A New
Year Gets Underway Best Wishes for Success in 2021
On the occasion of the New
Year, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) salutes all
those the world over who have played such a crucial role in 2020 by
showing through their deeds that our security lies in the fight to
affirm the rights of all. First and foremost the
Party sends warm New Year's greetings to all its members and
supporters. It expresses its profound appreciation of all the efforts
made to advance its nation-building project, whose 25th anniversary we
marked in 2020 along with the 50th anniversary of the Party's founding.
Many initiatives were taken in the past year to consolidate CPC(M-L)'s
Historic Initiative in line with the decisions of the Party's 8th
Congress, with encouraging results. The work to publish TML
Weekly and its supplements and Workers' Forum
to encourage all those on the front lines of the fight to affirm the
rights of all has been truly exceptional. In the words of one reader:
"Best Wishes in 2021 to the Party for all your actions and clarity in
the past, may it continue and thrive in the 'New' Year!" CPC(M-L)
also greets Canada's working class and people who, in the past year,
have brought great honour to themselves. They have proven their mettle
once again, in the conditions of the pandemic, against injustices of
all kinds and in support of those fighting for peace, justice and
democracy both at home and abroad. Canadian working people are giving
collective expression to their claims on society and against every act
of injustice, including within the pandemic conditions. It is thanks to
them that their own safety and that of their fellow workers is
defended. To their great honour, they have persisted in upholding the
dignity of labour by laying claim to what belongs to them by right.
Taking the high road, they are not only defending the health, safety
and well-being of the people within their immediate purview but
collectively addressing how to confront the attacks of the rulers who
persist in their anti-social wrecking and claim they have a mandate to
do so. The pandemic has served to make Canadians
aware of the economy and the role of the workers in production.
Canadians have also become more aware of how the economy is managed in
Canada, the disastrous consequences of the pay-the-rich course which
has been pursued by one party government after another at both the
federal and provincial levels since the onset of neo-liberalism in the
mid-1980s. Thanks to the working people, many collectives have been
activated to provide solutions to the myriad difficulties which exist
due to the wrecking of all hitherto known arrangements by the ruling
class. It is clear that so long as the direction set by the ruling
regime for the economy and all aspects of life is to preserve the
man-eating capitalist system and the so-called liberal democratic
institutions which are defunct, the destruction of the social and
natural environment and every manner of incoherence will continue, in
the service of narrow private interests. Havoc will continue to reign,
causing more and more damage. Globalization under
the control of the financial oligarchy is a disaster with surging
poverty, homelessness, unemployment, ruination of nature and threats of
world war increasing with every passing day. The working class has the
numbers and capability to forge a new direction to save humanity from
the abyss into which the ruling elite, in its obsession to pay the
rich, is plunging the human species and Mother Earth. Knowing
the difficulties they face, we salute all the workers who produce and
deliver the goods and services we require, most of whom are putting
their health and very lives on the line without proper cooperation from
either their employers or the governments at every level whose focus is
to pay the rich, not look after the people. We
condemn the federal government for responding in the most self-serving
manner to the pandemic. Borrowing money from private sources, it calls
these private funds "public funds," which it then doles out primarily
to narrow private interests claiming they, not the working people, are
crucial to the economy. Its demand that vulnerable workers and students
pay back thousands of dollars that they received through the Canada
Emergency Response Benefit and other payments, under the pretext that
they did not qualify according to rules they were never told existed,
is unconscionable. How should those who have no money pay it back?
We express our profound admiration for the health care
professionals and workers who have steadfastly defended the population
against contagion within the most difficult conditions caused by the
years of anti-social cutbacks to the health care system and its
privatization. We express our deepest sympathies to the families of all
those who have fallen victim to the coronavirus due to the failure of
governments to properly fund a public health care system which upholds
the highest standards of care and quality. Our
hearts go out to the families of those who have lost their lives as
residents and in the line of duty in long-term care and seniors' homes.
No one should suffer the brutality of the anti-human pay-the-rich
schemes which have created for-profit seniors' care, leaving them and
those who care for them abandoned, at the mercy of an avoidable fate.
We salute the teachers and staff of our schools, child care
centres, colleges and universities who are carrying out their duties in
untenable conditions. Our best wishes to all the children, students and
parents who are forced to fend for themselves in conditions of life
that governments make sure are out of their control. We
salute the workers and people from all walks of life who have come
forward to protect and advocate for migrant workers, migrant students,
refugee claimants and vulnerable recent immigrants, as well as those
who are defending the rights of the homeless and those in need of
shelter and protection. On the occasion of the New
Year, CPC(M-L) salutes the Indigenous peoples whose fight to put an end
to colonial injustice and for the rights which belong to them by virtue
of their being is at the heart of solving the problems of Canada's
anachronistic constitution, democracy and institutions. So too the
efforts of the people of every province and in Quebec to end the
anti-social offensive and resolve the crisis in the people's favour
encourage everyone to persist in their striving to humanize the natural
and social environment. In this regard, the youth make everyone
especially proud. All of it underscores the fact that the working class
and people are able to lead the society to sort out the problems it
faces. We hail the courageous resistance struggle
and fight for rights of the working class and people in the United
States. Their fight for justice against police impunity and for
equality has grown in scope and intensity over the past year, winning
the support of democratic forces around the world, including the
Canadian people, with whom they share weal and woe. Now, as evictions
soar in the United States and massive unemployment in the wake of the
pandemic means no money for food and rent, the fight the people are
waging to bring in new arrangements is bound to open a path to progress.
We send greetings and reaffirm our anti-imperialist solidarity
with the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean
fighting for their rights. Their struggles for justice and to be the
masters of their own destiny continue unabated and are escalating even
as the terrible conditions of an uncontrolled pandemic and its
attendant crises grip their societies, exacerbating the already
profound injustices of everyday life. On this occasion, the eyes of the
world are on the farmers and peoples of India fighting to repeal farm
laws designed to dispossess them in favour of narrow private interests.
In their hundreds of millions the peoples of India and south Asia are
demanding justice and constitutional arrangements which favour them.
Our red salute to the people of Kashmir and all the peoples affirming
their right to be. We salute the peoples of West
Asia who persist in fighting for their sovereignty and right to be,
facing the non-stop aggression of U.S. imperialism and its proxies,
including the Israeli Zionists in Palestine, Syria, Iran and Yemen. Our
stand is also with the peoples of Africa where former colonial powers,
in their desire to continue plundering natural resources and control
spheres of influence, are committing aggression against the peoples of
their former colonies, and the people are striving to be the sovereign
decision-makers of their nations. This is the case in Mali, the Ivory
Coast and elsewhere, including the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic
whose people are actively resisting the attempt of Morocco, backed by
France, to reoccupy their country by force of arms. Congratulations
to the organized people of Venezuela and Bolivia who won important
electoral victories in 2020, delivering a sharp rebuke to U.S.
imperialism and its appeasers, including Canada, intent on forcing
regime change in their countries and preventing the people from
expressing their democratic will. We pledge to do our utmost to ensure
that Latin America and the Caribbean are a zone of peace and that
Canada cannot be used as a base for undermining the peoples' striving
for peace, democracy and freedom. January 1 marks
the 217th anniversary of the 1804 Haitian Revolution which overthrew
both slavery and colonial rule. The revolutionaries led by Toussaint
L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines fought off successive European
powers -- the French, Spanish and British -- to proudly establish their
independent republic. Haiti was the first country in the world to
define citizenship rights on a modern basis, namely that they belong to
people by virtue of their being human as members of a body politic.
This was a decisive break from the conception of rights of the colonial
powers based on the ownership of property and a system of privileges,
which the U.S. imperialists and others continue to impose today.
Haiti's outstanding achievement continues to have great relevance for
the peoples of the world to this day as they fight for new arrangements
that affirm rights on a modern basis. On January 1
we also extend warm greetings to all our fraternal parties, especially
at this time to the Communist Party of Cuba and its first secretary,
General Raul Castro, as well as to the Cuban people and their president
Miguel Díaz-Canel, and congratulate them on the occasion of
the 62nd anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. We pledge to do our
utmost to contribute to defeating the criminal U.S. blockade and
attacks of other kinds that the U.S. has been intensifying in the vain
hope of bringing revolutionary Cuba to its knees. Meanwhile Cuba's
prestige is soaring to new heights for resisting the brutal U.S.
blockade and maintaining its independence and socialist project. The
exemplary life-saving work of its Henry Reeve International Medical
Brigade in more than 39 countries around the world has earned the
Brigade a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. The work of
Cuba's scientists is also exemplary. They have already come up with
four candidate vaccines as part of Cuba's efforts to help protect
humanity against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We send
greetings as well to the Communist Party of Vietnam and best wishes for
the successful holding of its 13th National Congress that will take
place in January 2021. The government and people of Vietnam are to be
congratulated for the remarkable success they have achieved in keeping
the pandemic at bay in their country, giving rise to their own vaccine
on a self-reliant basis. With the mobilization and active participation
of the entire population, as of December 30, Vietnam has registered
only 1,456 total cases and 35 total deaths due to COVID-19 -- 15 cases
and 0.4 deaths per one million population -- one of the best records in
the world. So too we congratulate the people of the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea and their leadership for their
achievements in raising the people's well-being despite a brutal
sanctions regime, attempts at regime change and a world pandemic. We
wish the Workers' Party of Korea and its leadership every success in
their 8th Congress to be held in the New Year. We
also wish to express our confidence in the fight of the peoples of
Europe and Oceania whose efforts to affirm the rights of all stand
second to none.  Nobody is sad to
see the year 2020 over. It will go on record for the uncertain
conditions which overtook the lives of the peoples of the world as a
result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a matter of great pride for
Canadians, Quebeckers and the Indigenous peoples to have faced the
pandemic in a manner which defends the rights of all. They have learned
a great deal from their experience which is worth appreciating as we
ring out the old year and ring in a new year. A crucial lesson is to
not put our lives on hold as a result of circumstances considered to be
exceptional.
This is a very particular historical
juncture where all the old forms of governance no longer exist and new
ones have not come into being. Whatever constituted a public authority
has been replaced by the destructive stranglehold and dictate of narrow
private interests. Far from putting our lives on hold and hoping the
old will return in due course, we must live our lives to the fullest
under all conditions and circumstances. Life is the object of our
living and what we achieve by it. It is ours for the taking. Best Wishes in the New Year! Stay Safe! Central
Committee
Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)
This
article was published in
Volume
51 Number 1 - January 3, 2021
Article Link:
Best
Wishes for Success in 2021
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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