The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist–Leninist) (abbr. CPC(M-L)) is an anti-revisionist, Marxist–Leninist communist party in Canada, founded in 1970 by Hardial Bains. It has been registered with Elections Canada as a federal political party under the name Marxist–Leninist Party of Canada (MLPC) since 1974. The party is not an offshoot of the Communist Party of Canada; its early membership came from student-led organizations active in the 1960s. After a period of alignment with Maoism and China, the CPC(M-L) pursued a Hoxhaist, pro-Albanian line until the early 1990s.
Bains led the CPC(M-L) from its founding in 1970 until his death in 1997. Bains' widow Sandra L. Smith succeeded her late husband as First Secretary following his death. Elections Canada lists Anna Di Carlo as the head of the electorally-registered organization. None of the party's candidates have been elected. Since the 1970s, the party has had a larger electoral campaign presence than the CPC. It ran its largest number of candidates in 1980 when it nominated 177 candidates, contesting 63 percent of the country's electoral districts.
The party publishes an online newspaper named The Marxist–Leninist Monthly.
Origins The CPC(M-L) developed from a progression of student-led organizations during the 1960s. It was created primarily as a result of the efforts of Marxist student activist Hardial Bains, who was the founder and national leader of the CPC(M-L) until his death in 1997. The CPC(M-L) was not created from a split from the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). The party emerged during a period of growing student and youth activism. At this time, the CPC was still struggling to break out of isolation it faced during the Cold War; it also suffered from a major rupture in the international communist movement between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, the latter of which the CPC had traditionally supported.
Hardial Bains and the Sino-Soviet split Bains came from Mahilpur in Hoshiarpur District of Punjab, India. His family were members or supporters of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and he joined its youth wing. The CPI that Bains knew as a teenager was a mass and militant party. Operating underground for part of the 1950s, the CPI won back its legality in time for the general elections of 1957, where it emerged as the largest opposition party in the country and held state government in Kerala. By this time, however, a young Bains had apparently quit the CPI in protest of its acceptance of Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Joseph Stalin. Bains, according to the CPC(M-L)'s official biography, immigrated to Canada from India two years later in 1959 at age nineteen. In Vancouver, he pursued post-graduate studies at the University of British Columbia from 1960 to 1965,; Hardial Bains, Party founder and leader in bacteriology.
During this time, the international communist movement went through a major internal crisis and upheaval with the Sino-Soviet split. Developing from 1960 on, sharp polemics over revolutionary strategy were exchanged between the two countries.
In Canada, the Sino-Soviet split was less sharply divisive than demoralizing for the communists. In the ensuing 15 years, the CPC had lost all of its limited gains in parliament under the pressure of the Cold War, and communist MP Fred Rose was jailed for sedition. Anti-communism in the labour movement resulted in the expulsion of all communist-led unions from the house of labour, and communists in general were treated as traitors. Following the 1956 revelations by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev ("On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences") about the crimes of Joseph Stalin, the CPC suffered many resignations, and its youth organization, the National Federation of Labour Youth, fell apart briefly. By the time it was reorganized as the Socialist Youth League in the late 1950s, the CPC had lost much of its prior visibility on university campuses—including the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The Internationalists Bains arrived at UBC in this vacuum of visible, public revolutionary politics on campus and just as a new generation of student activism was radicalizing. Mass student protests reacted to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Bains became actively involved in the political movement of the time and was elected President of the BC Students' Federation in 1964. While he apparently applied to join the CPC during his time as a student activist, Bains never held membership in that party for unknown reasons. Soon after his ideological outlook would eventually harden into Maoism, directly opposed to the pro-Soviet line of the CPC.Letter, "On the CPC (ML)," CPC Central Committee, 2001
Bains played a key role in founding the predecessor to the CPC(M-L) on March 13, 1963, as the "Internationalists", a student group at the UBC championing what they described as anti-revisionism. "If you like to talk, join the Internationalists", opined the UBC student newspaper under the headline "Hot air types form own group." But while co-organizer Mayling Weaver spoke of welcoming "students of any race, religion, or political beliefs", and both asserted that "the university is a coffee-shop", Bains was setting for itself much more adventurous goals than just "an extension to the extra-curricular programme" with "free-wheeling, year-round academic symposiums".http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_1963_10_03.pdf; Ubyssey, "Hot air types form own group," October 3, 1963 Bains desired in The Internationalists to form a future communist movement, founded on what he considered orthodox Marxist revolutionary theory, including opposition to de-Stalinization.
Bains wrote what would become one of the main ideological texts of the CPC(M-L) at this time, The Necessity For Change, which developed from a speech and study guide into what the CPC(M-L) would term "NFC analysis". Summarizing the text, Irish author Connor McCabe notes that:
"The main thrust of Necessity for Change appears to be towards students and academics, in that its criticisms are of intellectual production, and the intellectual industry, in the Western world. The control of ideas, of history, of 'common sense' by the ruling class needs to be challenged, first by a cadre who have un-taught themselves the prevailing ideas and have begun to see the world based on reality rather than the dominant, right-wing, intellectual discourse; then by the working class who will benefit from the intellectual and individual gains made by the cadre once these new ideas, and this new way of thinking, make their way into the working class through the actions of the cadre itself."
These ideas became a foundation as the group developed into a party or, as Bains himself would later say, "the analysis that lays down ideological remoulding as the key to the uninterrupted advance and victory of revolution."NFC Preface
The CPC(M-L) was not therefore born from a fracture within the CPC by supposed "breakaway hardliners" JJ's Complete Guide to Canada, "Fringe Parties", No date. but from the growing radical student movement in Canada of the mid-1960s. Within a few years Bain's group had succeeded in recruiting several hundred members across Canada, including Quebec, without the help of prominent former CPC leaders who had left the CPC and sided with China, such as former MP Dorise Nielsen or labour activist Jack Scott."The Second Wave of Anti-Revisionism, 1971-1981," Encyclopedia of Revisionism On Line Meanwhile, and throughout the 1960s, the CPC was struggling to make its presence felt and grasp what its General Secretary Leslie Morris called "the Challenge of the 60s". The CPC's youth organization experimented with a more decentralized model until the late 1960s when it reorganized. One of the few instances of CPC members quitting for the CPC(M-L) was that of a CPC youth activist from UBC who was accused of stealing a magazine subscription list and funds, and then joining the CPC(M-L).Ben Isitt, Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, U of T Press, 2011 In many places, in size and particularly youthfulness, the CPC(M-L) rivalled CPC.
Maoism In 1968, the Internationalists renamed themselves the "Canadian Student Movement" and then the "Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist–Leninist)". On March 31, 1970, they declared themselves a formal political party, adopting the name "Communist Party of Canada (Marxist–Leninist)". After a legal challenge from the CPC because of confusion at the ballot, Elections Canada ruled that the party's preferred name was too close to that of the CPC, and since that time the party has been known electorally as the Marxist–Leninist Party. The party ran candidates for the House of Commons of Canada during the 1974 federal election under the name of the "Marxist–Leninist Party of Canada". Because of the upsurge of left nationalism in Quebec, two separate parties were maintained until 1974 when the PCQ (ML) was folded into the CPC(M-L).
Bains and the CPC(M-L) strongly criticized the Soviet Union and Cuba as "social imperialist". This stance led CPC(M-L) to support the forces of UNITA in Angola, a nominally socialist group who were fighting the Cuban expeditionary forces sent to Angola. Eventually it was revealed that UNITA was covertly supported by the United States and Apartheid South Africa. Projecting themselves as more militant, Marxist, revolutionary and youthful than the older CPC, the CPC(M-L) embraced a strident, "vigorous" or even righteous rhetoric, even arguing for a two-stage struggle for Canada's liberation from US imperialist domination and "self-determination for the Canadian people".https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ca.secondwave/bu-albania/part18.htm;Bolshevik Union, "The Party of Labor of Albania Came to Canada Under a Stolen Flag," Proletarian Revolution, Vol. l, No. 8, December 1978
International relations Despite the self-proclaimed allegiance of the CPC(M-L) to the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party never recognized the CPC(M-L) as its official representative in Canada. By the mid-1970s there were at least five anti-revisionist, pro-China parties in Canada which debated forcefully with each other and—in particular—strongly condemned the CPC. This included Quebec-based and the Workers' Communist Party of Canada which also drew primarily from students (and not always from working-class backgrounds, such as Pierre Karl Péladeau). For a few years until this pro-Maoist wave of youthful political action fell apart in the early 1980s, the combined membership of pro-China communist parties also outnumbered the CPC."The First Wave of Anti-Revisionism, 1964–1970", Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line
While the CPC(M-L) was unsuccessful uniting these tendencies together, Bains was very active forming similar anti-revisionist ML groupings around the world which were influenced by his writings and theory. Pro-Chinese ML groups came together in Ireland, Britain, Trinidad and Tobago, India and the USA. In 1967, Bains' "Necessity for Change" conference in London saw most of the Irish delegation reportedly walk out. Those who stayed went on to form the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist–Leninist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist–Leninist). Bains was a friend of well-known avant garde British composer Cornelius Cardew, who was linked to the British party, and the CPC(M-L) hosted Cardew on tour in Canada with a youth concert and variety show. (Bains also contributed the lyrics to Cardew's signature song from his later period, "We Sing for the Future".)