Since the drafting of the following critique of the Bolshevik Tendency’s Party-building line, that group has provided the movement with a classic object lesson in the process of consolidation of opportunism and revisionism and the immense danger of any accomodation of such trends. We are not referring here to the recent split in the editorial board of the Canadian Revolution. Such a split is the natural and inevitable consequence of the editorial board’s Centrist policy. Given the active role the C.R. plays in fostering opportunism, in so far as this split weakens the ability of the editorial board to maintain its Centrism it is a positive ’contribution’.
The danger we speak of lies in the continuing pollution of the movement by contemptible prattle such as the Bolshevik Tendency’s second ’major contribution’: Nationhood or Genocide: The Struggle of the Native People Against Canadian and American Imperialism published in C.R. #4. In this article the Bolshevik Tendency has extended, broadened and deepened the opportunism and revisionism already apparent in its Party-building position: Why Building the Party is the Principal Task (C.R. #1). The basis of both articles is petty bourgeois hostility to the working class and complete rejection of the class line. In its first essay, the Bolshevik Tendency expresses this hostility primarily through its identification of ’workplace struggles’ with ’economism’, a maneuver used to ’build a party’ without the working class. In its second article, the Bolshevik Tendency has gene much further than simply trying to keep the working class away from the Party. It has taken the Native question as a means to challenge the absolutely revolutionary character and role of the working class, and consequently to liquidate the revolutionary character of the dictatorship of the proletariat. While pretending to ’uphold’ the struggles of Native people, the Bolshevik Tendency in fact denies what is most essential: proletarian leadership over all democratic and national struggles. At the same time, it portrays the Canadian proletariat as a potentially, if not actively reactionary mass benefiting from imperialist exploitation of Native people. It thus negates the national question for Native people, and splits the proletariat from its objective allies It achieves, in short, Trotskyism.
The Bolshevik Tendency rejects the only objective, scientific and comprehensive approach to the determination of the national status of any people: Stalin’s definition of a nation. This ’abstract’ and ’narrow’ method may be suitable for such “ubiquitous anthropologists” as Lenin and Stalin, but it does not befit our ’theoreticians’ grand designs. The problem is that on the one hand, the Bolshevik Tendency holds that the Native people are a “tribal, colonized peoples”; and on the other hand, it recognizes that, according to Marxism-Leninism, this level of social development does not constitute a nation. The Bolshevik Tendency finds itself in a bind. The existence of a Native nation is essential for the Bolshevik Tendency’s opportunist conclusions on the Canadian working class, and yet Marxism-Leninism provides no assistance. What to do? The solution to this contradiction undoubtedly came readily to our ’Bolsheviks’: simply reject Stalin’s definition, declare the Native people a ’nation’, and grant them the right to secede. After all, the Bolshevik Tendency is not at all interested in resolving the question scientifically. It was out to grant the Native people nationhood regardless of objective conditions, with or without the help of Marxism-Leninism, as a necessary prerequisite to achieving its larger goal. Having liberated itself from those ’metaphysical’ ’abstract’, ’cumbersome’ Marxist-Leninist criteria, the Bolshevik Tendency is able to pass directly into full-blown opportunism. We are told that not only are Native people a nation, but an oppressed nation of the Third World, engaging in a national liberation struggle. Clearly, the Bolshevik Tendency has not revised Stalin simply to place Native people in the Third World. The preoccupation of all revisionism, whatever form it takes, is the working class. This truism is affirmed when the Bolshevik Tendency turns its attention to the Canadian proletariat and ’finds’ what it was looking for all along: that the proletariat as a whole benefits from imperialism and thus has a material stake in oppressing the Native nation.
The Bolshevik Tendency’s ’benefit theory’, which they have the utter gall to portray as the “cornerstone of Lenin’s theory of imperialism”, has two essential aspects. One, that an “exceptionally high” proportion of the Canadian working class has been bought off and rendered in-motile by the fruits “accruing” from “imperialism generally and the exploitation of the Native people in particular”. A corollary to this is that the working classes of all the advanced capitalist countries, not only Canada, are so flooded with “material benefits”, are so intoxicated by plunder and booty, that they have lost their revolutionary character, and can become active only after being ’stimulated’ by the loss of the ’advantages’. Secondly, that the key factor for ending the ’privileged’ status of the working class of the advanced countries, and thereby ’restoring’ the objective revolutionary role of the working class, is the national liberation movements of the Third World. For Canada, of course, this means the struggle of the Native people.
The Bolshevik Tendency has concocted a hybrid form of the neo-Trotskyite line so popular during the petty bourgeois movement of the 1960’s, that is: Marxism-Leninism has been ’proven’ obsolete, since the working class of the advanced capitalist countries have been ’bought off by crumbs from the table of imperialism and is now a backward class. ’This being the case’, the only revolutionary force is the all-class national liberation movements of the Third World. The Bolshevik Tendency ’opposes’ this ’Third Worldism’s’ absolute rejection of proletarian revolution with its own theory on the ’relative’ revolutionary character of the working class. This minor ’improvement’ on overt Trotskyism achieves the same effect: formal recognition of proletarian revolution, but its real and absolute rejection. According to the Bolshevik Tendency, the correct Marxist-Leninist line derives from the simple adaptation of ’dialectics’ to the fundamental premise of this neo-Trotskyite analysis. That is, indeed the working class has been swept away by the bribes of imperialism and is a reactionary, backward class. But, reasons the Bolshevik Tendency, with the successful national liberation movements striking a blow from the rear, narrowing the sphere of imperialist domination, crisis erupts in the advanced capitalist countries, and the gluttonous workers are deprived of their abounding material benefits. Through this new diet the working class is ’dialectically’ transformed into its opposite, and ’becomes’ revolutionary. Evidently, the Bolshevik Tendency thinks that even wage-slavery is too good for the ’rich’, ’lay-about’ Canadian working class. What it ’really’ needs to be ’energized’ for revolutionary action is utter destitution, chronic unemployment and starvation, the real ’benefits’ of imperialism. This line is as old as Trotskyism. All our ’Bolsheviks’ have done is ’enriched’ this reactionary line with their own catch-phrases.
The strategy stemming from this ’analysis’ of imperialism was put forward consistentently by the 1960’s ’Third Worldism’: reject the revolutionary role of the proletariat; concentrate all efforts on ’supporting’ the New Democratic national liberation movements; and ally with all those who will join in this ’support’ work, regardless of class. The Bolshevik Tendency follows suit, but with its own ’creative’ additions: Of course, communists must not consider “the proletariat to be the automatic liberator of all humanity by definition” and must not “make working in the working class everything”, but we must also remember the ’relativity’ of proletarian revolution and not despair of the working class ’entirely’. We have, states the Bolshevik Tendency in effect, every faith that the working class may possibly be able to make a revolution. All that is required to bring this about is to focus our attention on the Native national struggle, that is, away from the working class. The successful conclusion of the Native struggle, you see, will “make it easier for the workers to overthrow capitalism”, since, of course, the workers will be so impoverished they will be forced to act. We, the Bolshevik Tendency, will, of course, do everything in our efforts to keep the Native struggle in the forefront and sharply condemn every effort to make “the working class everything”. More, to prove our proletarian internationalism, we will personally attempt to worsen the conditions of the proletariat and thus hasten the downfall of imperialism. The Bolshevik Tendency has in fact worsened the conditions of the proletariat by throwing such refuse into our movement. It is precisely this sort of political psychosis that attempts to divert the focus of the movement from the working class and negate its revolutionary role.
By making the working class and thus the dictatorship of the proletariat only conditionally revolutionary, a by-product of the national liberation struggles, socialism is subsumed under the all-class alliance of the national struggle and thus is equated with New Democracy. This is clearly shown in the Bolshevik Tendency’s position that the communists’ gravest error would be to participate in the spontaneous, defensive struggle of the working class and try to raise it to a class conscious political struggle for state power. One must not better the conditions of the working class, according to our ’Bolsheviks’, but worsen them. To participate in the workers struggles would be, after all, to aid and abet the ’benefits’ of imperialism. True to its chosen calling as theoreticians of opportunism, the Bolshevik Tendency draws the logically necessary conclusion that it is ’economism’ to consider the working class as an objectively and absolutely revolutionary class “regardless of the objective conditions of the imperialist system and regardless of the state of political consciousness of the masses”. In spite of its certain protestations at being ’misunderstood’, pleas of ’relativity’, or slander of all the ’dogmatic metaphysicians’, the Bolshevik Tendency’s ’argument’ amounts to nothing more than labelling as ’economism’ all adherence to the fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism that because of its objective relation to production, by definition, “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class” (Marx).
Once the dross is cut through, it is clear that the Bolshevik Tendency’s ’benefit theory’ is identical to the Trotskyite ’white skin privilege’ line, and is counterrevolutionary to the core. Not only is it a fundamental revision of Marxist-Leninist principle, its practical outcome is concretely divisive and splittist. It attempts to set the different national sections of the working class and communist movements against each other by creating antagonisms where, objectively, there are none. This is done by loudly prating about the importance of national differences, by accusing the working class and communist movements of racism at every turn, by associating the working class with the bourgeoisie’s assumption of “rights of hegemony over the Native peoples”, by proclaiming that the Native peoples “are not obligated to join hand in hand with members of the nation which oppresses them, in any struggle, for any reason”, and so on. This attempt to break-up and wreck the movement is crystallized in the Bolshevik Tendency’s Bundist call for a separate political party for the Native Marxist-Leninists.
The Bolshevik Tendency’s attempts to make inroads into the communist movement via its thinly-veiled ’Marxist-Leninist’ anti-communist tracts must be thoroughly exposed and blocked. The Bolshevik Tendency is appealing to frustrated, ambitious petty bourgeois intellectuals in general and to its counterparts among the Native Marxist-Leninists in particular. Through these strata it hopes to influence both the working class and Native movements with the aim of splitting both from Marxist-Leninist leadership. The Bolshevik Tendency’s sole function, whether consciously or not, is to undermine the work of building proletarian revolution in Canada. This reactionary sect has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism and has placed itself fully outside and in opposition to the communist movement. It is the responsibility of every Marxist-Leninist in our movement to isolate and defeat this sect as a political tendency and prevent its accommodation in our ranks.
In this context it is necessary to mention the role of the C.R. editorial board in aiding the Bolshevik Tendency through the wide dissemination of their completely reactionary line. The publication of the Native article is only one of many clear examples for those who have naively asked where and when the C.R. has ’allowed’ opportunism to ’mysteriously’ slip past it. It is bad enough that our movement is so weak and so dominated by opportunism that a sect such as the Bolshevik Tendency could appear and escape, for the moment, the punishment they so richly deserve. It is even worse that such opportunism is promoted and granted legitimacy by editors who claim to oppose all strains of opportunism, claim to adhere to Marxism-Leninism, but simultaneously devote 28 out of 68 pages of their allegedly ’Marxist-Leninist’ journal to a neo-Trotskyite attack on the working class and the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism. The editorial board expresses its total opportunism not only by printing such an article, but especially by printing it without exposing it. By its silence, the C.R. grants the Bolshevik Tendency’s political line credibility as being ’Marxist-Leninist’ and objectively allies itself to it.
It would be a mistake to view the appearance of this one article as an isolated, unfortunate accident. The publication of the Bolshevik Tendency’s articles in the pages of C.R. is consistent with its publication of J. Scott’s article or the blatant social-democracy of the Halifax ’comrades’ without criticism or comment. All of this is merely the externalized, concrete expression of the opportunism that exists within the editorial board. It is the inevitable outcome of a grouping that is united, not on the basis of clear political line, but on the basis of accommodating contending and even reactionary political lines. As such, the journal was bound to be a rallying point for a wide range of opportunist tendencies, and become the Canadian equivalent of the Guardian.
The editorial board has taken a ’stand’ against the Bolshevik Tendency, not on the basis of its political line, but on its ’method of struggle’. The manner in which the Bolshevik Tendency split from the C.R. editorial board was unquestionably unprincipled. But such unprincipled behavior was perfectly in line with the unprincipled formation of the editorial board. In making its ’bold criticism’ of the Bolshevik Tendency’s ’method of struggle’, the editorial board is merely trying to cover its own tracks. It has no intention of exposing the Bolshevik Tendency’s Trotskyism since that would lead, immediately, to exposing its own. The responsibility falls to our movement, then, to expose and isolate both.