Canadian Revolutionary Congress held
11 December 2006. A World to Win News Service.
Following is an article from the 1 December special issue of Arsenal-Express, put out by the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (organizing committee).
Political activists representing comrades from various cities and provinces across the country gathered at the Canadian Revolutionary Congress in Montreal last weekend gave their enthusiastic support to the foundation of the Revolutionary Communist Party, whose imminent establishment will crown more than six years of struggle by the RCP(oc).
The RCP(oc) took the initiative to call for this Congress last February with the aim of uniting the largest possible number of proletarian revolutionaries around a project simultaneously simple and demanding: the building of this indispensable tool for the deployment of the revolutionary struggle of the Canadian proletariat, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party linked to the international communist movement.
The assembly in Montreal of activists from many cities not only across Quebec but also from Ontario and as far away as Western Canada, hidden from the eyes and ears of the bourgeoisie and its security forces, represents a victory in itself, testament to the seriousness with which all these founding forces undertook the preparation of the Congress. In fact, for those who want to put an end to capitalism and imperialism and take part in the great struggle to free humanity from all forms of oppression and exploitation, nothing is more important than carrying out this basic battle for the building of a revolutionary party.
What a contrast with the media spectacle organized at the same moment at the congress of Françoise David’s Quebec Solidarity Party that seeks to “improve the system” by participating in the bourgeois parliamentary game and reinforcing the old, obsolete institutions on which the rule of the big Canadian bourgeoisie rests! Those attending the Canadian Revolutionary Congress had a very different and far broader objective: not the creation of “one more party” to lengthen the list in the next elections, but the building of a party to be the political arm of the revolutionary proletariat, a party that would be the sum of all our abilities – ideological, political, organizational and fighting – and whose aim and determination is to fight to the end, in other words, until the realization of communism worldwide. Some people might call this programme highly ambitious! But can we really still stand by and watch as capitalism leads humanity to its destruction – with increasing ferocity?
Two separate congresses held at the same time but different in every way. They represented two totally opposed outlooks and worlds: the old capitalist and imperialist world, whose time is up, and the new communist world whose task is to liberate the proletariat and all the oppressed.
Conscious of their historical responsibility and their modest position, of course, but solidly rooted in the centuries-old struggle of the world proletariat, the women and men Congress participants began by observing a minute of silence in memory of those who gave their lives for the cause of communism and who fell in combat since the holding of the first congress of the RCP(oc) three years ago. Notable among them are our two young comrades from the Mont-Laurier region in Quebec, “Bridge” and “Montevarius”, who lost their lives in the spring of 2004 in a tragic accident while carrying out political work the organization had assigned to them, as well as comrade Sunil of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) whom we had the great privilege of meeting and working with only a few days before gunfire from a Royal Nepal Army helicopter brought him down in November 2005; comrade Zhang Chungqiao – an outstanding 20th-century revolutionary who led the Great Proletarian Cultural revolution alongside Mao and his comrade Jianq Qing and who died after spending more than 20 years of imprisonment by the revisionists, without ever renouncing his communist ideals; and our dear comrades of the Maoist Communist Party of Turkey and North Kurdistan who, as is well known, were ambushed and massacred by Turkish state security forces in June 2005.
After the presentation of the introductory report by the CRC political committee of correspondence, representatives of some 15 organizations – RCP organizing committees, sympathizer groups and mass organizations such as the Youth Red Front – gave their views on the current state of the class struggle and the founding of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Some did so on the basis of their own summation, while others raised not only their points of unity but also the questions posed by the RCP(oc)’s strategic line and programme. Yet all greeted the formation of the RCP and emphasized that it constituted a great leap forward not only for revolutionaries in Canada but also for the entire world proletariat.
Also attending the Canadian Revolutionary Congress were supporters of the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan, the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Bolivarian Continental Coordinating Committee, which brought greetings from their respective organizations. Solidarity messages were also sent from Italy, Iraq, Bangladesh and Colombia.
The message from the Afghanistan Maoist party, for example, was received with enormous enthusiasm by the participants, who gave it a spontaneous standing ovation. As the message pointed out, over the last few months Canadian troops, acting together with other NATO forces commanded by a Canadian general, have committed mass killings of Afghanistan civilians. The message added, “We dare to believe that your exposure of these crimes will help unleash a powerful mass movement within this imperialist bastion that is Canada, which will contribute to the development of the revolutionary and proletarian struggle in your country.”
The Congress participants were also informed of an important message from the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, which groups Maoist parties and organizations on a world scale. While emphasizing that the founding of a vanguard revolutionary communist party in Canada represents an important step forward, the CoRIM also made a point of recalling that “With it comes the responsibility to ground yourselves in revolutionary theory, to make sure, to borrow Mao’s analogy, to choose the right arrows and assure that they are on target.” Furthermore, proletarian internationalism demands that revolution in Canada be firmly anchored in the objective of emancipating all humanity. Internationalism cannot be reduced to a more or less militant version of the kind of solidarity that peoples spontaneously extend to one another; the point is to build the party of the Canadian proletariat as an integral part of the international communist movement based on the fact that the proletariat is a single class worldwide.
This was seconded by a comrade who spoke on behalf of the Central Committee of the RCP(oc). After a quick sketch of the history of the line struggles that propelled the handful of revolutionary communists who made up the RCP(oc) to the stage where they are today, she explained, “This whole accumulation of experience, with its advances and setbacks, has brought us to reaffirm these simple words from Mao: It takes a revolutionary party to make revolution. And in the same way, we also reiterate Lenin’s equally simple words; without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary party. This revolutionary theory, this guide to action, is concentrated in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Today, we must bring that theory alive in Canada and apply it in revolutionary practice with the aim of the seizure of political power from the Canadian bourgeoisie by the proletariat... [Ellipses in original.] Today, we call all revolutionaries in Canada to assume this responsibility, to shoulder along with us this task that makes an urgent necessity of building an organization that will embody the unity of the revolutionaries and the defence of MLM and the programme based on that.”
At the end of the Congress, the participants adopted four resolutions almost unanimously, with a few abstentions.
The first resolution was regarding the foundation of the RCP. After a certain number of considerations, the text says, “We, the participants in the Canadian Revolutionary Congress, wholeheartedly support the imminent foundation of the Revolutionary Communist Party. We intend to make the founding of the RCP known and to popularise it among the population of Canada, in as many cities as possible, among the proletariat and groups and networks of activists. In this way we proudly and enthusiastically aim to carry forward the struggles of Canada’s poor and proletarians against the political power of the imperialist bourgeoisie. We will do everything we can to transform our support, in an everyday reality, into a powerful initiative of the proletarian masses. Support the RCP, and starting right now, let us deploy throughout Canada the broadest movement of struggle for socialism the country has ever known!”
The second resolution supported the development of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement “as a rallying force for all the revolutionaries of the world.” The third reaffirmed the support of Canadian revolutionaries for the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in its “revolutionary struggle so it can succeed in creating, with the help of the Nepalese people, a truly New Democracy that will then allow them to destroy the old state and build a new one, in which the people will exercise power under the leadership of the party in order to continue the struggle towards socialism and communism.” Finally, the last resolution presented for the Congress’s approval called for a second Canadian revolutionary Congress in 2008 in Toronto, as part of efforts to spread the work of the new party throughout the country.
The Congress came to a close with the singing of the Internationale in all of the languages spoken by the activists who took part.
The texts of the speeches at the Congress, including the report of the Political Committee of Correspondence and the speech of the RCP(oc) Central Committee, as well as the solidarity messages from Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations, will be published within a few weeks in a special edition of the magazine Le Drapeau Rouge, as well as on the RCP(co) Web site.
During the coming weeks the RCP(co) will base itself on the results of this Congress and the summation of its own work over the last six years to carry out the transformations necessary for the establishment of the new Revolutionary Communist Party.
We call on all proletarian revolutionaries throughout Canada, including those who participated, directly or indirectly, in the Canadian Revolutionary Congress initiative, to take their place in this fight and take up the necessary ideological and political struggle that will enable us to finally arm ourselves with this tool that is indispensable for the mobilization of the masses in the struggle for revolution and the cause of communism!
(For the documents of this Congress, including the CoRIM message, go to www.pcr-rcpcanada.org)
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