Business leaders, the media and crown corporations prepared the summit of the Americas at an international energy conference held in Montreal on February 14, 2001. The invitation to this conference is interesting to say the least:

“…The 12th International Energy Conference organized by Hydro-Quebec and Gaz Métropolitain will be held this year for the first time as part of The Conference of Montreal. At a time when energy deregulation raises serious questions in public opinion, this new component of the Conference, open to all registered participants, will explore the theme of energy in a context of free trade.
On the eve of the important Summit of the Americas in which 34 heads of State from countries all over the continent will meet in Quebec, the many guests and experts of the Montreal Conference presents a unique opportunity to consider the major issues that will be central to the Quebec Summit. This 7th edition of the Conference will be of particular significance for business leaders and major organizations that will have to adapt to changes suggested by the proposed expansion of the Free Trade Zone of the Americas.” announced by the founding president of the Montreal Conference, Mr. Gil Rémillard.

Partners
The 7th edition of the Montreal Conference was put together in collaboration with Inter-American Development Bank and benefits from special support from the Canadian government and from the active participation of the government of Quebec. This forum has also been made possible by several sponsors, including Bombardier, Power Corporation of Canada, Hydro-Québec, Gaz Métropolitain, BCE, Alcan, Air Canada, Export Development Corporation, the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, CAE, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, SNC-Lavalin, le Fonds de Solidarité de la Fédération des travailleurs du Québec, the daily newspapers La Presse and The Gazette and many other partners.”

All these bourgeois, officials, media representatives and the FTQ through its Solidarity Fund, were ready for the Quebec Summit. The Canadian and Québecois capitalist State, was well represented by the Export Development Corporation, the Business Development Bank of Canada, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. The organization of the conference “benefits from special support from the Canadian government and from the active participation of the Government of Quebec.”

These predators who live off the sweat and blood of the world’s working class were well protected: 7,000 police, hundreds of soldiers with tear-gas, plastic and rubber bullets, hundreds of arrests and dozens injured.

This horde of law enforcement for the protection, on the one hand, of corrupt politicians from all over the continent like Bush, Jean Chrétien and Bernard Landry, business people and officials, and for the brutalization, on the other hand, of tens of thousands of demonstrators, workers from the industrial and service industry, teachers, health workers, students, retired people, the unemployed, temporary workers and so on.

I couldn’t help noticing that union marshals redirected demonstrators to parking lots miles from the demonstration. Now, what on Earth could be the reason for directing this civil march to a municipal parking lot, far from the action at the Summit? We could sum up the outdated rhetoric of the union leaders’ with the following sentence: “A civic action within the framework of civil society (no need to speak of social classes here) can influence globalization. They maintained, and still do, that there are no social classes, that the State is somehow neutral. One could also see leftists and community groups mobilizing for the defense of bourgeois democracy. These ‘experts’ in the global justice movement, take a step backward to defend ‘good capitalism’ against ‘bad capitalism’. As far as they’re concerned, proletarians transformed into ordinary citizens should have to fight for laws and regulations against the actions of multinationals, within the framework of a bourgeois democracy. These militancy specialists – these social moderators – oppose the revolutionary action of a proletariat that just might become aware of its interests in a worldwide communist society.

Since the First World War, capitalism has been a social system in decay, no longer in any position to grant reforms and improvements for the working class. There are no longer any progressive capitalist factions that the proletariat can rely on for this struggle. Parliament is no longer an agency of reform, as the Communist International (2nd Congress) says, “the center of gravity of political life has shifted completely and definitely from parliament.” The essential task of the proletariat is the destruction of all bourgeois state institutions including Parliament, where we must establish our own dictatorship on the ruins of universal suffrage and other remnants of bourgeois society.

Transition from Maoism to Marxism isn’t easy. Habits and ideas acquired in Maoist groups block one’s understanding of Marxism and its implementation at the level of class struggle and the internal organizations of Left Communism. I developed my first ideas of Left Communism in 2001-2002 while reading the newsletter Notes Internationalistes (N.I.) published by the Groupe Internationaliste Ouvrier (GIO), an affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP).

Reading through the IBRP’s website, I discovered a Marxism that had been cultivated over the years in various class struggles and debates between different groups emerging from the proletarian camp. An assessment focused on the isolation of the working class that had seized power in October 1917, showing that Russian society during the 1920s was just a planned state capitalism that had nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The main cause of this defeat was the failure of the German revolutionary wave of 1919-1923 that condemned the Russian Revolution to isolation and to rapid degeneration.

The biggest lie ever peddled by the CPC (m-l), In Struggle!, the PCO, and that the current PCR and other Maoist groups harped on for decades, was that the Stalinist regime of the USSR represented communism. On this point, the Maoists show themselves for the organizations of capital that they are, pretending that Stalinism is a society in which the proletariat exercises its dictatorship. Unlike Marx and Lenin, they echo Stalin’s doctrine that it is possible to establish “socialism in one country”. To get young militants on board with their doctrine, the Maoists led me to believe and still insist that Stalinist repression was greatly exaggerated by the bourgeois media. In their estimation, Stalin may have made some mistakes,(1) but no matter. For after all, it was still a dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. We were urged to read a caricature of Marxism as The principles of Leninism by Stalin. It’s not easy to break with “Marxist-Leninism”, this Stalinist fabrication that dismisses the authority of workers councils and conflates the Communist Party directly with the State. In all these Marxist-Leninist groups, critics of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and of the 3rd International by the internationalist opponents to Stalin as the Italian Left (Bordiga), the Dutch-German Left (Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter) and the Russian Left Communism of Gavril Miasnikov were completely ignored [See Appendix VIII on the origin of Left Communism]. We were also strongly discouraged from reading Rosa Luxembourg and Trotsky, including his writings from before 1925.

For Maoists and Marxist-Leninists, capitalism starts in the USSR and in China after the death of Stalin and Mao. For them Khrushchev and the “revisionists” would have been the ruin of socialism. Though, the reality was that state capitalism had to be modernized – especially to meet the military challenges of the Cold War. This was the real object of the “revisionists”. The Russian working class did not revolt because it wasn’t their society that was transformed but rather the form of their exploitation. Stalin and his henchmen had long since exterminated the communists from the Russian ‘Communist’ Party. This party created by the working class had fallen under Stalinist control.

In China, there had been no worker militancy within the party since 1928, after the proletarian movements in Shanghai and Canton had been crushed. Subsequently, there was a civil war led by a block of classes in which the peasantry served as cannon fodder. It ended with the establishment of a regime under the dictates of Stalinist Russia. China has never been a proletarian state and Maoism was only a way to regiment the poor peasants and workers to sacrifice themselves in the interests of national capital. Mao, himself, was driven by an incredible thirst for power; he reproduced the brutal aspects of Stalinist state capitalist planning and established an unaccountable regime resulting in millions of murders (more than thirty million deaths, alone, during the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958).

Another of Left communism’s contributions that got me out of my “Marxist-Leninist” torpor dealt with the degeneration of the 3rd International. This concerned the tactic of the United or popular Front, as was the case in Spain, France and China. These fronts confused the interests of a faction of the bourgeoisie with those of the proletariat, and finally served only to divert the working class from its ultimate revolutionary objectives. For the Maoists, this means, “reaching the masses” and for this they create committees, fronts, unions, etc., with the adjective ‘red’ to attract workers and lead them to believe that these are organizations defending their interests.

In 2008, for instance, the PCR created one such ‘red’ committee: the Comité Fahad. This committee expressed its support for bourgeois Arabs in a leaflet distributed in January: “the influence of Islamism on the people is not due to medieval fundamentalism, but to the fact that Islamic organizations are also fighting against the bourgeoisies in league with [sic] imperialists... ” Unlike the Maoists, I think that this proliferation of these organizations and of “Islamic” terrorism is an expression of despair from minor capitalist classes in the countries most bitterly oppressed by imperialism. Maoists ultimately ended up supporting the involvement of the proletariat in one or the other of the bourgeois camps.

Another key difference I found was their conception of the party. For Maoists, the working class takes power through the intermediary of their “party”. In the countries on the capitalist periphery you have united fronts that come to power by proclaiming bourgeois democracy. The case of the Maoists in Nepal is a glaring example with their demand for proportional elections. According to the theory of “socialism in one country”, they create a party for each country and in some countries one party for each nation. All the organizations that have devoted themselves to the proletariat throughout its history have always been international organizations. These two lines from the Communist Manifesto: “The workers have no homeland” and “Workers of the world, unite!” have always been fundamental to the principle of what revolutionary Marxists call proletarian internationalism.
The Maoist parties are bourgeois parties using terror in their ranks to resolve the struggles between clans; there is no place for factions.

For the Left Communists:

1. The Party is international and internationalist
2. It is the achievement of the revolutionary political organization of the class-conscious proletariat
3. The role of this party will not be to seize power in the name of the working class, but to participate in the unification of its struggles, thus controlled by the workers themselves
4. Only the working class in its totality, through its own autonomous bodies, can institute socialism
5. This task cannot be delegated not even to the most conscious and capable of class parties

These achievements of the Communist Left answered to a large extent my questions concerning my past activities and particularly, what to do for the new millennium.

In fall of 2004, the Left communist critique led me to examine my thirty years as a labor militant. (See the brochure, “Du syndicalisme critique à la critique du syndicalisme: Témoignage d’un ex-syndicaliste en colère.)

I became aware of another Left communist group, the Internal Faction of the International Communist Current (IFICC).

Their international leaflet co-signed by the Montreal International Communists underlines the current reality of the capitalist system and places before the proletariat its historic responsibilities as the only revolutionary class, the only class capable of putting an end to this infernal system [See Appendix IX Capitalism is Dying!].

"Always remember that socialism since it is a science, must be treated as a science, i.e. to be studied" Engel advised. Every revolutionary militant should study the programs and platforms of the Communist Left. Besides the IBRP [Now Internationalist Communist Tendency], IFICC and the Montreal International Communists already mentioned, we must consider as well the political positions of the International Communist Current (ICC) and the International Communist Party (The Proletarian Program) (Int. CP).

This overview of differences between leftist organizations and those of Left communism is far from complete and I would encourage the reader to consult the websites and literature of Left communism for his or herself. These groups and organizations are numerous and this is not necessarily negative. There are differences between them politically and organizationally. These differences may reflect the varying experiences of the proletariat. These differences should be brought before the proletariat. This means having serious discussions which go beyond personal considerations, not stifled by committee resolutions, and which do not detract from their substance.

Réal Jodoin

First Edition February 2008
Second Edition November 2009

Appendix VIII

Origins of Left Communism

By the early 1920s, a process of degeneration appears in the recently founded CI (or 3rd Communist International). As a consequence of the inability of the proletarian revolution to spread (which in October 1917 was the only successful first step) the immediate result of this process in the communist movement on an international level was in the emergence of a series of political, essentially left responses, of varying levels of organization and significance reflecting various divisions, trends, fractions, oppositions, etc.).

Among the first to arise are the better-known parts of the left, which are, Italian Left (Bordiga), the Dutch-German Left (Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter) and the Russian Communist Left (Gavril Miasnikov). These are traditionally and rightly grouped as "Communist Left" (2). As diverse as they are, all components of the Communist Left recognized the first two congresses of the CI (while Trotsky, for example, and his followers adhere to the first 4). They adhere to the October Revolution in Russia (1917) but are characterized by their critical point of view as to its further development (3). They lead their main struggles from within the CI, the CPs and then externally when, for the most part, they were expelled. They are particularly known by their struggle against "the bolchevisation of the CPs as well as the theory of" Socialism in one country“ advocated by Stalin. They are characterized as well by a virulent denunciation of social democracy and a rejection of all policies of united fronts, popular, anti-fascist, etc. which advocate a return to an alliance of the working class with other layers of society as well as fractions of the bourgeoisie. The Communist Left as a whole is anti-parliamentary ("for the Italian
Left; abstentionist). It’s best known though Lenin’s critique "Left wing Communism an Infantile disorder." To this Herman Gorter replied globally in his "Answer to Lenin."

Over time, the two main branches of the CL, the German Left and the Italian Left, moved politically further away from each other. The appearance of major differences developed from within each, eventually finding form in different organizations. A number of political groups today (particularly those from the Italian left) continue to lay claim to the Communist Left.

Today, a common confusion exists between the Communist Left and the so-called "the ultra-left". Current organizations that adhere to the CL are interested in preserving this historical continuity, while those belonging to the ultra-left are purely "modernists" going so far as to reject any affiliation with any currents of the past.

The various branches of the Communist Left in history:
• The Italian Communist Left (see: Italian Communist Left and Bordigism)
• The German Communist Left Dutch (see: Council Communism)
• The Russian Communist Left, "Decembrists" and the Communist Workers Group Gavril
Miasnikov
• The Belgian Communist Left (1936-1940)
• The Communist Left in France
• The French Communist Left (Sylvia Pankhurst, Guy Aldred, etc.)

Appendix IX

With the resounding bankruptcies of the big banks, collapsing stock markets, scarcity of credit for firms and private individuals, the emergency nationalizations of banks and insurance companies is underway in an all-out effort to avert a collapse of the entire international financial system. And now the global recession, having firmly taken root, will deepen, creating genuine panic amongst governments and capitalists worldwide. Serious anxiety will grip the population as a whole, particularly the proletariat. Every worker or salaried employee knows full well that it is he who will foot the bill. The cost of nationalizating the great US, European, and other financial companies, for starters…

The bankruptcy of capitalism is irreversible

Governments, politicians, the media and other hucksters of the bourgeoisie would have us believe that this crisis is due to the irresponsibility of bad traders who played with fire at the stockmarkets. Nonsense! Immorality of predatory financiers… Lies! Madness in the real-estate sector with its "sub-primes"… Nothing but lies! Deregulation of the market… They just can’t stop! It would suffice, they say, to ‘moralize’ finance capitalism and to impose stricter rules to avoid this catastrophe. Every time, at each new crisis, they spout the same hot air: ‘capitalism isn't responsible, only its excesses’.

But nobody explains why capital prefers to invest in speculation rather than the sectors of production. It’s simple, however: the profits from investment in productive sectors are too low. And they are too low because the world market cannot absorb all the goods that the productive forces can create. Capitalism has long developed through the exploitation of the working class in every country, a capacity of productive forces such that it can't find the commercial outlets for all the goods produced. This is the historical contradiction in capitalism: a surplus of goods while billions of human beings live in poverty, unable to afford the immense mass of goods produced. This reveals the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, and the present terrible crisis is only its expression.

We pay for capitalism's plunge into massive and generalized debt !

One of the means capitalism has used for ages to overcome the overproduction of goods is to artificially create a market through massive and generalized debt, primarily that of the State. But even if this delays the outbreak of the disease, the remedy can only exacerbate it. The capitalist world today is faced with a mountain of debt that nobody – and above all neither the State nor the ruling class – will ever repay… and that the international proletariat will have to pay with its sweat and blood. Like the nationalizations of bankrupted banks, the burden of the massive injection of "liquidy" to the central banks to avoid the credit crunch - and thus the paralysis of the economy - and the creation of "bail-out packages" to rescue banks will be borne by the working class, demanding sacrifice, misery, further exploitation, unemployment and repression.

But just as with the generalized debt, this won't suffice. Faced with bankruptcy and lack of solvent markets – even if, today, at the end of 2008, the world’s bourgeoisie, in a panic at the prospect of a generalized collapse, temporarily buries its rivalries in order to come up with a global response – the economic and commercial competition, already acute, tomorrow will become even more savage and brutal; beginning with the capitalist States – expressions of each national capital and main defenders of its interests. Besides increased exploitation of the working class everywhere, all of this can only lead to commercialy and economicaly exacerbated rivalries, transforming them into political, military and imperialist rivalries in which the main capitalist powers of the world play the primary roles, one against the other.

We pay for capitalism's rush to a new world war !

Have no illusions! There are no possible reforms, much less any solution in today’s capitalism. There is but one outcome to the economic crisis and to the ultimate global bankruptcy it represents: mass destruction and the vast slaughterhouse of world war. This is precisely what this system has proven twice in the 20th century. The 1929 crisis – to which all economists and others refer today with horror in describing the extent of the present crisis – led to WWII. This is how it occurred with the economic difficulties – expressed in the 1907 financial crisis – at the turn of the 20th century which plunged the capitalist world into WWI. Already, the violent international recession currently unfolding, can only further exacerbate imperialist rivalries between the great powers. The local wars multiply on all international fronts, increasingly bringing the main imperialist powers into direct confrontation, as the war between Russia and Georgia has just shown. Far from slowing down, this conflict, which had the Russian and the US navies facing off in the Black Sea, has consequently seen the accelerated installation of military systems all over the world, particularly in Europe. Everyone can see this: preparations for military confrontations between the main imperialist powers of the planet is clearly underway.

Have no illusions! Capitalism must be brought down and a new society without classes must be set up!

Have no illusions! Bankrupted capitalism is preparing for decisive, massive, brutal and bloody confrontations against the international working class in order to impose complete and total submission. For only the international proletariat – the main productive class, the wage class – poses any obstacle to the ruling class in its march towards generalized war. It, alone, can really.

October13, 2008,

Leaflet by the International Fraction of ICC and Internationalist Communists of Montreal

(1) Mao, the “greathelmsman” went so far as to give marks to Stalin: 70% good and 30% bad.
(2) The Left opposition was another important response (different from the CL) to the
degeneration of the IC. It appears only in the @nd half of 1920 and its main
reprensentative is Trostsky.
(3) They developed a critical analysis of the Soviet state, which later (in 1930) led to the view
that the Soviet Union has become capitalist, a particular variant of "state capitalism".

email and postal address of Internationalist Communists of Montreal
cim_...@yahoo.com

CIM_ICM
Box 55514,
Succursale Maisonneuve,
Montréal,QC
H1W 0A1
Blog:http://internationalistcommunistsmontreal.blogspot.com/

Web Site of the Internal Fraction of International Communist Current (IFICC)
http://www.bulletincommuniste.org/

Web Site of Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT)
http://www.leftcom.org/en

International Communist Party (Proletarian)
http://www.pcint.org/

International Communist Current (ICC)
http://en.internationalism.org/