occupation. This means that the peace movement must redouble our efforts to demand that Canada immediately withdraw our military forces from Afghanistan and speak out in support of sovereignty of the peoples in the Middle East. There will be stronger campaigns along these lines by many anti-war groups across Canada in the coming months, including a cross-country day of action on October 28.

There are other crucial issues faced by the peace movement today. The U.S. continues to develop and lower thresholds for the use of its massive nuclear weapons arsenal. A new round of nuclear testing is in preparation.

The Bush administration is ominously charging that Iran is building nuclear weapons, laying the groundwork for some type of military assault upon that country.

Imperialist countries are using the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority elections to punish the Palestinian people with starvation and sanctions, while ignoring the murderous campaigns against the Palestinians by the Israeli state.

The war on terrorism is being used by imperialism to curb civil rights, carry out racist attacks, and criminalize resistance to its domination.

All these problems are added to old global injustices, such as the impoverishment and starvation of millions of people as a result of the unjust world order of corporate globalization.

In response, the Communist Party calls for an independent foreign policy of peace and disarmament for Canada, and urges peace‑supporting left, democratic, labour and other peoples' movements to mobilize and unite in support of such policies.

In all these broad struggles, our Party has also put forward our own perspective. Some of my comments on this topic were presented at a seminar in Toronto two years ago, where comrade Figueroa engaged in debate with other left groups, such as the International Socialists, who are prominent in the Canadian Peace Alliance and in some local coalitions and campaigns. I will also deal with some controversies here in Vancouver, where the Mobilization Against War and Occupation attempts to impose narrow, divisive positions on the wider anti-war movement. The point of these debates is not to engage in sectarian attacks against other forces on the Left, but to attempt to clarify the strategies and tactics necessary to strengthen the peace movement as a whole.

First, some comments on the nature of the Canadian state. In our Party's view, Canada is an imperialist state. Chapter II of our program states explicitly:

"Canada is an imperialist country – a highly developed monopoly capitalist state. Canada has the highest level of foreign ownership amongst the imperialist countries, but it is neither a colony nor a semi‑colony. Canadian‑based transnationals participate in the exploitation of working people in other countries, and Canada is subject to the intrinsic contradictions of global capitalism."

In fact, recent statistics indicate that while foreign ownership of the Canadian economy is on the rise once again, at the same time Canadian monopoly interests are increasing their export of capital. By 1996, outward Direct Foreign Investment (DFI) from Canada to the U.S., Europe, and Asia had actually surpassed new inward foreign investment in the country. Last weekend here at the Dogwood Centre, a speaker from Montreal pointed out that even the smaller nation of Quebec has developed its own transnational capitalists, such as the giant Bombardier Corporation.

Our program goes on to state: "Canadian monopoly is more than a junior partner of U.S. imperialism; it is an integral part of the world imperialist system. Canadian monopoly interests are interwoven with those of U.S. capital and increasingly with capital from the EU and Japan."

And on the related question of who actually controls the Canadian state, our program is also explicit: "The central fact of political life in Canada is that state power is in the hands of Canadian finance capital."

In short, our Party rejects the idea that Canada is some sort of vassal state, or semi‑colony controlled by a comprador bourgeoisie – a view advanced by some others on the Left during the 1960s and '70s.

This is not to deny the colonial, dependent roots and history of the development of capitalism in Canada, and of the ruling capitalist class in this country. From early in the twentieth century onward, trade and debt dependence on Britain was gradually replaced with an even closer dependence on U.S. capital and technology. U.S.‑based capital increasingly gained control of key sectors of the Canadian economy, particularly manufacturing and natural resources. This process resulted in Canada becoming more integrated into and more dependent on the U.S. economy than any other developed capitalist country.

This relatively unique pattern of capitalist development helps to explain the contradictory relations between Canadian and U.S. capital. In earlier decades we characterized this relationship as an "antagonistic partnership." The Canadian ruling class collaborated with foreign, mainly U.S. capital, including tolerating an unusually high level of foreign ownership in an advanced capitalist state, while at the same time maintaining its control over the Canadian state apparatus and over significant parts of the domestic market - banking and finance, communications, and certain manufacturing and service industries, in particular.

This "antagonistic partnership" took shape prior to WWII, and held sway for at least the next three decades or more. It began to give way by the late 70s and early 80s with the gradual abandonment of Keynesianism in favour of monetarist and neoliberal policies by the ruling class.

As late as the 1984 general election, Brian Mulroney campaigned on a promise never to enter into a free‑trade arrangement with the U.S. After that election, following a "briefing" from the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, CCCE), he and his Tory Government flipped 180 degrees and began to promote free trade.

Our party sums up this new orientation in this way: "Canadian monopoly has its own independent interests to protect and advance. However the dominant trend within Canadian monopoly circles today is toward economic integration and political collaboration with U.S. imperialism, and with international finance capital in general. In pursuit of maximizing profit, Canadian monopoly is prepared to sacrifice the country's economic and political sovereignty, so long as it can maintain a reasonable share of the plunder of Canada's natural resources and domestic market, while expanding access to larger U.S., hemispheric and global markets."

Simplistic theoretical constructs would suggest that a state like Canada is either an independent, imperialist body in its own right, or else that it is in a dependent, subordinate position to its much more powerful imperialist neighbour. Life is far more complex than this. Certainly, in the case of Canada, both are true.

With that, let us turn to the issue of sovereignty.

Our Party rejects the argument that somehow the fight to defend Canadian sovereignty is at best an unnecessary distraction from the class struggle against capitalism, and at worst, an unprincipled embrace of bourgeois nationalism, a rejection of working class internationalism. On the contrary, we contend that the struggle for Canadian sovereignty and independence is an essential condition and step for the advance to socialism.

Two main considerations inform our approach on this issue. The first relates to our understanding of sovereignty as a fundamentally democratic demand, and second, the importance of the struggle to defend sovereignty as part of the larger struggle against U.S. imperialism.

There is sometimes an assumption that when Communists speak of sovereignty, we are primarily referring to state sovereignty. As Communists we are not in favour of strengthening the Canadian bourgeois state. We envisage that revolutionary moment when the people begin to dismantle that oppressive capitalist state and replace it with a democratic, revolutionary state led by the working class and committed to the building of socialism.

When we speak of Canadian sovereignty, we mean the sovereignty of the Canadian people – the vast majority of whom are workers and their closest allies – and the basic democratic right of the Canadian people to determine their own future, their own destiny.

It is precisely the democratic content of national sovereignty which is under attack by finance capital – both international and domestic. This takes place under the cover of various trade and investment regimes – the so‑called "global architecture" that is being imposed on the peoples everywhere under the aegis of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the various imperialist‑controlled institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Under the terms of these pacts and agreements, the democratic rights of the people to determine their own social policies, labour and employment policies, environmental standards, etc., are being systematically stripped away. These "treaties" protect the interests of monopoly, guarantee the free mobility of capital, and virtually outlaw any possibility of public nationalizations and seizure of private assets. This is being done with the collusion of our own Canadian ruling class, and not by accident!

And yet there are still forces within the left which view the struggle against "free trade" and U.S. domination as a diversion, as a form of "tailing behind the national bourgeoisie." Such forces sharply criticize groups such as the Council of Canadians, which are considered simply "nationalist." Of course, this misses the point that it was precisely the national bourgeoisie which promoted "free trade" in the first place. Failure to condemn free trade, along with the rest of the project to integrate Canada more fully into the U.S. empire, plays into the hands of the Canadian ruling elite who want to enlist the support of the Canadian people for this sell‑out, or at least neutralize us and silence our protests.

There have been other forms of objection from the left against the struggle for sovereignty. Comrade Figueroa has related, for example, his experience at a seminar during the 1980s held by the Institute of Canada‑USA Studies in Moscow. The Soviet comrades argued that our party's position was reactionary, because economic integration is an inevitable, objective process under capitalism and that therefore we should accept and even embrace it.

Our response was that while economic integration is objectively-driven, under the prevailing monopoly capitalist conditions it exacts a heavy price primarily from working people, and that in struggling against this agenda, Canadian workers become more aware of their class interests.

Sovereignty is directly connected to the rights of nations and peoples to self‑determination. This is not a selective right reserved only for oppressed nations, or those which have already embarked on a revolutionary path. Such is the view of Movement Against War and Occupation (MAWO) here in Vancouver, for example, which has bitterly resisted any attempts to link the struggles by the people of both Cuba and Canada for sovereignty against U.S. domination.

In reality, sovereignty is a fundamental right of all nations and peoples. Of course, no nation or people can be truly free if they oppress another nation or people. Our program is very explicit on this point, with respect to the right to self-determination of the oppressed nations in Canada – the Aboriginal nations, the Acadians and Quebec. But recognition of these national rights does not detract from or negate the sovereign rights of the peoples of Canada as a whole to resist the onslaught by U.S. imperialism and international finance capital.

Yet another argument is sometimes raised: that the struggle for sovereignty is part of a bygone era, the stage of early development of the bourgeois-democratic state in Canada. Again, this view misses the point. The left supports and fights for a whole number of democratic demands of the people – the right to the full equality of women, the struggles of the LGBT community, the campaign against environmental degradation, the defence of civil liberties – none of which are not directly or inherently socialist demands. The role of the left is to link these democratic struggles to the overall struggle for social emancipation against capitalism.

Finally, on the importance of the struggle to defend sovereignty as part of the larger struggle against imperialism.

Since the point is not just "to interpret the world, but to change it," our starting point must be the elaboration of a clear line of march, a set of revolutionary strategy and tactics to achieve our goal.

There is a saying that "class consciousness is knowing which side of the barricades you are on – class analysis is knowing who is beside you." We could add that strategy and tactics is knowing which direction to point your gun.

We often speak of "imperialism" or "global capitalism" as short‑hand to refer to prevailing political economic order in the world today. But in doing so, we should not fall into acceptance of the concept that there exists one all‑embracing, interconnected imperialist goliath – a kind of "ultra‑imperialism" of which Karl Kautsky wrote, or its modern variant, the core‑periphery model of world systems theory or similar 'dependency' theories.

In fact, world imperialism is composed of several different rival imperialist powers and centres. For a number of decades, during the imperialist Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, these rivalries and contradictions were submerged in the common cause, to defeat world socialism. But these contradictions did not disappear, and since the early 90s, they have re‑emerged into the light of day.

To quote again from our program: "While the imperialist powers have a common interest in imposing a single global market which they can dominate and control, the three main imperialist centres – the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the emerging Asian bloc led by Japan – are engaged in a bitter struggle over the division of the spoils of global domination. As the world capitalist economy becomes ever more volatile, each imperialist centre seeks to protect its privileged position within those markets it already dominates (its so‑called 'sphere of influence') while simultaneously attempting to penetrate and supplant its rivals in other national and regional markets."

The most powerful, predatory and expansionist of these three centres is U.S. imperialism. It follows therefore, that the main enemy of humanity today - and the main target against which we must direct our political fire – is U.S. imperialism.

As we know, the Canadian ruling class has for the most part decided to throw in its lot with Fortress America. Since the 1980s this walk to economic and political integration with the U.S. has turned into a jog, and then since Sept. 11, 2001, into a full‑fledged sprint.

But for the working class and popular forces in Canada, as around the world, anything that can weaken and block the drive of U.S. imperialism for world domination and hegemony should be done.

And in so doing, it is necessary for us to seek out and utilize every possible contradiction, every chink in the armour, to weaken U.S. domination. Should we not seek out every grievance and perceived wrong to hurl at the Bush regime? Should we not enlist every possible ally in this mammoth battle?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Take the debate over Canada's participation in Missile Defence as an example. During the course of that political debate, former Liberal Foreign Minister Bill Graham made an incredibly honest statement – that Canada's involvement was "necessary" to head off severe repercussions from the White House. That remark reminded us once again of the arrogance and condescension towards Canada coming from our imperial masters to the South. In the ensuing political struggle, the Liberal government was compelled by public opinion to reject "official" participation, although in reality, most of what the U.S. wanted from Canada was being carried out through our participation in the NORAD treaty. Now, the Harper Tories are pushing once again for participation, not because this would mean Canada doing anything significantly different, but to support the public relations campaign of the Bush regime.

In such circumstances, we reject the argument – raised by MAWO for example – that Missile Defence is "just another weapons system." (The same general argument is used to resist efforts to build campaigns against nuclear weapons.) In our view, the development of Missile Defence, new tactical nuclear bombs, and other upgraded weapons systems are an integral part of the drive by U.S. imperialism to achieve global military domination. For this reason, all Canadians who are concerned about preserving our country's sovereignty must be mobilized into the broadest possible campaign to block Missile Defence and to pull out of U.S.-dominated military agreements. Failure to do so, on some specious grounds of refusing to pander to nationalist sentiments, would be the height of political immaturity and irresponsibility.

Communists are not afraid of seek unity with others. On the contrary, we understand that it is only through the forging of unity – both within our class and with other allies – will the class struggle against capitalism proceed toward victory.

I will let Lenin have the last word. He wrote in Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder: "To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, prolonged and complicated than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to refuse beforehand to manoeuvre - to refuse to temporize and compromise with possible (even though transitory, unstable, vacillating and conditional) allies – is this not ridiculous in the extreme?"

At the same time, however, let us remember that the working class and revolutionary forces must be expanded considerably to allow us to take part in the anti-war movement from a position of strength. Our perspective must be to build the broadest possible alliance of forces aimed at defeating imperialist war and aggression, at the same time as we build our own movement so that we can do more to provide principled and consistent leadership.