Statement of Canadians for Peace and Socialism
On the International Meeting of Communist and Worker’s Parties
São Paulo Brazil, November 21-23, 2008
November 18, 2008
Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism
An International Meeting of Communist and Worker’s Parties (IMCWP) will take place in São Paulo Brazil this weekend, November 21-23 2008. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada will attend. The IMCWP evaluates the new problems and tasks confronting the global anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist movement of the people and the experience of the Communist and Worker’s Parties striving to unite and lead the working class and popular movements of the people in the revolutionary struggle for peace and socialism.
The Meeting in Brazil takes place in the midst of an unfolding financial economic crisis of the global capitalist system. The crisis, induced by imperialist war and plunder, originating at the centre of the imperialist system, the U.S.A, is impacting Canada with particular force and gravity.
Canadian Federal and Provincial Governments approving and heavily involved in the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, implicated in profiteering from the international sub-prime bubble, are now weakly positioned to defend the working people and the country’s economic and political independence from the effects of the global credit crisis.
Both Liberal and Conservative state-monopoly governments for more than 30 years, imposed on Canada variants of neo-liberal and neo-conservative political and economic schemes, borrowed from the IMF and the WTO that undermined Canada’s potential for rational, planned, independent and progressive economic development.
Decades of economic and political integration with the U.S.A. via NAFTA have distorted domestic industrial and manufacturing growth, the home market and aggravated regional underdevelopment. State monopoly capitalist policies have promoted anarchic and centrifugal regional monopoly exploitation of Canada’s rich natural resources, in particular its energy resources on behalf of foreign mainly U.S. corporate investors.
At the same time Canadian state monopoly capitalism has been the main beneficiary of its betrayal of the country’s economic independence, enriching itself and using the capital generated from the exploitation of Canadian workers and the sell out of the country’s resources to amass and export capital to promote its own imperial goals in South America, the Middle East and to join the U.S.A. in intra-imperialist competition with the EU for military and economic global advantage and dominance. Canadian monopoly capital has joined with U.S. and Mexican financiers to jointly exploit the labour and resources of all of the peoples of North America.
The distortions in the economy have impacted most heavily the working class, the poor, the farmers and urban middle classes causing job loss, falling farm income, urban blight and homelessness and attempts to undermine and privatize the country’s social system of public healthcare, education and pensions.
U.S. imperialism seeks to relegate Canada to a permanent state of industrial and manufacturing stagnation and underdevelopment. U.S. state monopoly capitalist strategists view Canada primarily as a source of energy and raw materials that it seeks to exploit first before resorting to its own vast reserves of energy and mineral resources. There are finance capitalist interests in Canada willing to help them carry out this project all in the name of U.S. – Canadian “co-operation”.
For these compelling reasons, the proceedings, conclusions and declarations of IMCWP are of extreme importance and indispensible to the advancement of the struggles of organized labour, left, democratic and peace movements of Canada and must be widely disseminated among the labour and popular movements of the people.
The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) does not have an exemplary record in this regard. In the past decade it has treated IMCWP as the inner affair of the Party and its membership. The CPC contributions to these meetings are often superficial and ill prepared and are not preceded by a party-wide discussion of the strengths and weakness of the Party’s international work.
The Communist Party of Canada confronts a serious deficiency in its theoretical work and has become subsumed in the broad category of the “left”, often deferring to non-Communist analysis due to a low level of Marxist Leninist theoretical effort and output. The CPC confronts the urgent task of self-critically analyzing and overcoming this weakness and in developing a Canadian Marxist Leninist pole of revolutionary working class theory and analysis on a broad range of subjects.
The subjects in urgent need of study include a deep analysis of new phenomena in the development of the productive forces in Canada in particular the affect on the class struggle of the emergence of the energy sector and the impact of new high tech developments on industrial and manufacturing sectors, as major drivers of economic development; the factors contributing to the de-industrialization of core industrial and manufacturing sectors and what should be done; the corporatization of agriculture; the preponderance of the service industries and their continued viability.
These and other factors require urgent study as they impact the organic composition of capital in Canada in the 21st Century and the changes in the composition of the working class that is its result. There is a serious deficiency in the Communist Party of Canada’s analysis of non-proletarian middle strata entering the anti-monopoly struggle, such as the environmental movement and in particular the affects of petty bourgeois radicalism that directly and indirectly attack the fundamentals of the Marxist Leninist theory and practice of the struggle for socialism and disorient the advanced sections of the organized labour movement.
We mention these matters fully aware that they may be considered, as they have been in the past, as an attack on the Communist Party of Canada rather than a considered critical approach. The CPS believes it has become urgent and necessary to speak about these problems more openly as the indispensible need of the day, to further develop the work of the Communist movement and the struggle for socialism in Canada.
Trends within the IMCWP are openly and self-critically discussing these and other problems of revolutionary theory and practice. Our era is the era of the final stage of the development of capitalism, its imperialist stage beyond which there are no further stages. All theories of the possibility of reforming capitalism in its imperialist stage are being swept aside and the imperative of socialism posed more sharply. More attention is being paid to Marxism Leninism for identifying in our era, the “approaches to revolution” that as Lenin advised, become in practice the basis for enduring alliances of an anti-monopoly type that lead to socialism.
The CPS has developed its own analysis of these problems and for those interested it can be viewed at www.FocusOnSocialism.ca . The CPS looks forward to receiving and studying the contributions of the Communist Party of Canada to the IMCWP and the documents, speeches and declarations of all of the Communist Parties attending this important meeting. |