First Published: Canadian Revolution No. 3, October-November 1975
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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A strike movement without precedent is breaking out in Canada at this time. The present crisis of capitalism is seriously shaking bourgeois power and intensifying the contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In Quebec alone, the bosses ’deplore’ that 1974 saw 1.4 million man-days lost.
More and more unions are going beyond the orders of the union bosses and making spontaneous strikes, or are also spontaneously defying the injunctions and repressive laws of the capitalist State. In another spontaneous outburst, the wives of strikers are going out to support their husbands on the picket lines.
This is why it is correct to say that the objective conditions of the class struggle are moving forward in our country.
But although the working class is protesting against the treason of their present union leaders, although it is expressing the need for revolutionary leadership, there are those who wish to, ’from within’, take the lead in these economic struggles, in other words, to substitute themselves for the present leaders.
This theory termed ’implantation’ says, basically, that in order for the workers to judge the worth of one group or another, it is essential for the intellectuals to go and take the place of the workers, substituting themselves for the workers in order to lead their battles, thus showing the proof of their ’commitment’. It thus becomes necessary to compete with the ’self-sacrifice’ of the worker priests implanted in the factories in order to prove the revolutionary superiority of Marxism-Leninism over Christianity.
This same tendency accuses of ’insufficiency’, Marxist-Leninist propaganda based on ’contacts from outside’ with the workers. The comrades advancing these erroneous ideas have never done serious propaganda among the working class and certainly are ignoring the fact that this work has already produced concrete results. Lenin could not have been more clear on this question. Not only did he refute the economist tendencies of his era, similar to those we are criticizing today, but he also showed the importance of such propaganda being done on as large a scale and made as politically comprehensive as possible.
There has never been too much of such pushing on from the outside; on the contrary, there has been far too little, all too little of it in our movement, for we have been stewing too assiduously in our own juice; we have bowed far too slavishly to the elementary ’economic’ struggle of the workers against the employer and the government. We professional revolutionaries must and will make it our business to engage in this kind of ’pushing’ a hundred times more forcibly than we have done hitherto. But the very fact that you select so despicable a phrase as ’pushing from the outside’ – a phrase which cannot but raise in the workers (at least in the workers who are as unenlightened as you yourselves) a sense of distrust toward all who bring them political knowledge and revolutionary experience from outside, and raise in them an instinctive desire to resist all such people – proves that you are demagogues, and demagogues are the worst enemies of the working class. (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Foreign Languages Press, 1973, p. 150-151.)
The role of revolutionary intellectuals is therefore not to show proof of their voluntarism and go off to ’revolutionize themselves’ in the factory. This is what the worker-priests do. Let’s leave them their practice of petit-bourgeois idealism.
The role of Marxist-Leninists, their principal task at the present time, is to bring to the working class the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism, the tool it is lacking in order to free itself from capitalist exploitation. As for its fighting ability, the working class has more than enough to spare for all the petit-bourgeois idealists. As for dedication, it has this as well; this is called class instinct, class solidarity. As for leaders, the working class has many, who have already led, and are still leading, bitter struggles against the boss.
What the working class needs is large-scale political propaganda which will arm it against the opportunism rampant in its ranks, which will show it the path of revolution, which will call on its capacity to battle for political and not solely economic objectives. Such a propaganda will show it that the solution in getting rid of capitalism is not found in the immediate, defensive economic battles, but rather in an offensive struggle, large and powerful, in the political struggle, the class Struggle, which it must put itself at the head of to lead all of the people and carry out the socialist revolution.
Only thus can Marxist-Leninists be able to play their principal role which is to contribute to raising the level of consciousness of the working class, rally the conscious elements to communism and develop in its midst a solid communist organization. These are the subjective conditions which are so sorely lacking in the development of the Canadian revolution at the present time.
To build the proletarian party, the essential instrument in leading the class struggle in a planned way, this is our tactical objective, the indispensable condition for realizing the strategic task: the proletarian revolution in our country. But this party, proclaimed so many times by numerous groups vacillating in their understanding of Marxism-Leninism, despite their revolutionary pretentions, this proletarian party does not yet exist. For in order to assure solid foundations in the working class, it is still necessary to follow a rather lengthy route, which includes the creation of a Marxist-Leninist organization of struggle for the party. This organization, by centralizing its efforts, in summing up experience, and in winning advanced workers to communism, will make possible the formation of a working-class vanguard which will determine the party’s proletarian character and will accomplish the fusion of the working class movement and the Marxist-Leninist movement.
Unite our efforts!
Rally to the ranks of EN LUTTE!
Create the
Marxist-Leninist organization of struggle for the party!
EN LUTTE – May 8, 1975