New Year’s Message of CPC(M-L)

In 2025 Empower the People! Make Way for Renewal!

On the occasion of the New Year 2025, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) sends its militant revolutionary greetings to all its members, sympathizers and fellow-travellers. We wish all working people, young people and all those fighting for their rights and the rights of all success in their endeavours in the coming year.

We express our unwavering support for the Palestinian Resistance Movements and all those fighting all over the world for peace, freedom and democracy. We salute the heroic deeds of the Palestinian, Lebanese and Yemeni resistance fighters and their supporters, and those in the United States, Canada and all the countries of the world who have engaged in decisive actions which make a difference because they do not give free rein to the forces of reaction or vacillating forces. They strengthen the organized resistance, and build confidence and conviction.

Our thoughts are filled with the fight and courage of the peoples of Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, India and all the countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Oceania, many of whom have been able to stand their ground this year and many are making significant headway.

With profound sorrow we witness what is taking place in Sudan and all the countries where, as a result of the interference of the U.S./NATO forces, tragedies are taking place, including in Ukraine.

On the occasion of the New Year, our hearts go out to the families of all the martyrs and to all those whose lives are at the mercy of rulers who show no mercy.

The Year 2024

In 2024, the world witnessed the utter depravity of those who presently control the decision-making power in the United States and the countries which comprise its Genocide Coalition including Canada. The world has witnessed what it means when they resort to extreme violence and act with total impunity because they cannot achieve their aims in any other way. The world has witnessed an international system which is sclerotic and has no way to hold the criminals to account.

In 2024, the world also witnessed elections held in what are called the liberal democratic countries. The electoral process which presents candidates for election who are not chosen by the people and requires lots of money to pay private marketing firms to promote candidates and what they call “the issues,” confirms that the representational form of rule has had its day. The demand to renew the political processes and institutions, includes the renewal of electoral regimes which bring cartel parties to power. It involves taking measures which ensure that working people can choose the candidates they want elected and set their agenda, without which the Charter right to elect and be elected is meaningless.

In all these countries, the executive powers of the state have been taken over by narrow private interests. They govern by using the police powers of the state for their interests with impunity. Now, in the name of taking “innovative measures” to get out of the crises in which the liberal democratic institutions are mired where factional in-fighting makes it nigh impossible to take decisions, proposals are appearing for exceptional measures where the legislatures and parliaments are dispensed with altogether.

Sorry State of Canadian and U.S. Democracy

There is little incentive to find anything positive to say about the Canadian democracy as the year 2024 ends and prospects for 2025 are becoming reality. On January 20, in the United States, a new government of police powers comes into being when Donald Trump assumes the presidency. Impunity, extreme violence, incoherence and irrationality are to be expected on all fronts, at home and abroad.

While in 2024, the U.S. proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the current way elections are conducted is intolerable, the purpose of the representational form of government which brings cartel parties and individuals which represent narrow private interests to power is also finished. The rulers claim that the system of representation guarantees the peaceful transition of power from one president or government of the rich to the next. “Peaceful transition” makes absolutely no sense when that power is anything but peaceful, At the same time, the myth is promoted that the current representational system is superior and indispensable because it ensures the rulers have a “mandate” from the people. The fact is that this system of representation blocks the people from being able to have any say.

The aim of elections to keep the rich in power and the people out has so fully been exposed that everywhere people are looking for alternatives. They are organizing ways to participate and challenge the existing undemocratic set up, such as the Longest Ballot Project in Canada. The coming year will see more efforts to make way for renewal by countering the existing setup and raising the level of political discussion.

The United States has now officially regressed from what various pundits described two years ago as an “anocracy” – which is somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state — to an autocratic state. Trump has the responsibility, like Biden and Obama before him, to further break the bounds of the Constitution and to do so by increasing impunity and police powers of the executive. This will no doubt include use of the military inside the country, weakening authority of the states and more generally providing conditions for military rule.

As for the state of affairs in Canada, the situation is worse than pitiful. After marching in lockstep with the U.S. Department of State, Pentagon and intelligence agencies for so many years, Canada is seen to be a paltry appendage of them all. A pathetic carcass of its former self, Canada cannot find a champion from the ranks of those who have seized positions of power and privilege. Those that the establishment declare to be leaders cannot uphold a single cause worthy of the people of this country and what they stand for.

The New Year

As we enter the New Year, events are taking place fast and furious. It is important for the working class and people to keep their bearings and not get swept up by the narratives which are also coming fast and furious from both left and right. These narratives are comprised of the repetition of phrases and sound bites which fit this or that ideological viewpoint, bias or prejudice. Electioneering about a “carbon tax election” or nonsense about serving the middle class accompany the mudslinging in the parliament. Parliamentary committees hear self-serving incoherent testimonies which bring shame to the cartel parties with seats in the House of Commons. They are an embarrassment to anyone with any integrity whatsoever, including one or two of the academics, experts and even some of the politicians.

According to the soap opera accounts reported by the media and their cynical rendering, “politics will be politics” – meaning this destruction of political discourse is all normal.

As more police powers in the service of narrow private interests take over decision-making at every level, what is called the democratic process which brings the cartel parties to power and the parliamentary procedures and what have been understood to be ministerial responsibilities, lie in tatters. The liberal democratic apparatus has lost the fig leaves which have been covering up its essentially anti-democratic aim of preserving the rule of the rich.

It is hard to find someone who believes in the elections which are held. Nobody believes there is equality in Canada. Conflict of interest rules are ridiculous and meaningless given the revolving door between private industries, banks, consulting firms and government ministries while the owners of private facilities are put in charge of the systems of health care and education.

The integrity of any of the liberal democratic institutions and the system of representation has crumbled before our eyes. Even Members of Parliament agree with this, but then tell us the system can be repaired through elections!

What the people see is that the failing state structures have brought all the flotsam and jetsam of the society to the surface, and it is swirling around mindlessly. Those in positions of power and privilege are grabbing, looting, speaking nonsense and breaking all bounds of decency. The likes of Mark Carney in Canada and Elon Musk in the U.S. are promoted as leading the way. The likes of Donald Trump are literally portrayed as the voice of reason to sort everything out – as is, presumably, Canada’s own Chrystia Freeland!

How to not get caught in the traps of all the stories, presented as analyses, is a feat in itself. This is the case whether we consider the developments in Syria or in Canada’s Arctic or the tempest in a tea-pot which has broken out in Ottawa over who should be the next Prime Minister and when elections will be called (so that “Canadians can decide” who they want to rule them, no less!). Traps are laid when we are supposed to take this or that side when it comes to Trump’s threats on the matter of tariffs or increasing border security or how many international students it is appropriate to throw out of the country after they and their families have sacrificed everything to pay for their education.

Fraud is what we see in all matters of concern to the polity. The aim of the fraud and disinformation about what is at stake is to deprive the forces waging resistance struggles of initiative. It must not pass!

There is no sense gathering all the stories of the antics of the rich and their corrupt retinues. There is no sense in stringing them together in the hopes they will provide explanations or coherence, let alone a way forward. The people do well when they establish their own reference points which enable them to make judgments which serve their interests. Only in this way can they avoid the false choice – between falling into all the rabbit holes and traps the ruling circles create as they flail around not knowing what to do and dropping out.

The body politic is comprised of all citizens and residents. Its affairs are given importance when the agenda is set to make way for the democratic renewal of the political process and a modern constitution. A modern constitution must settle scores with Covenant Thesis which defines the Canadian state. Preserving the state, its governing institutions and electoral processes, all based on Covenant Thesis, deprives the people of power. This is the raison d’état of the Canadian state in the first place. Current arrangements guarantee that the state takes anti-people measures, quells opposition and that it is safeguarded by police powers which includes the courts which also reach verdicts based on what it takes to defend the anti-people state.

The polity is made up of all the peoples of the country, not just the rich and powerful. The Constitution and democratic institutions do not vest sovereignty in the people. For a people’s democracy, defending the supreme power imposed from above over which the people exercise no control is not an option.

A Guide to Action as We Enter the New Year

Let the words, spirit and insight of the young Palestinian woman who spoke at the demonstration held in Ottawa on December 28 accompany us into the New Year. Referring to the ongoing harassment, intimidation, and brutality by the City of Ottawa and the Ottawa Police, she ended by saying: “While our representatives continue to ignore us, while our city tries to silence our movement, our people are still being murdered. So, this New Year, we recommit ourselves to the cause, to continue showing up, no matter what, for Palestine, until the end of the genocide, until the end of the occupation and until total liberation from the river to the sea!”

The trauma of the genocide, or the wars of aggression and destruction, of the consequences of the climate crisis and mass migrations impacts us all. So does the imminent takeover of the presidency in the United States by Donald Trump. The distress caused by the impunity of the U.S./Zionist genocide, and their Genocide Coalition that includes Canada, is hard to bear. The way to deal with these developments in 2025 is to build on the red line against genocide, aggression, war and the use of violence to solve problems. It involves stepping up the organizing work to make way for democratic renewal, to change the electoral process that brings cartel parties to form governments that permit and fund genocide.

By speaking in our own name, developing mass democratic forms to involve people in setting an agenda of their own, a way forward emerges. When the workers, women and youth themselves establish a vantage point of their own, when they reject reacting to the self-serving agenda of the ruling elites without advancing their own cause, nine-tenths of the task to be achieved in the coming year will have been accomplished!

Best Wishes for Success in 2025!

450,000 people in Istanbul demonstrate in solidarity with Palestine, January 1, 2025, expressing the sentiment of the peoples of the world.