Today we are publishing the Draft Program for a new communist party of the Canadian working class. This draft program puts forward the road Canadian workers must take to free themselves from the chains of capitalist exploitation. It charts the way forward for the socialist revolution in our country.
The draft program presents the fundamental principles and positions of the new communist party that we will found before the year is out. It is a call to all Canadian workers to join us in creating the party that can lead the working class in the battle for liberation.
Our Party will be a working-class party based on the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. It will fight alongside the people against the crisis, against capitalist exploitation, national oppression and superpower domination of our country. The most militant and class-conscious sons and daughters of the working people will be its members.
Our Party will uphold proletarian internationalism in solidarity with workers and oppressed people around the world who are fighting imperialism. It will take up its responsibilities as a detachment of the international communist movement. It will firmly take up the struggle against modern revisionism and all the other forms of opportunism that try to sabotage the revolutionary cause.
For years the working class in our country has been deprived of leadership, of a revolutionary workers’ party. The Canadian working class once had such a party. Founded in 1921, the Communist Party of Canada led countless heroic struggles in the 1920s and ’30s, directing the strike movement and organizing the unemployed. It organized the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion of Canadian workers and progressive people who fought with glory against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Norman Bethune, the great internationalist doctor, was a member of this party, giving up his life for the Chinese revolution. But the Communist Party of Canada degenerated into revisionism more than 20 years ago taking the revolutionary essence out of Marxist teaching and leaving only the form. Advocating the “peaceful road to socialism,” it betrayed the cause of working-class revolution to serve the ruling class. It became an agent for Soviet social-imperialism, serving this superpower’s ambitions of world domination.
The new communist party will take up the revolutionary traditions of the Canadian working class. It will take up the banner of socialist revolution, of armed revolution, of the need to overthrow our main enemy, the Canadian bourgeoisie, and establish a workers’ state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The draft program is being presented by the Canadian Communist League (Marxist-Leninist). The League was founded in October 1975 with the central task of creating a revolutionary communist party. The draft program brings us a step closer to this goal. It contains the synthesis of three and a half years of applying Marxism-Leninism to the class struggle in our country.
In these three and a half years the League has expanded from its origins in Montreal right across the country. The League has rooted itself in the factories and amongst the masses and has become actively involved in the major battles of the working class.
This document is the result of discussion and criticism throughout the organization by League members who studied a previous draft. The final version of the Party’s program will be officially adopted by delegates at the Party’s founding congress.
In making public this document today, we invite your criticisms and comments on any of the subjects treated. It is important that the draft program for a new communist party be distributed as widely as possible to all class conscious workers, and to all those who desire a revolutionary change in our country.
Join with us in the great cause of socialist revolution!
Join with the League to found the new communist party!
The Canadian Communist League (Marxist-Leninist)
May 1st 1979