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April
2, 2020 - No. 3
CPC(M-L) CELEBRATES ITS
50th ANNIVERSARY
The Party's Deed Is Its Word
• The Party's Deed Is Its Word
- Pauline Easton
• We Are Our Own
Models - Margaret Villamizar
Reflections
• A Veteran from Student
Days in 1968
• A Woman Leader from the
1960s
• Opening a Path Forward
• The Early Years
- Pauline Easton -
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)
was founded 50 years ago based on the Necessity
for Change analysis (NfC). This analysis was
expounded by Hardial Bains in the course of a
study group held on the theme Necessity for Change
in 1967 and adopted by The Internationalists,
CPC(M-L)'s precursor organization, at a conference
held in August 1967. NfC determines that Understanding
Requires an Act of Conscious Participation of
the Individual, An Act of Finding Out. Its
adoption led to a determined and thoroughgoing
offensive against ideological subversion and block
to development through social forms and the
transformation of The Internationalists
into a Marxist-Leninist Youth and Student Movement
which took up the work to unite all
Marxist-Leninists in one party. Basing itself on
the revolutionary experience acquired by the
communist and workers' movement in Canada and
internationally, it took up the aim to build the
kind of organization which the working class
requires to open society's path to progress. The
emancipation of the working class by ending the
exploitation of persons by persons so as to
humanize the natural and social environment is at
the heart of its concern. Based on NfC, in 1995
the Party adopted a nation-building Historic
Initiative to lay the foundations for a mass
communist party created by the working class in
the course of constituting itself the nation and
vesting sovereignty in the people.
 In this world
which worships the phrase, like all the real
problems of life, quality itself is reduced to a
phrase. But we set ourselves the task to create a
new kind of communist in the form of a modern
democratic personality by organizing the working
class and people to carry out nation-building on a
modern basis, consistent with the needs of the
times. This requires engaging in setting and
carrying out those projects which are necessary to
open society's path to progress. In all cases, the
aim is for the working class and people to empower
themselves by laying the claims which they must.
By upholding their own rights, they fight for the
rights of all.
This is a program to end the marginalization of
the Party so as to end the marginalization of the
working class and people as those who are ruled by
privileged elites and have no say over matters of
concern to the society. This includes the
direction of the economy as well as laws and
regulations which determine what constitutes crime
and punishment and matters related to war and
peace. It is the duty of the communist party to
ensure the working class plays its leading role so
that the present crisis of thought and the anarchy
and violence in which humanity is mired are
resolved in favour of the people, not the rich who
have usurped power by force.
The requirement is to create an anti-war
government -- a form constituted by the people to
provide their desire for peace, freedom and
democracy with a guarantee. It requires bringing
into being new forms of governance at every level
which are established by the people so that their
voice is heard and their decisions determine the
outcome. It requires enlightenment theory as
expressed by Contemporary Marxist-Leninist Thought
to guide people in establishing their own
reference points and elaborating modern
definitions so that the historical task of
democratic political renewal is accomplished.
Today, as is the case under all conditions and
circumstances, the workers need an enlightened
party such as ours. Such a party must be capable
of finding its bearings in a manner which provides
leadership on a new modern basis. This requires
doing everything needed so that others can make
their contribution to turn things around in their
favour.
The ensemble of relations between humans
and humans and humans and nature reveal the need
for people's empowerment. As the working people
take up the cause of defeating the retrogressive
liquidationist pressure which the bourgeoisie,
imperialism and all reaction are imposing on
society and on the peoples of the entire world, it
is crucial for working people to speak in their
own name and use their own voice to lay the claims
which they must.
Today the rulers govern through their police
powers only. They exercise the decision-making
power to disinform the people so as to block their
participation in setting the direction of the
economy and making crucial decisions on matters
which affect their lives. The clash between the
conditions and authority must be resolved in
favour of the working peoples of the world.
Cartel party governments have taken over at all
levels to push the neo-liberal anti-social agenda
of the international financial oligarchy. They
represent a force which is corrupt, degenerate,
anti-worker, anti-national and anti-social. The
liberal democratic forms they espouse are
anachronistic because they represent the aim set
for society by privileged elites to advance their
propertied interests. However, the material
conditions have surpassed the ability of these
interests to propel progress. They have changed
tremendously from what they were during the 20th
century due to the development of the productive
powers of the working class on a massive scale as
a result of the achievements of the scientific and
technological revolution. Despite this, the
authorities continue to act in the old way, as if
everyone is a thing and everything is their private
property, even the discoveries of science which
belong to humanity by right along with land, air,
water, space and all the products of their labour.
They think they can dispose of human beings and
the relations they enter into as they wish. This
has created an intolerable situation which is
socially and environmentally unsustainable. Most
importantly, it means that the authorities which
try to control the productive powers to benefit
narrow private interests cannot succeed because
people are not things. The results of the
scientific and technological revolution are the
product of humanity's labour which can no longer
be contained by private interests. These private
interests resort to methods which destroy the
productive forces because they surpass their
ability to control them. They use police powers
and resort to war based on their belief that Might
Makes Right.
Brute force is behind the law of slavery to
which human beings have never submitted. Today
humanity's greatest asset is a modern
international working class which is making
headway to realize its striving for peace, freedom
and democracy. This modern working class requires
an organized political force constituted as a
Party such as ours, whose deed is its word. Such a
Party provides the organization the working class
needs to find its bearings so that it can sort out
the problems humankind faces in a manner which
favours it, not the rich who have usurped power by
force.
During this overall period of retrogression in
which terrible pressure is put on people to
succumb to everything which is negative in the
society, our Party calls on the working class,
women and youth to stand firm. All together we
must lay the claims on society which must be made.
The act of laying these claims constitutes the
human factor/social consciousness. It is the fight
of the working people to enunciate and lay the
claims they are entitled to make on society which
humanizes the social and natural environment and
brings forward the modern democratic personality.
The alternative to the status quo CPC(M-L) has
put forward is its program for political renewal
and a modern constitution, contained in its
program Stop Paying the Rich -- Increase
Funding for Social Programs. It is the
program for the working class to constitute the
nation and vest sovereignty in the people. What is
meant by "the will of the people" will find its
expression as the working class and people
elaborate their own decision-making process on a
modern basis. This requires affirming their right
to participate in arriving at decisions and
implementing them.
This will settle scores with the institutions
which hypocritically say one thing and do another.
It will create a modern world which belongs to
those whose deeds are their word. Finally
Canadians will be able to proudly say that
Canada's deed is also its word.
- Margaret Villamizar -
A stand that has characterized the work of
CPC(M-L) right from the beginning rejects the
notion of being anyone's agent or dependant. This
has always set CPC(M-L) apart from parties that
would change their stands according to how the
wind would blow in other countries they considered
to be their models. This outlook of CPC(M-L) was
embodied in the slogan "We Are Our Own Models,"
adopted when a foreign party tried to dictate to
the Party who it would accept as a representative
in exchanges between the two parties. At that time
it was said that the endorsement of this foreign
party would determine if we were real
Marxist-Leninists or not. CPC(M-L) responded by
stepping up its own work to organize the Party and
the class and clearly stated that it is the
recognition of the working class when it joins the
work that determines the legitimacy of the Party,
not foreign recognition.
 The stand of
the Party was set originally when it adopted the
Necessity for Change (NfC) analysis. NfC is based
on the demand that everyone must stand on their
own feet by participating in arriving at decisions
and implementing them. This is the thread running
through its work in different periods leading to
the Party's championing and elaboration of
Contemporary Marxist-Leninist Thought which gives
it its red spine. It was this revolutionary
outlook that led Hardial Bains to declare with
great foresight in 1984-85 that no individual,
collective or social force could act in the old
way but had to find their bearings in the new
conditions of the retreat of revolution. It gave
rise to the initiative to create the Renewal Party
in 1993. It is brought out in
the work of the Historic Initiative to lay the
foundations for a mass communist party and
the book Modern Communism, as well as in
the work of the Youth Organizing Project (YOP)
spearheaded by Comrade Bains in 1996, and its
methods of work: Learning Together, Working
As a Collective and Taking Up Social
Responsibility -- subsequently adopted by
the Party itself. The Report on the Work of the
Central Committee to the Party's Seventh Congress,
titled The Thinking Canadian, is a
passionate advocate of this principle. In fact,
this principle is the essence of the Party's
program for democratic renewal, further developed
in the recent period by calling on Canadians to
speak for themselves, in their own name and to Empower
Yourself Now!
Today the Party gives priority to the work to
highlight working people speaking in their own
name on matters of concern to the society so that
they lay the claims which they must in defense of
the rights of all. It is the essence of the work
to bring forward the new democratic personality
which puts decision-making in the hands of the
broad masses of the people, not ruling elites.
Reflections
I have been with the Party and The
Internationalists for over 52 years. I recall as a
student in Ontario in the '60s I was sympathetic
to the civil rights movement in the United States
and opposed to the Vietnam War and the military
draft the youth in the U.S. were subject to.
Discussion and questioning of these developments
swirled everywhere. But little of it concerned
Canada and our life.
This changed dramatically for me as an individual
and for my fellow students with the visit to the
University of Guelph in the summer of 1968 of a
contingent from The Internationalists that
had been reorganized in Montreal. They set the
campus ablaze with discussion of the role of U.S.
imperialist culture in Canada and the manner in
which it blocked people from organizing on a
conscious basis to bring about change. The
discussion went on for more than 24 continuous
hours with heated exchanges, debates and views.
I was out of town with a summer construction job
but as I landed back in town my circles were abuzz
and others had joined in to keep the discussion
going. I was introduced to students at the
University of Waterloo where I attended who
organized campus literature tables and discussions
around the Marxist-Leninist classics and
especially The Necessity for Change
pamphlet.
It was the beginning of two years of dizzying
developments that included the formation of the
Canadian Student Movement and a student conference
in Montreal in December 1968, a particularly
freezing winter where students from Ireland,
England, the U.S., India and South Africa joined
students from Quebec, Ontario, BC, the prairies
and the Maritimes, to exchange views and
experiences in discussions led by Hardial Bains.
This event was followed by the opening of a
revolutionary bookstore in Toronto on Gerrard
Street; the Conference of Anti-Imperialist Youth
in Regina in May 1969; the Vancouver Conference
held in Vancouver in 1969 and my deployment as
part of a contingent of Canadian revolutionary
youth working in industry and participating in
developing and strengthening of the revolutionary
organs for working class propaganda according to
my abilities in southern Ontario. After all this
activity, we founded the Party in Montreal in
March 1970.
All of this was possible thanks to the guidance
of The Internationalists who worked to
found the Party and the workers, students and
youth who answered the call.
The 50 years of work the Party has carried in
very difficult circumstances is a testament to the
tenacity of the comrades at all levels in the
setting of the tasks and the work necessary to
move forward. It is indeed an occasion to
celebrate our collective work for people's
empowerment.
Discussion at Necessity for Change Conference,
London, August 1967.
As a young woman activist in the 1960s, along
with so many others, I was looking for a way to
change the situation: to address the injustices
faced by women, workers, and students; to end the
wars of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia and
Latin America; to create a better world. We
organized the Students for a Democratic
University, the Vancouver Liberation Front, the
Red Collective, the Partisan Organization. Some of
us organized unions to improve working conditions
and women's liberation organizations to fight for
the emancipation of women. We kept looking for the
way to make a fundamental breakthrough. And, for
me, it wasn't until I met Hardial Bains and many
of us began to learn about the Party's work and
aspirations; its commitment to seeking truth from
facts, that understanding required an act of
conscious participation, an act of finding out.
And, as the Party has done at each important
juncture since, it opened a path for us, for the
Unity of Marxist-Leninists which brought activists
together, strengthened the movement and captured
the strivings of many youth, students and workers.
It is this capacity to provide theoretical and
practical leadership that has put the Party in the
forefront of the progressive movement; and that
continues to open the path at every stage to
create the space for the working class and people
to not only have their voices heard, but, through
their own program and initiative, to create a
world that truly meets the needs and aspirations
of its members.
The political excitement in Montreal in the
summer of 1968 was palpable. Every week
demonstrations, meetings and discussions raged on
the issue of national liberation for Quebec. The
world was in flux. Myself from Toronto and my
close friend from Chicoutimi went to as many of
the actions as possible when we were not working
at our summer jobs. He was a student at the
Université de Montréal on the other side of the
mountain while I was at Sir George Williams
University in the downtown. We had met during the
transit strike in 1967 when he picked me up on his
motorcycle while I was hitchhiking and we had become great
friends.
A poster caught my attention for an August
seminar at Sir George organized by The
Internationalists. We decided to attend, and
my goodness did that ever make a change in our
lives that neither one of us anticipated. The main
speaker Hardial Bains spoke with such clarity and
conviction we joined with others after the speech
to speak to him personally. He enquired as to our
activities and expressed an interest to meet again
to exchange views.
We met a few days later and told him that Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau was coming to Montreal and
activists were busy organizing to denounce his
strident opposition to Quebec independence.
Hardial said that a contingent from The
Internationalists would be there and asked
if we were going as an organized force. We said
with some embarrassment that we were not organized
as yet but were interested in doing so. He
suggested that we should put our views on the
issue of national liberation into the form of a
leaflet for distribution and discussion. He
mentioned that the motion and political life in
Quebec was what drew him to Montreal earlier in
the year as the place to reorganize The
Internationalists as a Marxist-Leninist
youth and student movement. He said one photograph
in the imperialist media in particular had caught
his eye showing Quebec youth militantly
confronting the RCMP.
We met again a few days before the Trudeau
demonstration and showed him a draft in English
and French of a leaflet entitled "Long Live the
National Liberation of Quebec!" To our surprise he
only made a few suggestions including one to at
least have a way for readers of the leaflet to
contact us. He then inquired how we were going to
print and pay for the leaflet. In our excitement
to put our thoughts down on paper, we had not even
thought of those details. He told us The
Internationalists had means to do so and
would assist us on that front. Hardial said we
should meet again after our action to sum up the
activity. We did so and soon began attending the
Marxist-Leninist discussions at the meeting room
on rue Jeanne Mance.
What followed was intense political activity that
saw The Internationalists
organize Les Intellectuels et Ouvriers Patriotes du Québec
(marxiste-léniniste) (IOPQ). Those who participated in the IOPQ
worked tirelessly to expand the influence of The Internationalists throughout Quebec.
They played a role in building a string of
bookstores across Montreal called Les Livres et
périodiques progressistes, attended the Regina and
Vancouver youth and student Conferences, discussed
in detail the necessity for the formation of the
Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and
in sum played a positive role in the founding of
the Party on March 31, 1970.
All glory to Hardial Bains and The
Internationalists for mobilizing the Quebec
youth to participate in such a historic
development and opening a path forward!
Long live the Communist Party of Canada
(Marxist-Leninist)!
It was my good fortune to be at UBC in the early
sixties and encounter The Internationalists
a year after its formation in 1963. The discussions, academic
symposiums, the concrete programs of action
associated with that period of upsurge of youth
throughout North America were, on the West Coast,
inspired and given direction by this fledgling
movement.
Comrade
Bains, with an incredible energy and dedication, was immersed in the
practical politics of UBC as many, many students were drawn into
political work. The aim of The Internationalists was profoundly simple: "Create an academic atmosphere on the campus."
Hardial Bains in front of International
House at the University of British
Columbia, 1962. The meeting to found The
Internationalists took place here
March 13, 1963.
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Coming from an upper middle-class background
where Cold War propaganda and media spin on the
War in Vietnam was simply how we saw the world, The
Internationalists provided researched
exposures of the Great American Dream. Our own
Party has written about this early period and the
profound transformational impact of those early
years which led to the formation of a
revolutionary movement and in 1970 the formation
of a party of a new type.
There were mass discussions in front of the UBC
library, itself an iconic image on the old campus,
where this young microbiology graduate student,
Hardial Bains, would soapbox to lunch hour crowds
from a few dozen and often several hundred. This
type of gathering was known as a teach-in in the
USA coming out of the Berkeley protests and direct
action around the War in Vietnam and racism in the
southern USA.
In those early years we called these "mass
democracy meetings." These were not scripted
lectures as were the classes on seemingly
unconnected subjects. Rather, it was real exchange
of ideas where the most coherent and logical
explanations held sway.
This was the embryo of the modern communist
movement in Canada. It challenged all old dogma,
all those whose "Marxist" and "leftist" politics
were on some dusty academic shelf, or rooted in a
kind of mindless activism. It was based on our
real-life experience as students subject to the
confines of an education system which reinforced
the status quo.
This early quality, breaking with the old, has
characterized the entire life of CPC(M-L) and
explains how our Party has survived so many
challenges and turning points over more than half
a century.
Fidelity to truth, integrity of organization, and
setting a program consistent with the needs of the
people at every stage of development, and having
all members and activists as conscious organizers,
breaking down the "you lead -- I'll follow"
tendency which gives rise to various forms of
bureaucracy. Right from day one, young men and
women of all origins worked on an equal footing.
As the world adjusts to a global pandemic and
economic dislocation unprecedented since the 1929
crash, we are entering a period where old
sclerotic political arrangements are patently
failing. "Who decides" has become a real visible
problem. The incapacity of the old arrangements is
not someone's "opinion," it has become a palpable
objective feature of the mass consciousness.
Constant disinformation by the Anglo-American
mainstream media is being challenged as more and
more people look to social media and the internet
for news and analysis.
Very serious questions about the basis of the
economy are being asked. For example, how do you
shut down production while opening the gates to
massive spending? Who really benefits from these
multi-billion and trillion-dollar announcements?
How can you print paper money which is not
grounded in economic activity? There has been
little discussion on the negative effects of
massive "stimulus packages," or on how a currency
is affected when the money supply goes in a
direction opposite to production? Are we
witnessing an unprecedented bailout in the manner
of Goldman-Sachs but disguised as a handout to
every laid off worker?
More than ever, the need for a new direction in
the economy is becoming one of the burning issues
of this period. On the 50th Anniversary of the founding of CPC(M-L),
it is timely to declare that there is such a party
which addresses these central concerns.
Let us march forward together, emerge from this
all-sided crisis and create a society which is
rational, planned, opposed to the scourge of war
and gunboat diplomacy, and which respects all
countries, all peoples, and fights for the good of
humanity!
Long live CPC(M-L)!
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