35 Years of Spartacist Canada

This October marks the 35th year of Spartacist Canada, the Marxist newspaper of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Since 1975, SC has remained true to the purpose stated in our first issue: “to expose the treacherous lies of the bourgeoisie, to bring to our readers an understanding of the irreconcilable class antagonisms that characterize capitalist society, and to put forward the program, strategy and tactics necessary to realize the victory of the international proletariat.”

SC was launched in a period of turmoil on the left. Among our founding cadre were individuals and groupings won from various centrist and left-reformist groups as well as youth new to Marxism. Today the bulk of what passes for Canadian left organizations are simply anti-Communist social democrats. Starting in the late 1970s, many left groups moved sharply to the right, notably by embracing the imperialist Cold War II against the Soviet Union. Groups falsely alleging to be Trotskyist cheered on the CIA-backed Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan who murdered schoolgirls in their “holy war” against the 1979 Red Army intervention. The fake left also joined with Ronald Reagan and the pope to support the clerical, anti-Communist Solidarność movement in Poland.

Despite decades of misrule under a nationalist, Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union remained a workers state, the product of the 1917 October Revolution. The ICL’s fight against counterrevolution in the USSR and the deformed workers states of East Europe—notably in East Germany in 1989-90—and for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats attracted militants from other left currents to the TL, a process of revolutionary regroupment that strengthened our organization.

Rejecting Canadian nationalism in all its forms, SC has always championed the right of the oppressed French-speaking Québécois nation to self-determination. Since 1995, we have advocated independence for Quebec. This is a recognition that the anti-Quebec chauvinism fostered by the ruling class and its social-democratic henchmen, and the bourgeois Quebec nationalism which it fuels, constitute a decisive barrier to the development of class consciousness in this country.

SC is our Marxist weapon of intervention into the class struggle, and is thus highly polemical. We seek to expose the pretenders to socialism who in the main preach illusions in pushing the NDP to the left. We fight to forge a binational, multiethnic, internationalist revolutionary party through breaking the working class from the politics of social democracy. We encourage our readers to subscribe to SC and the other publications of the International Communist League, to contact us, discuss and get involved in the activities of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste and Spartacus Youth Clubs.