January 11, 2016

NDP LEADER MULCAIR ENDORSES ANTI-COMMUNIST MONUMENT

By Darrell Rankin, Leader, Communist Party of Canada-Manitoba, in response to NDP leader Thomas Mulcair's support letter for the proposed "Memorial to the Victims of Communism" in Ottawa.

            NDP leader Thomas Mulcair's support for the Tory government's anti-communist monument in Ottawa is a contemptible attack on the working class's most staunch and militant fighters and on anyone who shares the aim of achieving a socialist society.

            Anyone familiar with socialist ideas knows they do not victimize anyone. When workers start building a new society, socialists know it takes a great deal of work to overcome capitalism’s barbaric legacies and to wield power well and with confidence.

            We know that capitalist ideas can taint and overthrow socialist governments.

            Capitalists ought to know. They mismanaged their affairs and lost power several times while toppling the feudal aristocracy two centuries ago.

            Frederick Engels wrote about the French revolution that the bourgeoisie “lost confidence in their own political capacity, (taking) refuge first in the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism…. It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie can in no European country get hold of political power – at least for any length of time – in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy kept hold of it during the Middle Ages” (1875; 1892).

            In my view, people who suffered discrimination or violence in a socialist society really ought to blame the legacy of capitalism and the ideological poisons it has honed.

            Engels wrote at a time when capitalists strove to take and hold on to power. Today, however, they are working exclusively to stay in power and dampen the revolutionary ambitions of the working class, the class destined to end the class struggle through the creation of a socialist society.

            Capitalism continues to grow ripe and rotten. Every crisis spawns outbursts of anti-communism. This perfectly explains why anti-communism is more and more a deceptive cloak for capitalism's worst reactionaries and warmongers, from Czarist Russia to U.S. McCarthyism and Apartheid South Africa.

            The Tory attempt to revive this vile canard deserves – and is starting to receive – a sharp rebuke by Canada's democratic and labour movements, not a fawning endorsement by the NDP that drives a sectarian stake into the working class. 

            The world's reactionaries have written many obituaries for communism since Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto for our party in 1848.

            Their descendants today will never kill communism because they cannot kill the entire working class from which we spring. It did not work for Hitler and it won't work today for Ukraine's pro-Nazi regime and the most rabid and militarist circles in U.S. and Canadian imperialism.

            In the Communist Party of Canada, we are proud of our contributions to working class and democratic struggles. And we will never give up until the working class achieves a socialist society and everything socialism offers humanity. 

            Mr. Mulcair degrades both himself and the working class by standing behind the Tory crusade against communism. 

            This Tory crusade is carried out in the same sectarian and reactionary spirit as those against Muslims and other discriminated groups, except it is directed against the working class as a whole.

link:http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint157/13MULCAIR.htm
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  - 
(The above article is from the April 16-30, 2015 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

No comments:

Featured Story

Dejemos que la izquierda de Estados Unidos tenga cuidado! por Andrew Taylor 23.06.2021

La Administración Biden ha habilitado una nueva "Iniciativa contra el terrorismo doméstico" para defender "The Homeland"...