Sabotage of trade unions and mass organizations is an accurate description of the work of IS revisionists.
Let’s take a look at a few facts.
In October, 1978, IS attacked the CNTU (Confederation of National Trade Unions) union at the Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine Hospital in Montreal, at the same time attacking League communists who were active executive members. This went on in the midst of a full-scale battle against the raiding campaign launched by a sell-out company union in the pay of the employers. (We shall return to this affair later.)
The same month, during the Post Office conflict which extended across the country, IS took up the bourgeoisie’s chorus and lambasted the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) executive with criticism. When Parliament, the New Democratic Party and Canadian Labour Congress head McDermott tried to break the strike and the union by concentrating their blows on CUPW’s leadership, In Struggle gave them a helping hand with a constant barrage of criticism of the executive. This is how In Struggle uses its “left” cover to do its dirty anti-union work.
Now that the strike is over, thousands of workers are demanding McDermott’s head because this traitor stabbed the postal workers in the back at the decisive moment.
The leaders of the postal workers continue to defend their decision to go on strike and the 23,000 postal workers’ defiance of the back-to-work law. But In Struggle rushed to equate the CUPW leadership with that of the CLC. In an article printed in In Struggle, No. 135, p. 5, IS went to the point of saying that “Parrot (CUPW president) wants to unite with McDermott.” The only aim of this attack was to turn part of the workers’ anger for McDermott against CUPW. In Struggle is in fact protecting McDermott. (see The Forge, Vol. 3, No. 27)
In November, 1978, at the height of the strike movement of 80,000 Quebec students – a movement led by ANEQ (the Quebec National Students’ Association) for the abolition of the present loans and bursaries system and for free tuition, what did IS do? It set to work once more at breaking the struggle. It opposed the slogan “free tuition,” because, according to IS, it is “not possible” under capitalism. (see The Forge, Vol. 3, No. 27)
This is the same tired litany, that democratic rights cannot be attained under capitalism, that IS used to try to kill the struggle waged by SOS Daycare, a Quebec mass organization fighting for universal free daycare, controlled and run by the parents.
We should also recall IS’s adventures with the Trudeau wage freeze, which hit workers’ wages. For two and a half years IS outdid itself in its efforts to mislead the workers’ movement. First, it opposed the call for a general strike when it corresponded to the actual situation as well as to the workers’ willingness to fight. Then it began to maintain that withdrawal of the wage freeze was the remedy to all the evils of capitalism, from unemployment to health and safety problems, not to mention capitalist repression. (We shall also come back to these two points further on.)
However, IS cannot carry on this kind of sabotage without trying to explain and justify itself. Otherwise, it would run the risk of being too easily exposed to workers and losing all credibility.
So IS grossly distorts Marxist-Leninist principles, takes what is useful to it from Marxism and rejects the rest, and fabricates a whole slew of intellectual theories. This is its only hope of extricating itself from the difficulties it gets into and covering up its capitulation in the face of the class struggle and its sabotage in the unions and mass organizations.
IS has developed its line in the unions over the years and in the course of its degeneration. It started out with a completely “leftist” position: trade unions are reactionary, we must organize outside them. Applying this line, they set up the “Atelier ouvrier” (labour workshop), a group that was parallel to the unions. Later in 1973, pursuing the same line of reasoning, IS was the main participant in the creation of the CSLO (Committee for Solidarity with Workers’ Struggles).
The next stage was to go on to plain, vulgar economism: here and there a few sporadic forays into union struggles, but certainly no communist agitation or propaganda.
International Women’s Day, March 8, 1977, serves as a good example. That year the League called on various community groups, mass organizations, and IS – which we still considered to be Marxist-Leninist – to form a common contingent in the demonstration called to mark the day.
IS refused to take part because it opposed the slogan calling for class struggle unions.
Why? Because, said the IS representative, this slogan is “leftist and rightist at the same time.” Make no mistake about it – the slogan is “leftist” because “the masses are not ready” to take up such a slogan, because we do not have a party yet, basically because “it isn’t the right time.” It is “rightist” because if we try to fight to change the unions in these conditions we will fall into economism.
This amazing stew is one of the best economist concentrates IS has ever served up. First they tell us the masses “aren’t ready” to do anything but fight for better wages and working conditions, and therefore that communists should limit their work and their agitation and propaganda to this level. Then in the same breath they add that communists shouldn’t get involved in the working class’s immediate struggles because that would be “economism.” So, if we sum up what IS says, the economic struggle is for the masses, the revolutionary struggle for the communists.“ IS wants to cut the unions off from revolutionary politics.
Finally, once IS became a little revisionist group it consolidated its erroneous line on the unions, strengthened its alliances with the reformists at the head of many of these mass organizations, and openly took up sabotaging struggles and stirring up anticommunism.
It laid out its line clearly in a brochure published in May 1978, entitled, The goals and work of Canadian Communists in trade unions today. What does it say?
Among the defence organizations of the proletariat – i.e. those that don’t have as an objective the conquest of State power... the trade unions occupy a place of the highest importance. (p. 14, our emphasis)
This is the logical outcome of the position IS laid out around March 8, 1977. After “economic struggle for the masses, revolutionary struggle for the communists,” the version now is, “defensive struggle for the unions, the struggle for socialism for the party.”
This is what it really gets down to; this is why IS is against the fight to make our unions instruments of class struggle. For IS unions should not be weapons in the hands of the working class for attacking the capitalists; they should merely defend it.
Unions should therefore limit their task to resisting oppression and exploitation, but not fighting it. They should, according to IS continue to demand this or that improvement in working conditions or wages, but must not choose to fight for the overthrow of this system of exploitation.
So finally and inevitably, we have IS, like all reformist traitors, crying, “no politics in the unions,” that is to say, no revolutionary education in the unions, just the purest bourgeois reformism.
Of course, IS isn’t inventing anything new. Communists have always had to fight this sort of reformist line. Lenin, in 1920, wrote in The Terms of Admission into the Communist International:
Communist cells should be formed in the trade unions, and by their sustained and unflagging work, win the unions over to the communist cause. (Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 209)
And Karl Marx, over 100 years ago, explained:
Too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital, the Trades Unions have not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. (Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Vol. 2, p. 83)
He went on:
Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. (Instructions for Delegates of Provisional General Council, 1866)
And Losovsky, taking up the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, wrote in the Program of Action of the Red International of Labour Unions:
We advocate working in the unions, not in order to follow reformist slogans and principles, but to win over the masses and to transform these unions into instruments of social revolution against their reactionary leaders. (Red Flag Publications, p. 78)
For communists, unions most definitively must have as their objective the conquest of state power by the working class. The party leading the revolutionary struggle must train the entire working class for this struggle. But to do this, mass organizations under the party’s leadership must also play a role of broad mobilization and education.
Communists work in the unions to strengthen them, to wage class-against-class struggle, to steel the broad working masses in battle and to educate them in struggle about the necessity to destroy the bourgeoisie’s power. Communists want the unions to become mass organizations which recognize this necessity and, led by the communist party, will fight to this end.
The revisionists and reformists in every period have always wanted to confine the unions to the immediate “defensive” struggles, to restrict them to a narrow range of activities within the framework of capitalist exploitation. And this is exactly the line IS is taking up today.
Particularly since IS published its famous “program” in which, as we have seen, there is not the slightest trace of strategic perspective or political leadership for the struggle of the working class, IS has added a new chorus to its repertoire: according to it a whole list of struggles have become “impossible to wage,” “unrealistic,” “utopian,” “wishful thinking.”
IS opposed to the fight for daycare
IS puts this line forward most blatantly in its June 8, 1978 issue in an article entitled “In Quebec, daycare centres join together to struggle.” In it they attack SOS Daycare, a mass organization in Quebec which is fighting for a universal network of daycare centres subsidized by the state and controlled by the parents. What does IS have against this?
But in the struggle for a daycare network, demanding control over the centres is a demand that can cut both ways. We must realize that in a capitalist system the State will not hand out money for a daycare network that it cannot control. To demand this is simply daydreaming. (IS, No. 116, p. 15)
And they go further, attacking League communists who defend a class struggle orientation within SOS:
But all that the SOS/League aims at by putting forward “control by users”, is to sabotage the struggle. The League misleads the masses by taking them up a blind alley for, as we have seen, user control is an unattainable goal. (ibid)
What IS is telling us as clear as day is to fight only for demands that are feasible under capitalism, those which are “acceptable” to the bourgeois state.
IS is against the fight for the right to jobs
IS sings the same old song when it comes to the fight against unemployment:
The use of slogans such as “the right to work” and “full employment” throws sand in the eyes of the working class and tries to trick workers into thinking that this is possible under capitalism. (IS, No. 102, p. 5)
And IS goes on setting the fight for the rights of the working class and the fight against unemployment in opposition to the struggle for socialist revolution:
Unemployment can only be eliminated if we eliminate capitalism. Also if we really want the “right to work” and “full employment”, we’re going to have to wage the struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state and the expropriation of the capitalists. (ibid)
Of course this is perfectly true. But the problem is that IS puts this forward only to justify its refusal to take up the struggle against unemployment right now.
“We don’t have to fight against unemployment, we have to make the revolution” – what stupidity. We must fight for our right to jobs, just as we fight for all our rights. We must fight with all our might to force the bourgeoisie to give us everything possible. And in this fight communists teach the working class about the need for socialist revolution, and the working class strengthens itself to one day be able to wage the big battle.
But the pathetic revisionists of IS keep repeating “only socialist revolution can solve the problem.” This is not to educate the masses but to stop them from fighting.
Instead of making the need for revolution a call to fight, they make it an excuse for not fighting right now to win our rights.
Once again this bourgeois line appears, a line which Lenin exposed, fought against and condemned 60 years ago. In fact, in 1916, Lenin fought against this line defended by Kievski:
... The author returned to his old mistake (...) He cannot solve the problem of how to link the advent of imperialism with the struggle for reforms and democracy (...) Hence – complete confusion concerning the “unachievabffity” of democratic demands under imperialism. Hence – ignoring of the political struggle now, at present, immediately and at all times. (Lenin, The Nascent Trend of Imperialist Economism, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 15)
As Lenin explains, this verbiage on “unachievable” struggles under imperialism serves only to liquidate all political struggle “immediately and at all times.”
And Lenin shows that this is just another form of economism:
The same old fundamental mistake of the same old Economism: inabllity to pose political questions. (Lenin, ibid, p. 18)
The first economists Lenin fought against wanted to restrict the workers to the economic struggle. In the same way the “imperialist economists” prevent the working class from taking up its political tasks. They are happy just to keep repeating that “the revolution will solve everything.”
Lenin fiercely fought against this tendency because it ends up sabotaging not only the immediate political struggles of the working class but also the fight for socialist revolution. Lenin explains:
All “democracy” consists in the proclamation and realisation of “rights” which under capitalism are realisable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible. (Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 74)
Because: “The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory.” (Lenin, Reply to P. Kievsky, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 26)
So, Lenin explains, the proletariat absolutely must fight for its rights, tirelessly and starting right now, so as to be in a position to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
This is why political struggles must be waged immediately. This is why League communists are putting out the call to fight for the right to jobs, for the rights of the Quebec nation and other oppressed nationalities, for all the fundamental democratic rights of the working class and the people of our country, rights which are trampled on daily by the bourgeoisie.
The working class learns in these struggles for its rights, from communist agitation and propaganda, that the overthrow of the Canadian bourgeoisie is essential. In these struggles and through its victories, the working class develops its class conciousness and strengthens its capacity to fight.
So when IS goes around saying that because the only solution is revolution, therefore there is nothing to do but wait and meanwhile sink into the most vulgar reformism, they just end up sabotaging all political struggles and sabotaging the socialist revolution.
One of the most blatant examples of this vulgar reformism is IS’s “campaign” on the Trudeau wage freeze.
For two and a half years IS waged a “political campaign” against the Trudeau wage freeze. Two and a half years during which they were determined to go against the tide in the labour movement to sabotage its battles.
This campaign was carried out in two stages.
First Stage
IS launched its campaign in January, 1976. In its publication it put forward grandiose slogans like: “To overcome the capitalist crisis, assimilate Marxism-Leninism!” (IS, No. 52, English Digest)
As far as fighting, their position was one of total passivity, and they also hollered against the just call the League put forward from the first issue of The Forge, “Prepare the General Strike.” This slogan (which spontaneously came out in the labour movement when the Trudeau measures were announced) corresponded perfectly to the deep-seated feelings of the most far-sighted and militant workers.
The only people who opposed this slogan were those who were afraid they couldn’t hold down the growing anger, couldn’t block the open hostility toward the bourgeoisie: only union leaders who had sold out to the bosses – and IS.
IS militants spouted incredible nonsense against the general strike. A general strike is “leftist”, or it is “contrary to the tasks in the first stage of party building” or “this is tailing behind the bureaucrats who are putting this forward.” This is how IS waged its big campaign.
By mid-August 1976, the leaders of the Canadian Labour Congress were forced by the powerful rank-and-file movement to call a one-day general strike on October 14. Finding themselves trailing behind even the union bureaucrats, IS was forced to take up the slogan in early September.
On October 14, 1976 a million workers walked off the job in Canada’s first country-wide general strike.
For two and a half months following the general strike IS didn’t utter a word about the wage freeeze. Much later, an IS militant gave this evaluation at a meeting in Sorel, Quebec: October 14 was a “monumental flop.”
Second Stage
In January, 1977, IS makes a startling turnabout and launches a big campaign. Pulling out a dust-covered analysis from the depths of its files, IS once again focused in on the wage freeze as the sprearhead of the bourgeoisie’s attack. But the situation had changed. After being in effect for more than one year, the Trudeau wage freeze was no longer the main way the capitalists were hitting the working class. Instead, we saw factory shutdowns, massive layoffs, and unemployment reaching unprecedented highs. Ottawa and the provinces were churning out repressive laws such as Bill C-24 (against immigrants) and Bill C-27 (against the unemployed). Tripartism made its appearance.
But what does IS care about reality? It follows only its own mental abstraction. Forced to explain the connection between all these other crisis measures and the wage freeze, IS declared in black and white that they all arise out of the wage freeze.
– Unemployment: “Thus, thanks to the Wage Control Act, be it by speedups or by the modernization of its equipment, the bourgeoisie attains the same results: make a reduced number of workers produce more...” (IS, No. 93, p. 7)
– The deterioration of health and safety in industry: “with the Wage Control Act and its bonus for productivity, speed-ups are multiplied which lead to even more problems in health and workplace safety...” (IS, No. 95, p. 7)
– The removal of acquired rights: In a leaflet distributed to Regina’s municipal library employees, on strike over non-monetary clauses (which do not touch wages), IS stated that it was nevertheless necessary to attack the wage control law. It proposed setting up one of its notorious bogus committees “against Bill C-73.”
– Cutbacks in social service budgets: in a leaflet aimed at the Saint-Charles-Borromee Hospital workers in Montreal, IS explains that the wage freeze “cuts back budgets in health care, education, unemployment insurance, and welfare!!”
– Repression: after the July 22, 1977 shooting of eight striking millworkers at the gates of the Robin Hood plant by hired thugs, IS managed to explain the whole thing as a direct result of the Trudeau wage freeze.
They distributed to the millworkers a tear-jerking sheet declaring, after a detailed account of the events: “When we saw that scene, our throats were too tight, our eyes too full of tears to understand.” (our translation)
But, aside from its tears, what did IS have to offer the millworkers as a perspective for fighting? Its flyer continues: “It is clear that we are fighting an entire law, to force the withdrawal of the wage freeze.” Furthermore it explains that the capitalists’ hired killers will shoot at anyone fighting the Trudeau wage freeze. And in conclusion: “We must fight back against their savage repression by gathering together all our class brothers.”... “We must set up a fight committee, organize our class hatred into a fight against the wage controls.”
Beat the wage freeze and we will silence the guns of the bourgeoisie. That piece of deceit is all IS had to offer the millworkers!
As IS sank deeper, it became more delirious. In September 1977, just as the bourgeoisie began talking of withdrawing wage controls, IS issued a call for a general strike against them.
It’s at that point too that the bogus committees began to surface. Not a single one had been set up before that autumn, even though IS had been proposing them as far back as early March. By the year’s end, three came into being (in Montreal, on Quebec’s South Shore, and in Abitibi-Temiscaming.) In February 1978 (11 months after the initial proposal and two months before the official end of controls!) two others saw the light of day, in Halifax and Regina. In March, two more popped up, one more in Toronto and one in the Montreal railroad industry.
None of these committees ever really functioned. No one joined them and they never organized anything. They suffered from complete paralysis. Each time its activists raised their concern about this stagnation, IS would invariably answer, “sure, it’s not too good here but in other places it’s working.” They lied through their teeth each time.
The fundamental line that guided the entire second period of this campaign was total reformism. Ascribing all the ills of capitalism to the Trudeau wage controls, IS inevitably fed the illusion that the crisis would end once the law was withdrawn.
At the Montreal committee’s first (and only) meeting, there was a placard that just about summed up IS’s line: “beating the Trudeau Law means gaining on all fronts.”
On its crusade against the wage freeze, IS sabotaged any struggle that did not aim its blow directly at the law. We give only two examples from many others.
– At the large Montreal MLW-Bombardier factory, an IS leaflet plainly told the striking workers not to fight for their demands but to set up one of the non-existent committees.
The leaflet said things like: “We’ll never see hide nor hair of the 2 or 3% retroactive pay (one of the unions’s demands-Ed.). Bill C-73 won’t be withdrawn overnight, judging by what’s going on in Europe.” How encouraging! Or: “As for job security, it’s equally useless to work out something with the company. Because according to the Trudeau Law the companies are allowed to raise their margin of profit if productivity goes up.” So there’ll be more speedups, etc. and accidents will increase.
The MLW-Bombardier bosses couldn’t have found a better ally than IS!
– In British Columbia, the BC Federation of Labour organized a demonstration against unemployment in Victoria, March 20, 1978. An IS leaflet arrogantly told the thousands of demonstrators:
“Well, since when is unemployment our only problem? These past three years this country’s working class has been hit hard by the wage controls... With each day that the working class failed to defeat the controls, the reward was more unemployment.”
In other words, IS was sneering at the assembled workers: you’re wrong to want to fight unemployment, take on the wage freeze and nothing else. In the middle of the leaflet this slogan stuck out: “Down with unemployment! Fight the wage freeze!”
In reviewing its super-duper campaign against the Trudeau wage freeze, IS passes lightly over what it calls “weaknesses”: that it “created the impression that there were times when choices had to be made between various battlegrounds (unemployment, industrial accidents) and the struggle against wage controls in short, that sometimes it was necessary to limit the class struggle to struggle against this one act” (No. 116, p. 12). Just simply “created the impression” that sometimes “choices had to be made”? Hell no! IS had very distinctly declared that everything from one end of the country to the other had to give place to the fight against the Trudeau wage freeze. The disintegration of this group is so complete that the scoundrels leading it have to erect a wall of lies in order to hide it.
When the wage freeze ended on April 14, IS didn’t have a thing to say. A couple of bogus committees were dissolved and others that had never really existed were just forgotten. This great campaign of two and a half years of sabotage ended in embarassment and shame.
According to IS we are now in a period where the state is “becoming fascist,” so we should put all our energy into the struggle against repression. After IS has told us that the struggle for our rights (like the right to jobs) is impossible, now they try to sidetrack everything into the battle against their spectre of rising fascism.
This theme is quite convenient for IS. If in fact fascism were rapidly taking hold, we would then have to unite all “sincere democrats” against this danger. Consequence: IS allies even more closely with reformists and bureaucrats of all stripes. IS starts up a defence campaign for bourgeois democracy.
There is no question that in times of crisis the bourgeoisie steps up repression of the working class and sectors of the people as a whole. But this has nothing to do with fascism [1]. As a matter of fact, the mask of bourgeois democracy is still there, and the bourgeoisie makes good use of it (especially of reformism) to maintain its oppression of the masses.
In light of this, what must we do against repression? We must build up our fightback and fight all the reformist agents who spread illusions. We have to step up our fight for socialist revolution. We have to show precisely how bourgeois democracy is a dictatorship of the exploiters that the working class must destroy once and for all.
When IS hollers about fascism, it does the exact opposite. It leads us to believe that the repression raining down is “exceptional” and something other than bourgeois democracy. This just strengthens the reformists’ hold on the masses.
But IS goes further still. It clearly affirms that if fascism develops and if the bourgeoisie takes away the working class’s democratic rights, any form of struggle becomes impossible. It spreads this idea among the masses.
The struggle against repression... is an immediate struggle because these attacks directly affect the proletariat’s ability to maintain and improve its living conditions. The working-class movement must struggle for decent wages, for industrial health and safety, and against unemployment; but if it no longer has the means to fight, it will be unable to win the struggle and make the bourgeoisie back down. (IS, No. 116, p. 13, emphasis in French original)
So in IS!s eyes, union rights and democratic rights are the proletariat’s only weapons for fighting. Without them, the proletariat is “unable to win the struggle!”
What IS is saying here is that the working class can fight only within the framework permitted by the bourgeoisie, within the framework of bourgeois legality.
This is the worst kind of reformism. And it’s a good way for IS to justify its sabotage of the working-class fightback.
As a result, November 1, 1978, IS said virtually nothing about the 7000-strong demonstration in Montreal called by the CNTU to protest the Trudeau crisis measures, layoffs, unemployment and the Cadbury closing.
Instead, it talked about nothing but its “Operation Liberty”, a “massive campaign” which in reality came down to uniting with Trotskyists to make a fuss about mounting repression. (More about this later.)
IS has a mortal fear of class struggle and total contempt for the working class’s capacity to fight.
It goes on and on about how the labour movement is in a terrible fix; it’s not even sure that it can find its way out:
This situation is extremely serious. We must be conscious that if the bourgeoisie makes more gains it will represent more defeats for the working-class movement and the conditions of struggle will be all the more unfavorable. (Proletarian Unity, No. 9, p. 5)
This kind of warning the working class can do without! The bourgeoisie, with its control of state power, will undoubtedly make “gains,” as IS puts it. But so will the working class, and more and more gains, too, regardless of the conditions the struggle is waged in.
But IS closes its eyes to these gains. Just as it called the October 14, 1976 general strike a “flop,” IS will find ways to claim that the bourgeoisie wins every time and that the “future is bleak” for the working class.
Why is this? Because IS, like all revisionists, has absolutely no confidence in the power of the proletariat and the people. It is deadly afraid of the bourgeoisie and tries to spread its own cowardice and capitulation among the masses.
With this point of view, IS obviously doesn’t call for a strengthening of the labour movement to deal with repression – it doesn’t believe in it. Instead it waves the bogey of fascism in order to present the petty bourgeoisie – and among it, reformists of all stripes – as the vanguard of the struggle. The workers just have to follow.
In its July 1978 leaflet marking the July 22, 1977 shooting of the Robin Hood strikers, IS doesn’t underline the antagonistic contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie, it doesn’t show how we must answer the capitalists’ guns with armed struggle led by our communist party to seize state power. No, instead it calls on us to join a Civil Liberties Association!
Already our comrades at Commonwealth Plywood, Fleck Manufacturing, Radio Mutual, have shown us the road to follow: to fight back at any cost. And, on the initiative of the Quebec Human Rights League, this fightback is growing rapidly and becoming ever more organized. This is due to the formation of a coalition of all groups and individuals who want to fight against the growth of repression in our country. The Marxist-Leninist group In Struggle calls upon all unions and workers to join this coalition and take part in its activities.” (our translation, our emphasis)
So, as far as IS is concerned, the Quebec Human Rights League has become the vanguard the labour movement should follow. The Human Rights League works to defend democratic rights and that is a good thing, but it certainly won’t lead the working class’s struggle for socialist revolution in our country!
Once again IS is in fact changing its conception of the principal contradiction in Canada. This time the contradiction is between all “democratic forces” (led by the petty bourgeoisie and, why not, even the liberal bourgeoisie) and fascism, and no longer between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Anyway, the whole question was never more than one of “formulation” for IS.
IS’s famous “Operation Liberty” campaign presents us with yet another example of IS’s friendly relations with the Trotskyists.
The “Operation Liberty” coalition was set up in Montreal in May, 1978, supposedly to organize against political repression, In Struggle and the Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) were the two big backers of this scheme.
For weeks and weeks In Struggle built up Operation Liberty, calling it “huge mass movement,” “a great assembly of unions, popular and mass groups,” “a vast campaign against the Canadian bourgeoisie.”
According to IS the major union centrals in Quebec, the Quebec Human Rights League, and many more were backing it. But it didn’t take long for the balloon to burst.
The project was based on In Struggle’s fantasies. But the slick marketing of these political hucksters was in vain. The organizing groups dwindled until only IS and the Trotskyists remained. The grand scheme for a massive demonstration was put off, then scrapped altogether.
Completely isolated from the workers’ movement and the real struggles of the masses, IS had pumped away for weeks to fill its balloon with hot air. But the balloon has popped and In Struggle has come in for a bumpy landing.
The friendship between IS and the Trotskyists is nothing new. When the League refused to allow these counter-revolutionaries to distribute their garbage at our meetings, didn’t a scandalized IS rush to their rescue? Didn’t IS push for discussions with these professional saboteurs by inviting them to its meetings? (see The Forge, Vol. 2, no. 9) And we saw how these miserable little groups appreciate IS when the RWL invited it to join the 4thInternational, a world-wide family of counter-revolutionaries. (see The Forge, Vol. 2, no. 19)
But Operation Liberty really takes the cake. In Struggle and the RWL linked arms for this. In fact In Struggle desperately needed the RWL just to be able to claim that the “coalition” still existed!
Naturally IS tries to cover its tracks by writing articles criticizing the Trotskyists. But words are cheap.
Every day IS works with the Trotskyists; they speak at the same meetings, give out their literature together and so on. And just as each little Trotskyist sect has to denounce the others to justify its separate existence, so too IS must shout all the louder as any practical distinction between it and the Trotskyists fades away, and as its line gets closer and closer to theirs.
The IS revisionists will now go to the extreme of supporting a sold-out company union’s demagogy in order to attack League Communists’ work in a union executive.
IS undertook one of its anti-communist campaigns at Montreal’s Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Hospital in October, 1978.
At the time the hospital was being raided by the Montreal Hospital Employees Union (MHEU), well known for collaborating with hospital administrations. IS was there to give it a hand with its anti-union and anti-communist attacks.
The MHEU’s aim was to divide public sector workers on the eve of negotiations with the PQ government. It charged that the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) union at LHL was infiltrated by communists, was carrying out “Marxist” policies and was pushing the workers into a constant confrontation with the bosses.
In a leaflet handed out at this hospital, IS picked up the same arguments, writing: “Today the executive and the union are controlled by one group (the League)” which does “everything possible to stop the expression of points of view other than its own.” (our translation)
Isn’t that just one of the best ways you’ve ever seen to give the bosses a helping hand, supporting their efforts to split the union and weaken it?
What’s bothering IS – and the bosses for that matter – is the fact that due to the work of the League, the union is taking stands against class collaboration, isn’t afraid of confronting the bosses with direct action, and really defends the interests of the hospital workers. But what really gets IS’s goat is to see two League communists on the union executive, and the fact that they were clearly identified as communists when they were elected in a referendum of more than 1000 workers.
The IS revisionists are doing everything possible to stop the working class from taking up Marxism-Leninism, so they can’t stand seeing authentic communists gaining influence among the masses and being recognized as leaders.
This is why IS never misses a chance of maligning the work of League communists and spreading anti-communism among the workers.
This isn’t an isolated example. In fact IS began a demagogic campaign against the League very early on.
The campaign blew up several different themes. The first was the League’s supposed “sectarianism” and “dogmatism.” IS started howling about this in July ’76 and continued for some months thereafter.
We were “sectarian” because we refused to make alliances with reformists and revisionists, for example, around March 8, 1976.
And we were “dogmatic” because we unswervingly criticized IS’s opportunist line on the basis of Marxist-Leninist principles.
IS didn’t invent accusations of this nature. In the ’60s, the Khrushchevite clique charged the Chinese Communist Party – relentless defender of Marxism-Leninism – with “sectarianism and dogmatism.”
Then in February ’77, when the bourgeoisie began to crank up its anti-communist propaganda, IS rushed to get out of the target range. What did it do? First of all it justified and encouraged attacks on the League, and second, it protested that IS was “not like that.” IS told anyone who would listen that the attacks were not anti-communist but only “anti-League.”
So they said:
Above all, the Canadian workers will not let themselves be misled on the basis of the mistakes of certain elements of the Canadian Marxist-Leninist movement who add fat to the fire of anti-communism by their ultra-left actions and who thus play into the hands of the reaction. (Proletarian Unity, No. 3, p. 4, our emphasis)
By claiming that “leftist errors” on the part of MarxistLeninists were the cause of anti-communism, IS picked up yet another line from of its revisionist big brothers. The “Communist” Party of Canada, for example, has always maintained that repression was caused by the activities of “leftists” (that is, genuine communists.)
It was at this time as well that IS struck up a tune that would become one of its favourites: it accused the League of being too hard on reformists. IS went so far as to accuse the League of hunting down reformists in the unions and other mass organizations!
Right along with that, IS began to say that the League wanted “to take over” these organizations, that it was “undemocratic”, that it “infiltrated” (?!) the masses, that it “manipulated the people.” This is the familiar litany of the bourgeoisie, expressing the utmost contempt for the people who allow themselves to be “brainwashed by evil communists.” IS devoted itself to this kind of reactionary propaganda, leaping to protect the reformists from “communist infiltration.” That’s why they attacked mass organizations where League members are active, including the union at the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Hospital and the SOS Daycare movement.
Over two years, IS’s anti-communist campaign has been stepped up and has grown increasingly hysterical. It has built up to such a pitch that today attacking the League is IS’s main (and often only) theme of agitation. More and more, IS’s activities everywhere are confined to trying to sabotage struggles and communist work.
This is no surprise. The history of the international communist movement shows us that those who have sunk into revisionism become some of the most virulent anti-communists. We have only to look at how Krushchev’s clique, and today Brezhnev’s, violently attacked and are still attacking socialist China.
Revisionists are class enemies who try to disguise themselves with a: communist mask. That is why they inevitably reserve their greatest hatred for genuine communists who tear this mask off and reveal their real nature to the people.
[1]Fascism and bourgeois democracy are two different forms of bourgeois dictatorship. Fascism is the monopoly bourgeoisie’s open, unmasked dictatorship. It completely suppresses the few democratic rights and freedoms won by the people under bourgeois democracy.
When fascism is on the rise, it can be clearly perceived. For example, we would see a fascist party growing very rapidly and moving towards a takeover, or we would see rights like the right to assemble, to elections, freedom of the press and of speech suppressed one after another.
This is clearly not the present situation in Canada. What we are witnessing now is an intensification of repression under a bourgeois democratic regime.