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	Spartacist Canada No. 178	Fall 2013

TL/LT Thirteenth National Conference

The Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), held its Thirteenth National Conference this summer. Members of our Toronto and Vancouver locals and the Spartacus Youth Club as well as representatives from the ICL’s International Secretariat and our sections in the U.S. and France attended the two-day gathering, as did several comrades from Montreal. One of the decisions adopted was to establish a TL/LT organizing committee in Montreal. This follows our interventions into last year’s militant student strike and our organization of a well-attended monthly Marxist study circle in the city starting that summer. The main conference resolution noted: “If we can consolidate a presence in Montreal while maintaining our existing locals—notably our small Vancouver branch—and our regular press, this would be a significant step in building a fighting Marxist propaganda group in Canada.”

The resolution, prepared by our outgoing Central Committee and approved unanimously with some amendments, situated our work in an international framework. Five years after the start of the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s, the bourgeois rulers are continuing their austerity attacks. There has been resistance including one-day general strikes in several European countries, notably Greece, while South Africa has seen repeated militant strikes by black miners. But the war on the workers has overwhelmingly been one-sided. The labour bureaucrats and social democrats have accepted, at times openly supported or, as in some European countries, directly implemented the capitalists’ attacks, while diverting discontent into nationalism and anti-immigrant demagogy. Noting that the political period continues to be defined, if unevenly, by the impact of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe two decades ago, the document continued:

“The struggles that have erupted in various countries have underlined the gap between the Marxist program and the prevalent consciousness among workers and the oppressed. The ‘Arab spring’ upsurges in North Africa were mainly channelled into religious fundamentalism. In Latin America, Chávez-style bourgeois populism is touted as ‘21st century socialism’ by a host of reformist groups who no longer even pretend to fight for workers revolution. Calls to build broad reformist or populist parties explicitly counterposed to Leninism are ubiquitous among our fake-Marxist opponents. It is crucial that we seek to intersect with our program struggles that arise. But the ICL’s tasks remain overwhelmingly propagandistic: explaining a proletarian-revolutionary worldview to a relatively small audience; recruiting, educating and training a Marxist cadre.”

There continue to be big shifts in the concentration of the proletariat globally, notably the growth of China’s industrial working class. The conference affirmed that our call to defend China and the other remaining deformed workers states (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos) against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution will remain central to our propaganda, including against the China-bashing anti-Communism of the labour misleaders. At the same time, workers political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies combined with socialist revolutions in the imperialist world is the only road to the all-sided, egalitarian modernization of such countries.

Factory closures and mass layoffs have decreased the social weight of the proletariat in Canada, especially in the Ontario industrial heartland. Sapped by bureaucratic betrayal, the unions have declined considerably, though the unionization rate is still far higher than in the U.S. The next step in the capitalist offensive may well be a move to ban the closed shop, perhaps initially in Ontario if the Tory opposition can oust the current unstable Liberal provincial regime. This would be the biggest legislative attack on Canadian labour since World War II, likely provoking major protests into which we must be ready to intervene. Our propaganda will continue to emphasize that past gains won by the workers came through class struggle, not begging the bosses. The fight against the rulers’ anti-union offensive poses the need for a new, class-struggle leadership.

The rampage of the federal Tory government extends to attacks on science, culture, Native rights and more. The conference noted in particular the vast expansion of the temporary foreign worker program, which has made the lives of new immigrants ever more precarious. A class-struggle labour leadership would fight to unionize these foreign-born workers, demanding equal pay for equal work and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. This is the only way to undercut attempts by the capitalists to bring down the wages and working conditions of all workers by playing off one nationality against the other.

The Quebec student strike was the most sustained social struggle in this country in years, generating a crisis that politicized a layer of Québécois youth and led to the fall of the Liberal provincial government. The conference document noted that the politicization was “fairly broad but also shallow, largely remaining in the framework of left nationalism and/or anarcho-liberal activism.” As we warned, the election of the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois was not a victory, but has meant continued attacks on workers, the poor and student youth.

The building of an authentic Marxist nucleus in Quebec is especially important because of the national divide that defines much of Canadian politics. More often than not, developments in Quebec and in English Canada differ starkly; the student strike, for example, had little echo on English Canadian campuses even though tuition is far higher there. We advocate independence for Quebec as the best means to break the mutually reinforcing hold of Anglo chauvinism and Quebec nationalism on the working class. Defense of Quebec’s national rights is a litmus test for the English Canadian left and workers movement. In Quebec, we emphasize our opposition to nationalism, including the variant propagated by the populist Québec Solidaire, darling of the reformist left.

The TL/LT has had modest growth in the past period, in which we have heavily emphasized cadre training and education in the historically evolved lessons of Marxism. Meanwhile, the get-rich-quick schemes of our reformist opponents have driven them further to the right and even toward disintegration. These pseudo-socialists hailed the populist Occupy movement as a harbinger of revolutionary struggle, but it soon collapsed and has left little trace beyond existing anarcho-liberal circles. In a sign of the times, Paul Kellogg—a long-time central leader of the International Socialists who recently resigned—now calls to “turn your back on the small left” and seek complete immersion in “movements” around environmentalism and support to bourgeois populist governments in Latin America. The one outfit that has grown somewhat, the Fightback group, is deeply reformist, unconditionally backing the right-wing social democrats of the NDP and opposing the call for Quebec independence.

In the absence of major controversies over current work, much of our conference was devoted to educational sessions and discussions of aspects of Trotskyist history. A presentation by the I.S. representative, comrade J. Milner, addressed the disputes in the Trotskyist movement over the constitutional referendums of 1945 and 1946 in France, during a period of great political turmoil after World War II. This discussion, first pursued in the ICL’s French section, continues internationally. A class by comrade Russell Stoker, the first in a projected series, looked at the crucial interconnections between slavery and the rise of imperialism, with a focus on Britain’s role in the Caribbean and India. Building on classes held at our Twelfth National Conference two years ago, Charles Galarneau and Andrew Shilling gave presentations on the developments in the Quebec left in the 1960s and ’70s with particular reference to the national question. We project addressing these various issues in future articles.

Following the singing of the Internationale, the international workers’ anthem, in English, French and other languages, the conference concluded by electing a new Central Committee to guide the work of the TL/LT until our next such gathering.