On January 31, 2024, history was made with the formation of the (New) Communist Party of Canada (the (N)CPC), the successful completion of its Founding Congress, and the public release of its Political Program. A most sporadic development in turning course of Communist movement locally, and worldwide. It also pits a challenge to dogmatism or mechanical approach and stagnation. taps the revolutionary creativity of the masses and is major re-orientation towards shaping revolutionary class struggles and the massline.
The new Party was morally born was born clandestinely over two years ago, in 2021, after the protracted Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21 succeeded in binding together communist revolutionaries from across Canada, old and new, with many veterans of what is being labelled “third,” and even some from what we are calling the “second,” communist party-building movements in Canada, alongside a great many fresher or younger proletarian revolutionaries who are more than ready to flash the torch of proletarian revolution in the world today.
It strive to delve into the challenges of building the subjective forces for revolution: a communist vanguard party at the core of a revolutionary movement of class-conscious proletarians and their allies manifest in various forms of mass organization and struggle.
The (N)CPC was born clandestinely because it professes Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that analyses that proletarian revolution is neither a peaceful or Parliamentary affair. Rather, it is a protracted political process of garnering revolutionary forces, establishing the organs of proletarian political power and intensifying confrontations with the ruling class and its agents that can and eventually must lead to open civil war between the antagonistically opposed classes. The capitalist-imperialist state and ruling class will bang every nail in the wall to crush the communist vanguard party and the proletarian revolutionary movement the moment it poses as a danger to the bourgeoisie. Thus, the Party builds the proletarian revolution accordingly, in clandestinely. The true communist party is the only genuine l threat that the bourgeoisie faces. The (N)CPC now counts over two years of party-building activity since its constitution in 2021. These two years have consisted of intensive and extensive political activity that has included:
• Escalating process of regrouping fragmented groups of communist revolutionaries in Canada through unity and struggle;
• Consolidating the process of summing up the experience and rectification campaign of the errors of the preceding (third) party-building movement;
• building the infrastructure of the new party;
• Constructing new forms of mass work in the working class and other sections of the proletariat breaking barriers of the preceding movement;
• Self-criticism of its Party Program and its revolutionary strategy; and finally,
• convening and successfully concluding both the Founding Conference (2021) and Founding Congress (2023) of the (N)CPC.
Prior to the Party’s consolidation in 2021 as a democratic centralist communist vanguard party, well over a year of sustained effort was directed into the Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21. This process succeeded in forging unity of most remaining fragments of the third party-building movement and the vast majority (but not all) of the participants of the various groupings represented in the unity-struggle process, namely: Unité Maoiste, Proletarian Revolutionary Organization (coming out of one strand of the former Revolutionary Initiative, or RI), a separate group “RI-Canada,” and what remained of the “Pan-Canadian” section of the PCR-RCP. In fact, all the members of the first three groupings in this list joined the new party, as well as the majority of the latter grouping.
The Unity-Struggle Process of 2020-21 unified most of the existing proletarian revolutionary groupings in Canada who had discovered and widened their political initiative preceding, during, and following the unfolding of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the absence of the leadership of a higher democratic centralist communist organization behind them. It was a highly praiseworthy that these forces in 2020-21 achieved in just about a year’s time what the two organizations of the third party-building movement (RI and PCR-RCP) were unable to achieve in 15 years, i.e., knitting together virtually all groupings of communist revolutionaries into a single revolutionary communist vanguard party
(N)CPC brings projects its Program for socialist revolution in Canada which was adopted at the Founding Congress of the (New) Communist Party of Canada in 2023. It expects this document to be a principal centre of debate for some years and it wholeheartedly endorses the discussion, debate, and further struggle for unity with all other proletarian revolutionaries who have yet to crystallise.
The (N)CPC pledged to carry out to it’s utmost best the experience of its revolutionary predecessors, including: the first and once revolutionary (but no longer) Communist Party of Canada of the 1920s and ’30s, what it classed as the first party-building movement in Canada; followed by the Marxist-Leninist anti-revisionist movement that arose from the 1960s onward, leading to the second party-building movement throughout the 1970s, especially the Workers’ Communist Party of Canada and In Struggle!; and culminate in the two organizations of the third party-building movement in Canada whose experiences lasted from the early-to-mid 2000s right up to the end of the 2010s, namely the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) and Revolutionary Initiative (RI). These last organizations the breeding ground for the current party.
The (N)CPC, through the contributions of a great number of participants of the third party-building movement, is heading towards the conclusion the of summations of the overall experience of the third party-building movement, consisting of distinct summations of both PCR-RCP and RI, in addition to a separate and briefer overview of the “third wave” as a whole. These summations will clarify what we have learned, what we uphold, and what we have needed to make a break from the third party-building movement. As for the main short-comings of our forerunner organizations, our Party Program summarizes:
The PCR-RCP attributed such shortcomings to dogmatism and unproper application of democratic centralism, leading to degeneration and a series of splits. For Rev¬olutionary Initiative, a fundamental inability to grasp party building as the principal task of communist revolutionaries paved way to liquidation.
The new party pledged that the Party and its cadre would soon undertake complete diagnoses of these organizations, which would be the most penetrative overview to date concerning the PCR-RCP and RI experiences. The Party has studied these experiences to a great extent (which many of us were a part of), and are on the track of rectifying the errors of their predecessors.
The new party seeks to make similarly lucid summations made of the first and second waves of communist party-building in Canada. In it’s view, given that the existing movement is much further detached from those earlier periods of the proletarian revolution in Canada, we must find original approaches to summing those up. It also planned to undertake an incisive diagnosis of the first Communist Party of Canada in its revolutionary days. However, for that purpose, it would depend on academic tracts and older anti-revisionist literature, and not first-hand participants (considering the fact that that party has been off the revolutionary road for more than seventy years now!).
The (New) Communist Party of Canada, (N) CPC, pursues two innately linked objectives:
a) Establish working-class rule in the economic and political spheres of Canada; and
b) Establish a new, non-colonial, equal and fraternal type of relations between all nations which today remain forcefully and unequally united within the Canadian state.
The party asserted that neither one of these goals is likely to be achieved in a lasting, meaningful way without the other, like a wheel and an axle. The program of the (N) CPC aims to provide a sharp, scientific analysis of current conditions in Canada, a comprehensive assessment of the history of people’s struggles and communist party-building in this country and carved a road that can mobilize and unite all our class’s most dedicated, relentless fighters in the pursuit of a bright socialist future.
It must be noted that however much the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism are vital to any future revolutionary advances, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in itself, if applied as a closed system or a dogma, would be in sufficient for formulating path to revolution in the present.
As for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the positive side of that postulate that it identifies with the greatest achievements of the international communist movement, practically and theoretically: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and Mao’s theoretical breakthroughs, especially concerning class struggle in the socialist transition period.
The negative side of the postulation Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is that nearly everyone in North America who upholds it is mechanical and it can boost a trend in the international communist movement to deify great leaders, rather than imbibe lessons critically from their practical achievements and theoretical breakthroughs and apply those lessons to our own times and places. It could turn into a closed system that fails to learn from experiences and theories apart from those it upholds.
Quoting the New Communist Party of Canada “To all those toiling and struggling in Canada who suffer and anger at the worsening of conditions among the people broadly; and To all those who have no illusions remaining about the supposed benevolence of the Canadian state, who have come to see the naked reality of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class that controls it, and the imperialist state that it has long been and become in order to serve that ruling class; and To all those who have come to understand and stand in opposition to bankrupt liberalism and the monsters it breeds around the world; and finally, to all the rest who are in search of a real way forward out of the misery and decay of the present world, which is the world imposed by capitalism and imperialism,We say: Don’t despair! Because a new period has commenced, a new party of the proletariat has been forged!”.
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Harsh Thakor is freelance journalist
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