Part 2 of Sorting Through the Undead: An overview of the (self-proclaimed) communist formations in Canada, a 4-part series by Rob L.R. Part 1. Part 3. Part 4.

After the (ol’)CPC’ categorically sealed its fate with its support of Khrushchev’s revisionist coup in 1956, it took a decade or so for a new revolutionary party-building movement to arise and develop.

1960’s Radicalism & the Cultural Revolution

The 1960’s was a period defined by economic instability, social struggles and political turmoil, both internationally and within the State of Canada. These turbulent conditions were met with a corresponding jump in mass ideology. There was a marked spike in working-class consciousness, progressive revolutionary nationalism, and mass militancy. Disappointed (to say the least) by the (ol’)CPC’s revisionism, a second party-building movement began to arise. It was surrounded by and enmeshed within resurging national-liberatory movements for Indigenous self-determination, Black Power, and Québec nationhood, alongside radical-democratic struggles for feminism, LGBTI+ rights, peace, nuclear disarmament, and environmental sustainability.

By the latter part of the decade, a large portion of the world’s truly revolutionary thought and actions were inspired by the People’s Republic of China and its Cultural Revolution that went into full swing in ’66. Hundreds of millions of workers, soldiers and revolutionary cadre in China were encouraged, particularly by Chairman Mao Zedong, to self-organize in order to shake up the bureaucracy, combat capitalist corruption, and struggle against revisionism within the CP of China and within Chinese society at large. The Cultural Revolution was an all-sided, self-critical attempt to weaken capitalist influences and develop socialist construction. As it was the world’s first experiment of its kind, it ran into problems and went astray to some extent, but was overall successful in involving the masses in revolutionary struggle and in holding back capitalist restoration in China for some time. It supercharged proletarian revolutionary activity internationally and intensified the anti-revisionist developments within the revolutionary movement in Canada.

Mass ideology and culture advanced rapidly as the world flexed and shifted in turbulent class struggle. 100,000 pages could be written about the years 1966-1970. The Québec nationalist movement grew stronger and more restless; the militant Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) surged in popularity;¹ the “charismatic”, Montréal-born Trudeau Sr. (soon-to-be the country’s chief neoliberal-fascist) was elected in a wave of manufactured “Trudeaumania”; the Canadian bourgeoisie attempted to quell revolt through the introduction of Canada’s “great” Medicare system; Indigenous peoples created militant countrywide organizations and led a series of blockades and roadblocks against imperial and colonial maneuvers; the openly sovereigntist and socialistic Parti Québécois was created; Black and Francophone students led a number of university occupations to fight discriminatory policies and practices; Trudeau and co. published the infamous “White Paper” (which openly advocated for the complete assimilation of Indigenous peoples) leading to mass protest and revolt; the FLQ bombings and propaganda campaigns intensified; Trudeau brought down martial law through the “War Measures” Act (making it the third time it was used and first time it was enacted during peace time). The revolution seemed to close in while simultaneously being pushed away.²

The Maoist Turmoil of the ’70’s

By the mid 1970’s, Canada’s second party-building movement had coalesced into three main anti-revisionist communist formations:

1. The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), CPC(M-L);
2. En Lutte! (In Struggle!);
3. and the Canadian Communist League (Marxist-Leninist), i.e. “the League”.

The CPC(M-L) was the first to form, smallest and least relevant of the three. It’s creation was led by some opportunistic, globetrotting academic named Hardinal Bains. He had left the (ol’)CPC in the mid-’60’s before setting up some radical student study groups in Vancouver and elsewhere. Bains and his followers carried on in a confused and disconnected way until a top-down decision was made to formalize as the CPC(M-L) in March 1970.³

In Struggle! came into being a few years later. It began as a newspaper in 1972 before consolidating as an all-sided revolutionary organization in ’74.⁴ Many of its members, including its general secretary Charles Gagnon, had come out of the Front de libération du Québec milieu.⁵

The League formed in the fall of 1975 through the amalgamation of a few Montréal revolutionary groups. Comprised mostly of students, it went on to become the largest pre-eminent revolutionary group in Québec throughout the latter 1970’s. The League attempted to become cross-country but fundamentally remained based and concentrated in Montréal.

Initially, these groups were alike in their youthful energy and revolutionary fervour, their renunciation of the (old) Communist Party of Canada as wholly revisionist, and their shared admiration of Chairman Mao. They formed workplace and union cells, organized and led (more or less) militant protests, contributed to revolutionary culture and theory in Canada, and gained somewhat of a mass following, especially among students, academics and young people. Soon the self-proclaimed anti-revisionist, pro-Mao communist groups collectively had more members than the ol’ revisionist CPC!

Yet early on cracks had begun to form. In Struggle! and the League remained cordial with each other but quickly sidelined the CPC(M-L). They sited the CPC(M-L)’s opportunistic behaviour and weird (often vague and changing) politics. For example, the Bainzites (as they were mockingly called) insisted that Canada was a colony of America and thus communists should team up with “our” capitalists to fight for “independence” (?), among other ridiculous non-communistic conceptions. Thus CPC(M-L)ers were ignored and even fought, while In Struggle! and the League continued to attempt to unify with each other. Through a series of Conferences of Canadian Marxist-Leninists, smaller revolutionary groups were mostly absorbed into either In Struggle! or the League, while a secondary beef between the two orgs metastasized and grew.⁶

Additionally, negative ideological tendencies and leftovers from the history of our revolutionary movement permeated all three formations. These blunders and oversights included: a) an improper, idealist class analysis that led to an overestimation of the revolutionary potential of privileged workers and the middle classes, b) a misunderstanding of capitalist States and the relation between US imperialism and the Canadian bourgeoisie, leading to lesser-evilism and class capitulation, and c) an under-prioritization, misinterpretation, (or outright dismissal!) of proletarian feminism, Indigenous nationhood, and the revolutionary potential of LGBTI+ people, among other things.

1976: Coup and Capitalist Reversal in China!

Even when Mao began to display some revisionist tendencies near his end of life, the second party-building movement generally held firm to its support of him. But in 1976 Mao Zedong died and the socialist bloc and broader international situation took a turn for the worse.

Pro-Mao leaders within the CP of China, including Mao’s militant widow Jiang Qing, attempted to maintain control and continue China’s socialist development. But they were quickly overthrown in a counterrevolutionary coup! China fell under the control of the pro-western revisionist Deng Xiaopeng and his cronies. The new leadership halted the Cultural Revolution that had attempted to hold back such a coup, it cut back on socialist construction, set off down the capitalist road, and actually cozied up with US imperialism!

The capitalist-roaders in charge exchanged military-technical expertise with US agencies, and aligned with the US against the already-degrading and imperialistic USSR. They were right in pointing out the dangers of Soviet social-imperialism, but were wrong in alleging that it posed a greater threat than US imperialism. Then they were extremely wrong, in fact downright traitorous, in capitulating to a confused lesser-evilism by siding with (what was actually the worst of the two), US imperialism! Worse still, Deng and the other capitalist roaders claimed they were carrying on Mao’s legacy! The leading counterrevolutionary clique distorted Mao’s good ideas and amplified his worst ones, using Mao’s name to reverse his achievements (as they continue to do so today). The Chinese counterrevolutionary coup and its ramifications created shockwaves throughout the international communist movement, sending confused radicals and revolutionaries scattering in all sorts of directions.

Confusion and Downfall

In Canada, these new major international developments were interpreted very differently by the main anti-revisionist communist organizations, solidifying the bitter rivalry between them. The League unflinchingly and dogmatically supported the counterrevolutionary coup and its leader Deng, wishfully claiming that China was continuing down the socialist road. In Struggle! rightfully condemned the coup and Deng, seeking to uphold the revolutionary aspects of Mao, albeit in a rather confused, half-baked sort of way. Both viewed themselves as ideologically adhering to some sort of anti-revisionism Marxism-Leninism alongside some underdeveloped Mao Zedong Thought.

The CPC(M-L) however, responded to the capitalist reversal in China by rejecting Mao and Maoism outright. Bains and his followers began to adhere to Enver Hoxha’s ideas in regard to Mao. Not only did the Albanian partisan and communist leader (correctly) assert that China was going down a capitalist road, but also (incorrectly) posited that the People’s Republic of China had always been a bourgeois-nationalist, revisionist State. Hoxha, who had once held Mao in high regard (Albania had even launched its own Cultural Revolution inspired by China’s), now rejected all of Mao’s theoretical and practical contributions. He went so far as to claim that Mao was never even a Marxist and that the Communist Party of China had never been communist!

This ideological confusion was amplified by the changing material and class conditions in Canada and the world. Rising shifts in the political and economic position of the Québécois national bourgeoisie and corresponding changes in the Québécois working class, a shift to globalization and neoliberal economic policies, and the new western imperialist collaboration with “socialist” China, among other things, created disunity and confusion within the revolutionary movement within Canada. It failed to advance its revolutionary theory and practice to changing conditions. While other sections of the international communist movement developed and adapted Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) to help explain and grapple with shifts in late 20^th-century capitalism-imperialism, comrades in Canada remained bogged down and theoretically behind.⁷

Within the hectic international environment generated by Deng’s coup and the capitalist reversal in China, Canada’s anti-revisionist groups continued to spiral. The ideological confusion exacerbated organizational and practical contradictions within the League and In Struggle!, leading to them both being disbanded by the end of 1982. They had both failed to fully grasp or develop anti-revisionism Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought into concretized MLM. They had failed to integrate with and organize the working and dispossessed masses. In both theory and practice they had tunnel vision, choosing to idealistically focus almost exclusively on day-to-day labour struggles. They both adapted positions on the national and colonial question that weren’t fully worked out, resulting in a general tendency for national-chauvinism in one form or another. Additionally, their dismissive rejection of proletarian feminism and LGBTI rights as a necessary and integral aspect of scientific socialism further contributed to their degradation and eventual disintegration, a problem that persists within our movement today.

1980’s to Present: Decline and Zombification

The CPC(M-L) took incorrect positions on many of these questions as well and faced similar organizational problems, yet dragged on. Still led by its well-off founder and main theorist Hardinal Bains, the Party became firmly Hoxhaist and anti-Mao. This staunch, rigid support didn’t go unrecognized, with the CPC(M-L) going on to become the only Party in North America to establish formal ties with Hoxha’s Party of Labour of Albania.

Then Hoxha died in ’85. Shortly after, contradictions within the degenerated revisionist States of Europe and Asia exploded. The capitalists took advantage of the revisionist mess and political crises taking place in almost all of the socialist States at the time by launching political, economic, and even military assaults from within and without. This led to their final destruction one by one in quick succession. By 1991, what remained of the socialist bloc were a few small, politically revisionist or basically national-democratic States (Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos) and the rising social-imperialist China.

At this point, the dogmatic Hoxhaist line within the CPC(M-L) gave way to full neo-revisionism. Bains and his Party coped with the destruction of the USSR and co. by wholeheartedly upholding the remaining revisionist hangover-States, not only in anti-imperialist solidarity, but in an uncritical and idealizing way. Relatedly, Bains’ supporters became fully aligned behind the idea of a two-stage revolution in Canada, with a particular focus on what they saw as the current stage embodied by a struggle for “democratic renewal” (not socialism). The CPC(M-L), long the worst of Canada’s anti-revisionist revolutionary movement, had become a walking corpse, devoid of a revolutionary soul.

cpc’s the walking dead

Today the CPC(M-L) persists as a sort of benign undead formation. Its membership is comprised almost entirely of its old guard as well as a few well-meaning yet confused youths. In terms of international solidarity and fraternization, they actually have better relations with some foreign Parties (albeit revisionist ones) than the (old)CPC. They have a friendly connection with the Workers’ Party of Korea and maintain a pretty strong working relationship with the folks at the Cuban embassy in Ottawa. One of their more recent achievements has been their setting up and running of a decent publishing arm in collaboration with the remnant of Hoxha’s old Party in Albania, the November 8th Publishing House. (While the publishing house is pretty affordable and offers some good texts, it’s perhaps tired and somewhat lifeless).

Like the (ol’)CPC, the CPC(M-L) tends to overfocus on electorialism and trade-unionism. Every federal election the two revisionist Parties get about the same amount of votes (about 5 to 10 thousand). Yet the CPC(M-L) is infamous for bolstering its numbers by putting up “paper candidates” (candidates who’s names appear on the ballot but who do not actually campaign). CPC(M-L) members sometimes attempt to work their way onto school boards or into local office, and do in fact hold some positions in certain union locales (while having very little sway within the wider working-class movement).

Almost 20 years since his passing in 1997, Bains’ neo-revisionist line basically holds true to today. The CPC(M-L) is still advocating for “sovereignty”, bourgeois “democracy” and “renewal” (reforms) in what is an independent imperialist State. . . Suffice to say, decaying capitalist Canada is more than objectively ready for, and in fact in desperate need of, a transition to socialism. Something the CPC(M-L) refuses to acknowledge, instead catering to a petty-bourgeois ideal of slipping into a better, socialistic (but non-revolutionary) form of Canada through constitutional reforms and “renewal” (renew what? restore, revitalize what? we need revolution). . .

CPC(M-L)ers continue to crank out monthly, weekly and even daily papers. Yet, like their practice, their writings function mostly like an appendage of the labour movement, following it around instead of leading it ahead. They can be seen at most demonstrations, swinging between movementism (tailing the masses) and commandism (attempting to proclaim leadership), while waving their flags and reusing the same generalized slogan placards. Good for them!

But we can do better!

Let’s struggle for a bolder, truly revolutionary movement in Canada!