The PWM gained control of the local Canada-China Friendship Association. According to Ron Haywood, “The association was converted by the Maoists into a propagandists mouthpiece for the thought of Mao Tsetung. One had no business in the CCFA unless the thought of Mao was foremost in his mind and he supported the cultural revolution.”
The PWM followed the evolving antipathy of the Chinese for Fidel Castro. In February 1968, the PWM’s paper, Progressive Worker, argued that the Cuban regime was “essentially a bourgeois-democratic revolution masquerading as socialism.” It was headed by “petty-bourgeois leaders,” who sought only “a patching of the capitalist system.”
Finally, the Progressive Workers Movement separated itself from the broader movement of protest against the Vietnam War. It claimed that that movement was controlled by “counterrevolutionaries.”[102]
There is no information available concerning how long the PWM survived into the 1970s.
The Canadian Party of Labor
The Progressive Workers Movement, although centered in British Columbia, did have some branches in the rest of Canada. One of these was in Toronto, and it was its breaking away from the PWM that gave rise to the second Canadian Maoist organization. This was the Canadian Party of Labor (CPL).
The splitaway of the CPL was over a disagreement concerning Vietnam and the war there. The Toronto group in November 1968 adopted a position which was then being propagated by the Progressive Labor Party, which then held the “Chinese franchise” in the United States. They argued that the North Vietnamese and the NLF in South Vietnam had become “revisionist,” because they had agreed to enter peace talks with the Americans and the Republic of Vietnam in Paris. The Vancouver-based PWM would not accept this position and so the Toronto group broke away to form the CPL. Shortly afterwards, when a Vietcong (NLF) delegation visited Canada, the CPL strongly attacked them for the NLF’s taking part in the Paris talks.
The CPL shared the PWM’s antipathy for the United States-based international unions that were joined in the Canadian Labor of Congress. They labeled these organizations “Yankee loyalists” and “agents of U.S. policies.” In a strike in a Continental Can plant in Toronto in February 1969, the CPL temporarily gained leadership of a strike called by a small union that had broken away from the International Union of Operating Engineers, and they blocked efforts to get the International Pulp and Sulphite Union to aid the walkout, which was subsequently lost.
The CPL had some following among students on the local campuses in Ontario. They followed the policy of getting these students involved in local workers’ strikes. According to one hostile (Trotskyite) source, “In the trade-union arena, CPL had a consistent strategy of organizing picket-line mobilization for selected strikes, preferably small strikes which they have a chance of taking over. Although CPL nominally supports unions, its activities actually undermine, rather than complement the existing unions.”[103]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the separatist movement gained much support in Quebec. There arose the Parti Quebecois urging independence for the province. To its left, there also appeared a terrorist group, the Front de Liberation de Quebec (FLQ).
Late in 1970, the FLQ kidnapped two politicians, Cross and Laporte, presumably to put pressure on the Canadian government to allow the separation of Quebec. The Canadian Party of Labor opposed the FLQ.
The CPL issued a statement of its position in which it asked, “Has the ruling class been weakened by the Cross and Laporte kidnappings? Have we workers moved ahead in our struggle against the rotten boss system and for socialism as a result? NOT A BIT! … FLQ actions have never had anything to do with working-class struggle. While workers have been fighting year after year, and needing better organization and class unity more than ever (that is needing a real communist party which knows how to lead our fight), the FLQ has spent its time planting bombs in letter-boxes, factories, statues and stock exchanges. Today they abduct diplomats. Tomorrow it will be political assassination or skyjacking. And what do we workers have to do with all this? Nothing.”
The CPL presented working-class unity as the solution to the separatist problem. Its statement said that “All of us, workers of both nations, have the same foot on our necks: the bosses’ state. To get rid of it we need to unite in a single fighting organization. … We need unity. The bosses and the FLQ led us into isolation. Unite with the French-speaking workers, fight anti-Quebec racism and nationalism, the bosses’ double-edged knife! French and English-speaking workers fighting together can win!”[104]
The Canadian Party of Labor, which had been closely associated with the U.S. Progressive Labor Party, joined the PLP in breaking with the Chinese after President Nixon’s trip to Peking in 1972.[105] They clearly continued to regard one another as sister organizations as late as 1978, although by that time they were engaged in a polemic over the issue of self-determination for Quebec. In that discussion, the CPL was supporting the concept, and the PLP was opposing it.[106]
The Canadian Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)
By 1970, the largest Maoist group in Canada was the Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist) or CCM. In Quebec it was known as Les Intellectuels et Ouvriers Patriotes du Quebec (Marxistes-Leninistes), and it was said to be “the only cross-Canada Maoist organization,” but “it has no great strength in any one area.” It had organized a number of front organizations among students, Afro-Asian youths, and in other fields.
The CCM had its origins in the Canadian Internationalists (Marxist Leninist Youth and Student Movement). A Trotskyist source reported in 1970 that “although the activity of the leaders of the Internationalists spans a number of years, it is only over the past two years, since they shifted their major forces from Vancouver to Montreal, that they have become a significant force. Their only relation to other Maoist currents has been the loose working relationship which they had until recently with the Vancouver-based Progressive Workers Movement.”
This same source said that “The CCM sees Canada, and the world generally, as being in an immediate revolutionary situation. The task for them is not mass actions around popular and defensively formulated demands which are designed to raise consciousness, but super-militant confrontations and violence by a small group to propel the awaiting revolutionary masses out onto the streets behind the bright red banner of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought’ and the Canadian Communist Movement.”[107]
In 1970, the CCM became the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) or CPC (M-L). Ivan Avakumovic noted at the time that the membership consists mostly of young persons and includes a fair number of recent immigrants from the United States, the West Indies, and the Indian subcontinent. Leaders include Hardial Bains, chairman of the Norman Bethune Institute, and Robert A. Cruse, national secretary of the CPC (M-L). Bains was an immigrant from India.
Unlike Maoist groups in some countries, the CPC (M-L) participated fairly regularly in elections. In 1972 it ran 52 candidates in federal elections in a campaign in which it demanded “elimination of U.S. imperialist domination of Canada and Quebec” and “ascendancy of the working class as the ruling class.” Avakumovic noted that the party’s nominees received 9,000 votes as opposed to the 7,000 for the pro-Soviet party. He added, “All the Maoist candidates lost their deposits and polled fewer votes than members of the CPC when both presented candidates in the same riding.”[108]
102
All foregoing from Ron Haywood, “The Rise and Decline of Maoism in Canada,” in Intercontinental Press, an organ of Socialist Workers Party, New York, January 26, 1970, pages 65—67.
103
Keith Locke, “The Maoist Canadian Party of Labour,” Intercontinental Press, March 9, 1970, pages 215—216.
104
Challenge, organ of Progressive Labor Party, New York, November 22, 1970, pages 2 and 15.
105
Desmond J. Fitzgerald, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1977, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 415.
107
Keith Locke, “The ‘Canadian Communist Movement (M-L),” Intercontinental Press, March 23, 1970, pages 262—263.
108
Ivan Avakumovic, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1973, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 303.