Revolutionary Initiative sends warm internationalist greetings to the Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist on the occasion of your 7th Congress.
The CPN-M Party has been a source of great inspiration to us revolutionary communists in Canada and throughout the entire International Communist Movement since the launch of the People’s War in Nepal. Your bold and great example in carving out a new power for the people in Nepal stimulated the new vitality of the International Communist Movement throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, when oppressed and exploited peoples of the world were being told that communism was a failure and that capitalist was the “end of history”.
The CPN-M’s’ creative approach to Maoism, your firm basis amongst the masses, your reliance on concrete study of concrete conditions, and the very open manner in which your Party has conducted its two-line struggle has provided an invaluable examples of how revolutionaries around the world can work to break with both dogmatism and revisionism in their many forms and carry the revolution forward. We also recognize the great sacrifices that your Party has had to make and we pay homage to the great comrades and fighters that were martyred or injured during the People’s War.
We have watched for years with profound sorrow and concern as some of your former comrade leaders of the United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist capitulated to imperialism and Indian expansionism; but we were are greatly inspired by your Party’s ability to reconstitute itself on a revolutionary basis. It is our great hope that your Party will be able to emerge from the current crossroads and lead the transformation of Nepalese society and by doing so greatly advance the cause of revolution in South Asia and around the world.
As this statement is being read here in Nepal today, one of the most significant movements in decades is developing within Canada’s borders right now, a movement spreading as fast as the Occupy movement and the “Arab Spring” before it. This is a movement encompassing the dozens of nations of Indigenous peoples that long preceded the European colonization of the Americas and by any means necessary will long outlive this past five hundred years of European colonization of the Americas up to the present day imperialist world system.
The spontaneous movement that is known as ‘Idle No More’ has captured international headlines since early December 2012, shattering the illusions of Canada as a country of peace, multiculturalism, and opportunity for all. Quite to the contrary, however, Canada has for centuries been a couldron of colonial occupation and genocide against the first nations and peoples of what can be alternatively called Turtle Island [the name by which many nations referred to North America before the arrival of Europeans].
Although this is a spontaneous mass movement, with leadership elements of bureaucrat capitalist “Indian chiefs” very closely tied to Canadian imperialism and colonialism, this movement has set off the long pent-up fury of Indigenous peoples who have suffered decades and centuries of genocidal policies all the way up to the present day. In the past month alone, road and railway blockades, mass protests, and direct actions all across the country have been led by grassroots Indigenous people ready and willing to fight Canadian colonialism head on.
Although the “first nations” within Canada’s colonial borders make up perhaps only a small fraction of the total population, their ancestral lands cover the land mass of the entire country, ancestral lands that many nations are fighting resolutely to defend as their very survival as nations is threatended by Canadian imperialism’s constant and now intensified attempt to eliminate Indigenous peoples.
We firmly believe that the national liberation struggles of indigenous peoples is not only complimentary to the proletarian revolution in Canada, but more importantly, it is necessary for it, and indeed for the advance of proletarian revolution on a world scale.
Since the spectacula financial collapses of 2008 revealed the crisis of capitalism to be endemic and structural to the imperialist world system, Canadian bourgeois politicians have suggested that Canadian economy is exceptional, and that Canadian finance capital is unaffected by the sorts of crises being experienced in the U.S. or Europe. What is not said in these pronouncements is the extent to which Canadian imperialism and monopoly capital is reliant upon the plunder of the world’s natural resources through Canada’s monopoly capitalist extractive industries, much of which comes from the internal colonies encompassing Indigenous peoples ancestral lands.
The struggle of Indigenous peoples’ for genuine self-determination to break Canadian colonialism would not only be a contribution to liberation of struggling peoples everywhere but indeed all humanity. Canada’s spoiliation of the environment and these resources is driving our world closer to, and arguably even beyond, the brink of irreversible ecological collapse; and the Indigenous peoples in Canada are without a doubt on the frontlines of militant struggle against this plunder.
Yet, as significant as the Idle No More movement is – and we believe that we are only seeing the beginning of this upsurge – it comes not even a year after another one of the greatest upsurges in Canadian history, the great student strike of Quebec, which as you may know brought hundreds of thousands of students and popular masses into the streets every week for months and months. Every single day there were between one and three rallies running into the thousands somewhere in Montreal alone. At its height, the mobilization reached 400,000 people. This student strike approached insurrectionary proportions at certain points, with thousands of people facing off with heavily-armed officers who are among the most brutal in North America. Not only did this upsurge refuse to be quelled through violence and draconian emergency laws (Law 79), it was ultimately victorious in halting the tuition fee increases that sparked this movement to begin with. This makes it one of the few struggles in the imperialist countries in recent years to halt an “austerity” attack. Yet, all throughout the strike and especially as it grew, a growing proportion of the striking students began taking up anti-capitalist and anti-colonial slogans and recognized that the strike amounted to so much more than the economistic struggle of tuition fees.
These two events in the past year in Canada are mere signals that not only is Canada fully embroiled in the crisis of the imperialist world system, but more importantly, the people are beginning to fight back.
While being humbled by and sometimes even overwhelmed by the power of the people’s struggles, our task, like yours, is to give the greatest possible unity to all the just struggles of the people through the consolidation of a genuine proletarian revolutionary vanguard Party. We hope and are planning for this event in the immediate years.
Without being self-satisfied we can claim with confidence that our efforts at party-building are making strides towards the constitution of a new revolutionary party guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Although there is currently at least two Marxist-Leninist-Maoists currents within Canada, we are confident that the force of history will unite all possible revolutionary communist forces within Canada along correct lines in the coming future.
The task of Revolutionary Initiative in the coming three years is to meet all possible necessary preconditions for the foundation of a genuine revolutionary communist party in Canada, including a sufficient basis amongst the proletarian masses, with representation from the many nations within Canada and across the many sectors of oppressed and expoited people; and finally, with a draft Party program based upon a comprehensive historical materialist summation of Canadian history, society, and the subjective conditions of the revolutionary struggle, past and present.
We cannot have made it as far as we have without the example and guidance of the people’s wars in countries like Nepal, India, Philippines, and elsewhere. More importantly, the masses in the imperialist countries will not be able to make revolution unless the most exploited and oppressed peoples of the world hasten and intensify the crisis of the imperialist world system, while inspiring us with a living example of a much better world awaits us all, a world beyond capitalism and imperialism, a world of socialism on the path to communism.
There’s much more that can be said about Canadian imperialism and its place in the world today, this country that is the most vocal supporter of Zionist Israel in the world today, that is unabashedly enthusiastic about its part in bombing Libya and the new wars brewing that menace the world, such as in Syria and Iran. There’s much more than can be said about this country where so many migrant workers from around world come to in order to find a better life only to meet intensified exploitation, racism, precariousness, and often a worse future for their children. Much more can be said, but we know that you comrades have much work to do; and our time here is limited and your tasks are many.
Long the Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist!
Long live the revolution!
J. Cabral – Chairperson Joseph Mackenzie – Vice-Secretary, Education
Members of the Central Committee of Revolutionary Initiative (Canada)
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