First Published: The Forge, Vol. 2, No. 7, March 31, 1977
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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VANCOUVER. BC – The United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union (UFAWU)[1] held its 32nd Convention during the week of February 12. UFAWU leadership is in the hands of “Communist” Party of Canada revisionists.
Out of the 130 delegates, over 30 were members of the CPC including outgoing president Homer Stevens.
Important issues like the protection of our fishing zones and the 200-mile off shore limit, the Quebec national question, the safety inspection of boats to protect fishermen, were all discussed.
But the fishermen’s great fighting spirit was completely diverted and sabotaged by the revisionists.
Despite their “communist” mask, these traitors couldn’t hide their true role as agents of the bourgeoisie and servants of Soviet social-imperialism.
The fight to protect fishing reserves within the 200-mile limit is crucial to the preservation of both fishermen’s jobs and our natural resources.
But the Canadian state clears the way for pillaging despite all its fine speeches. It allows the United States to do as it pleases while “imposing” quotas on other boats including Soviet trawlers.
What have the revisionists done to mobilize fishermen in the fight to protect coastlines and prevent the robbing of our resources?
They invited Romeo Leblanc, the Federal Minister of Fisheries. Imagine, these “great defenders” of working people open their conference doors to a representative of our worst enemy, the Canadian bourgeoisie.
What could be better to demobilize the fishermen and sabotage their fight for just demands. They did a great job of spreading the illusion that we can collaborate with our worst enemy, that we can stand by...patiently waiting for them to grant us our rights.
These revisionists even had the nerve to invite Joe Morris so he could talk about his notorious class collaboration project – tripartism.
Stevens put on his usual militant show and introduced Morris, the reformist bureaucrat sold-out to the bourgeoisie, as “one of the great leaders of the workers movement in the finest hours of its history”
Steven’s lies about this traitor tells a lot about the man who told them!
But their hypocrisy doesn’t end there. They say they fight for unity between English Canadian and Quebec workers. They even passed a motion proposing “mutual understanding of their (workers) problems in both nations in Canada.”
How can they pretend to be working for the unity of the two nations when they keep their own members separated from other fishermen and don’t clearly recognize that Quebec is an oppressed nation with the fundamental right to self-determination up to and including separation?
This is the real basis for building a solid unity and for fighting against all the chauvinist theories of the bourgeoisie which doesn’t recognize and deprives the Quebec nation of its rights.
But this position is easily understood when we know that this party has completely abandoned the proletariat’s revolutionary cause. It peddles the peaceful road to socialism, the idea that the state is neutral and that the bourgeoisie will voluntarily hand over its power.
So they remove the revolutionary content from the fishermen’s just demands, as they do for those of all working people, and divert them from the only possible road to socialism, the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie and its state and the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The revisionists fell over themselves in denouncing American imperialism’s ravaging of our coasts and begged the bourgeois state to put an end to this. But these vermin didn’t say a single thing against the Soviet factory-ships and their pillaging especially off the east coast. They were silent about the fightback and the just struggle of the Newfoundland fisherman last year.
Their goal is obvious: attack American imperialism while leaving the door open to social-imperialism, divide the fishermen over this issue, lie to them and keep silent about the Soviet pillage. What could be more vile!
But their support for the Soviet Union’s interference doesn’t stop there. The members of this totally bourgeois party also pushed for the signing of a petition supporting the Stockholm Appeal by the union members. This appeal for disarmament and world peace was launched by the Soviet Union which in the meantime, in its race for hegemony with the US is increasing its arms and preparing for a new world war.
The revisionist “Communist” Party supports this international bandit. It fills the pages of its papers, the Canadian Tribune and Pacific Tribune – which had their day at the convention – with praise for the Soviet Union where Brezhnev’s clique crushes the working people’s rights and their struggles under its social-fascist dictatorship.
We shouldn’t be fooled by Stevens and his like when they put on a militant front and proclaim themselves communists. They wave the red flag the better to oppose it.
Confronted with these traitors we must fight to show that real communists are presently fighting to build an authentic communist party that will not collaborate with our enemies but will struggle to overthrow them. A party that won’t be an agent of one or the other of the superpowers which are ready to smash anything in their way while dividing up the world.
We must show that in the unions real communists will fight to make these organizations true instruments of struggle which will firmly defend the workers’ interests and support the fight to overthrow capitalism.
From now on fishermen, as workers, must take up the struggle to expose this phoney communist party and kick these traitors out of the leadership.
Fishermen’s rights will only be firmly defended by transforming their union into a class struggle organization, and only by fighting to overthrow capitalism will they guarantee these rights.
[1] This union has more than 5500 members. Along with the United Electrical Workers whose leadership is also in the hands of the revisionists, this union is the “C’PC’s means to infiltrate the union movement.