First Published: In Struggle No. 85, March 31, 1977
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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IN STRUGGLE!’s last issue (special issue no. 84) contains an important error that we wish to rectify immediately. In the article “How is the 2nd national Conference of Canadian Marxist-Leninists going to proceed?” we state on p. 5:
“Since then other groups have turned up such as a group from Guelph, Ontario, and a study group from Moncton, New Brunswick. We will invite them to participate to the extent that they meet the criteria for belonging to the Marxist-Leninist movement and that the Conference itself will be a place of experimentation to determine who is and who isn’t Marxist-Leninist”.
The above mentioned group from Guelph is in fact the Organization of Communist Workers (ML) (OCW (ML) whose first and only public manifestation was the publication of a 200 page document last November, document intitled The Movement for the Party. Contrary to what the previously quoted article stated, IN STRUGGLE! never intended to invite this group to the 2nd Conference of Marxist-Leninists for a very simple reason: the OCW (ML) is not a Marxist-Leninist group, it in no way corresponds to the criteria that we defined in issue no. 1 of PROLETARIAN UNITY. Finally, we can already affirm that the OCW (ML) is in fact a counter-revolutionary group similar to the so-called CPC (ML) or any Trotskyist sect. Why?
The OCW (ML) announces in The Movement for the Party that since its own creation the Marxist-Leninist movement was reborn. Surprise, surprise! Many years after the creation of the Progressive Workers’ Movement, 3 years after the creation of IN STRUGGLE!, 1 year after the creation of the Canadian Communist League (ML), after all this, the Marxist-Leninist movement was born with the creation of the OCW (M-L) in November 1975!
Of course, the OCW (ML) hastened to dump all the Marxist-Leninist groups that proceeded it into the garbage can of revisionism, to exclude them from the communist movement, as it clearly states it throughout its document (particularly on p. 36 for those who have had the courage to read the whole text).
However the sectarianism of the OCW(ML) is such that it even claims to have become one of the only representatives of Marxism-Leninism in the world. Armed with great pretention and quotes galor from all the existing Marxist-Leninist classics, OCW (ML) teaches us that the Chinese Communist Party and the Party of Labour of Albania as well as most of the International Communist movement has long fallen into “revisionism”. Nothing more than that! It even hasted to spread the news around the world by sending telegrams to the Chinese and Albanian Parties in which it stated:
“There has been no truly international and truly communist movement for more than 40 years, that is, since the Communist International adopted Social-Democratic Social-chauvinist positions during the United Front period in the middle of the 1930’s.” (The Movement for the Party p. 244).
Must one say more in order to show that by excommunicating everyone from the Marxist-Leninist movement by lowly attacks without a shred of proof against the International Communist as well as the Communist Parties of China and Albania, by denying the historical role of the great leaders of the international proletariat, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, the newly born OCW (ML), has expelled itself from the Marxist-Leninist movement.
The lies and slanders of the OCW (ML), have fooled no one. To build division into theory, to denounce the Chinese and Albanian Parties, instruments of the dictatorship to the Proletariat in China and Albania, is not the work of Marxist-Leninists. Rather it’s the trade-mark Trotskyists sects that run around loose in Canada, and that now appear to have a new member in their ranks. The OCW (ML) can’t attend the Conference of Canadian Marxist-Leninists, for it would be out of place there.
The editors of IN STRUGGLE! want to excuse themselves to the readers regarding this mistake found in the newspaper’s pages. In struggle for the 2nd Conference of Canadian Marxist-Leninists!