– Statement of the Communist Party of Canada
(Marxist-Leninist), January 1, 2018 –
On the occasion of the New Year 2018, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) sends its revolutionary greetings to the working people of Canada and the world.
Along with all Canadians and the peoples everywhere, we enter the New Year conscious of the grave dangers that lie ahead. The period of retreat of revolution, ushered in when the Cold War and the bi-polar division of the world ended nearly 30 years ago, is accompanied by the institutionalization of an all-pervasive counter-revolution. This has given rise to a particular historical juncture where the old forms hitherto known to humankind have passed away and new forms consistent with the requirements of the times have yet to be brought into being.
The profoundly anti-social offensive unleashed by those who control the economy and political power is destroying the human productive forces on an unprecedented scale. It blocks the release of the human energy required for the benefit of human society. The outlook it presents to the peoples everywhere is one of disaster in the form of nuclear holocaust, a global war on terror, massive famines, deprivation and migrations with all the attendant suffering and ills. The outlook is sustained by the End of History thesis that liberal democracy is the pinnacle of democracy beyond which no further development is required or even possible.
The insecurity inherent in this form of democracy is drowning the lives of the working people all over the world. It has created the condition for the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, climate change and the war on terror to wreak havoc on humankind. Those who have usurped power by force within the imperialist heartlands and internationally persist in their rule by depriving the people of an outlook that favours them and the solving of the problems they and society face. Promoting a view that the people confront an unthinkable apocalypse whose horrors are too big to consider reveals that those in control are in a deep crisis and unfit to rule yet they persist in their irrational view that the people have no choice but to entrust their fate to those incapable of finding a way forward.
The inference drawn from this apocalyptic outlook is that the humans who collectively have created all the productive forces, science and technology underlying the disasters before us cannot control their own creations. The people are forced to believe that an irreconcilable breakdown has occurred between the productive powers and the products they create. People are meant to turn their backs on science and technology because the productive powers and products are out of their control and they can do nothing about it. The only option made available is to turn to global police powers to defend liberal democracy, which we are reminded is the highest and final stage of humankind, and use those police powers against those who seek to destroy liberal democracy for reasons of hate, revenge, evil and self-serving private interests and gain. Trump’s actions in the U.S. and throughout the world can be understood on the basis of the outlook that whatever he cannot control, he will destroy.
CPC(M-L) rejects any outlook that seeks to imbue us with a view that no alternative is possible. We reject an outlook that tells us human beings have no other option but to submit to the police powers over which not only we, the people, exercise no control but over which those who have seized power by force exercise no control either.
In the name of defending the national interest and civilized values, which the ruling elite have declared are one and the same, every form of diversion is used to block the people from forming their own political movement and to deprive them of an outlook advantageous to them and to finding solutions to the problems they and society face.
CPC(M-L) upholds the conclusion of modern science and human experience, which tells us that human beings by using their speech to affirm their conscience, can bring forth their own thought material and establish a framework that favours them. They can think things through and work out how to resolve the contradictions in favour of humanity. Far from U.S. imperialism and the rulers being indispensable in the world, it is the relations of humans and humans, and humans and nature that are truly indispensable. All individuals, all members of the human species, all persons and their collectives are indispensable. They are not dispensable as the rulers claim.
Given the rulers’ claim that all the future holds is an unthinkable apocalypse, we draw the conclusion that what is necessary is our own thinking and our own way of looking at the world from a vantage point far different from theirs. In our experience, the vantage point that favours human beings emerges from revolutionary practice. Revolutionary practice is the action that intervenes in any situation with analysis, in a manner that puts the human person at the centre of the action. This action with analysis not only reveals the Necessity for Change but also de facto changes to our advantage the material conditions as they present themselves. Revolutionary practice is required to resolve the crisis in a manner that favours the working class and others of this country and on the world scale.
The emphasis on apocalypse to deprive us of an outlook is a form of coercion aimed at persuading us to give up and give in. It has the same effect as the bombs and guns, corruption and bribery used by the rulers to remain in power. What this reveals is not that we are targeted by fake news as such, or that we are deprived of contextual information to draw warranted conclusions, but that the working class and others amongst the people need their own outlook and their own nation-building project arrived at based on their own politics and organization. The situation reveals the need for the people to develop a modern democratic personality that expresses itself in the form of an anti-war government. This is required not only to open society’s path to progress but the path to progress of humanity itself at this time.
In the opinion of CPC(M-L), this year will bring to the fore what it means to be revolutionary. To have fidelity to a cause is not enough to be considered revolutionary, no matter how well intentioned. For instance, not a few are alarmed by the rise of what they see to be fascism and a dangerous right wing in the form of racists, misogynists, Islamophobes and extremists of all kinds. While it is true that police powers are the only vestige that remains of the public authority in control of what is called the civil power, a lack of actions with analysis leads many to respond to the dangers humankind faces today by rising in defence of liberal democracy, as the Anglo-American imperialists did in World War II when confronted by the fascist menace. This reaction to the situation shows the need to make a break with Cold War historiography. The system called liberal democracy is precisely the system of representation in crisis, that system that has given rise to governments out of control and a state power devouring itself.
Unfettered police powers in the form of global cartels and oligopolies have seized the political powers of the state and act with impunity. A main advocate of these police powers is no doubt U.S. President Donald Trump who openly calls for the destruction of whatever he cannot control. But he and his henchmen are not alone. Their existence cannot be explained by saying they are rogue elements who, for self-serving reasons, pursue anti-people or wrong policies.
The crisis is such that others within the situation pose as left wing or progressive in opposition to right wing extremism, which threatens liberal democracy. The people are asked to trust the progressives to defend freedom, peace and human rights and in doing so liberal democracy will be preserved. Such is the case of the Government of Canada and its Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and other representatives of liberal hypocrisy. Their actions facilitate the destructive path on which the U.S. imperialists have embarked based on the claim that the U.S. is indispensable.
The liberal hypocrites, calling themselves progressive, base their actions on the same outlook of apocalypse. To safeguard peace, they swear, all must come under the control of the U.S. war machine. Those who refuse to come under U.S. control are targeted for attack and those that cannot be controlled are slated for destruction. The Liberal government has put Canada in the forefront of creating new illegitimate international bodies comprised of so-called allies to enforce this dictate through military and other means of coercion.
The year 2018 is to begin with the holding of one such gathering in Vancouver on January 16, meant to further isolate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, prevent it from following its own independent path and prepare public opinion for its total destruction, as Trump dictated at the United Nations. Contrary to the liberal hypocrites and others in the camp of U.S. imperialism, we must demand that the U.S. sign a peace treaty with the DPRK, something it has refused to do since the Korean War reached an impasse in 1953, resulting in an armistice agreement but not a peace treaty and the removal of hostile U.S. armed forces.
The atrocities the U.S. committed against the Korean people during the war and since are so horrendous as to force the DPRK to defend its people at all costs. Meanwhile, the belligerent powers that invaded the Korean Peninsula, including Canada, are countenancing a repeat of the total destruction and genocide they committed. It must not pass!
So too, Canada is resorting to new hooligan international arrangements to justify overthrowing the government of Venezuela and reinstalling the racist oligarchy, which dominated that country in the past, reducing the people to a life of poverty, deprivation and oppression. Meanwhile, Canada remains silent about the killings carried out by those it helped bring to power in a coup in Honduras and the corruption of those it put in power in Haiti. Canada is supplying weapons and other means to sustain the murderous counter-revolution in Ukraine where violence against the people is increasing dangerously. Canada through NATO is partner to attempts to surround Russia. It sells arms to Europe, Saudi Arabia and others and participates in the ceaseless slaughter of the people in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria as well as Yemen and others. Its interests and interference in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean are detrimental to the peoples there and do not contribute to peace, freedom or human rights.
To act with impunity in all these areas, the Government of Canada has given free rein to police powers being erected in this country as part of an international cartel of spy agencies, mercenaries, NGOs and armed forces that it equates with the defence of the U.S. as the indispensable nation. Canada is fully involved in the aggressive military alliances NATO and NORAD, as well as supranational free trade agreements where decisions taken by the oligarchs and their global oligopolies are said to be in the national interest.
The government’s moves to rescind civil rights such as freedom of speech and association through Bill C-59, the new national security bill before the Parliament of Canada, and to reform electoral laws further exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy in which governments and the state power are mired. All of it reveals that the forms given rise to by the European nation-state and the system of representation called liberal democracy are finished and that the people need to bring into being new forms that favour their interests and those of all humankind.
So too, the refusal of the ruling circles to bargain in good faith with the collectives of workers for wages and conditions of work and retirement that recognize workers’ contribution to the wealth they create for society shows that the equilibrium and arrangements developed after WWII to provide the people with security no longer exist. The working people must resolve the problem of their powerlessness and can do so using their speech to think things through, exchange their experiences and ideas with one another, establish what is relevant and what is not, and determine how to intervene in any situation in a manner that favours them.
Matters of war and peace and the economy concern us all as human beings. We have a human right to deliberate on these matters of concern and this right is inviolable. Without it, we cannot affirm our human quality, or activate the human factor/social consciousness to humanize the natural and social environment.
Affirming our human conscience by exercising our human right to speak does not come under the rubric of civil rights as contained in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The limits on the exercise of these civil rights are said to be reasonable but who decides what those rights are, how they should be exercised, and what is “reasonable” is kept hidden. The people are told that a motivation of Bill C-59 is to balance rights and security. Claims are made that it must be in conformity with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms even though it puts the police powers in control of decision-making. Those police powers include the arbitrary powers of ministers and judges which are, de facto, above the rule of law. For their part, legislatures are in contempt of the commonly held democratic opinion that they are supposed to represent the people. To pass laws legalizing the use of police powers in the name of security and equating this to the national interest clearly reveals that the people are rendered powerless by the current state of affairs.
The situation brings to mind the verse of the workers’ anthem, The Internationale:
We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favours
Let each one rule for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.
With best wishes for success in all your endeavours in the coming year!
