Canadian Communist party leadership, as to be expected, has demonstratively lined up behind Moscow, against Peking. Not content with passing resolutions in the name of top committees which servilely echo- Khrushchev's views, the aging and now largely honorary national leader Tim Buck, who has bowed and scraped before the Kremlin for almost forty years, has been dragged out of retirement to write a series of five lengthy articles in support of Khrushchev, Readers of the party's newspaper The Tribune have also been confronted with slahs of material from the type-— writers of the new national leader, Leslie Morris; the national organizer, Nelson Clarke and many others,
If the tedium resulting from these contributions has not exactly been | relieved, the leadership!s line has been reinforced periodically by the publication of pages of anti- ~Peking declarations by U.S. CP leader Gus Hall, Italian CP leader Togliatti, various central bodies of Communist parties in: India, Chile, Cyprus, Ceylon, etc. -~ all designed to convince anyone who may have doubts as to the correctness of the party's line that the odds are solidly stacked against him.
That there are extensive opposition forces in these parties opposing the Moscow positions, and that these statements may actually be the opinion of the majority -- Geylon and India for instance -- is not of course even hinted at. Tribune readers have to rely on the garbled reporting of the capitalist dailies to have any idea at all that there are any differences in the world Communist movement other than those between the main protagon= -ists -- Moscow anc Peking,
As if to make it crystal clear that any criticisms launched by the Chinese are directed equally against them, the editors of the Tribune have been reproducing the most blatant and. crude statements of the U.S. CP leader-~ ship whose policies the Chinese singled out to demonstrate that peaceful coexistence is nothing but an every day, garden-variety-form of class collaboration,
At the.time of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, they reproduced U.S, Worker editor J,E.Jackson!s attack on the Black Muslims as "the single most reactionary and counter-revolutionary force among the organizetions in Negro life today," and which declares that “it is necessary to expose the connections, sinister purposes and the use which the enemy makes of such people as Malcolm X and assorted diversionists," The same article defended NAACP head Roy Wilkins from Malcolm X's attack as an "Uncle Tom leader of an Uncle Tom association,"
Their latest lift from the Worker is U.S. CP spokesman Gus Hall's
‘statement on U.S. President Johnson's speech to Congress. Running scared before the ultra right campaign around the Kennedy assassination, Hall attempts to clear the CP by putting the finger on other left groups. “If we, the CP, writes Hall, “are to be located in the political terms of 'Left! and tRight! then we declare our position as that of the 'responsible Left,!"
The Tribune pulled off its own little fink job the week previous with a lengthy inspired letter to the editor against a "'way out! leftist group," the logic of whose position, the author claims, would “be bearing arms" and "secretly training to ‘take over,‘" ,
In the same issue their youth national secretary commiserates with the rightist reformist wing in the NDP youth for having to bear the cross of the "Trotskyites,"
Other comments by Hall place the CP as a_"Left" responsible to the U.S. Big Business Democratic party -- “Our people La euphemism for the CP] have made it clear that they will give support to the Johnson administration as they did. to the Kennedy administration if its policies continue in the same. direction," a
In prominent places among the various statements of world Knrushchevism are any and all that link the Chinese to Trotskyism. But French, Bolivian, Soviet and U.S, efforts at this peculiar Stalinist form of red-baiting appear to be insufficient, The Canadian CP national executive has charged the: Chinese with being "in direct contact with the Trotskyites" in Canada "in violation of the standards of conduct which should regulate the relationship between fraternal parties."
Logically enough the leadership's position has been reflected in vari~ ous fields of the party's work, This year's. Toronto celebration of the Chinese Revolution, in the past an occasion for identification of prominent CP spokesmen with that great event, was a modest one -- largely a movie night -- an all-Chinese affair, without even the CP's leading Chinese spokesman, Howe Kai, appearing on the platform. The CP has in recent months become noticeably cold on Cuba.
Possibly in the belief that what is happening in many other Communist parties, the formation of sizeable pro-Chinese and other left forces, must necessarily happen in the Canadian Communist party, the Toronto Star, largest daily in the country, declared in a recent editorial, "Last Saturday November 2] was an historic.day in the history of the far far left in Ontario, The Chinese Communist party made its first appearance in Canada at a meeting of the orthodox Russian-style Communists." Referring to a meeting in Hamilton, the editors continue, "inconclusive as the debate was it has served to launch the Chinese Communist party (non Mongolian division) in Canada."
This fantasy was whipped up from a small public meeting in Hamilton addressed by Tim Buck which saw a couple of Trotskyist youth challenge Buckts distortion of the Chinese viewpoint.
This is not to say that there are no pro-Mao and other left opposition elements in the Canadian Communist party. The sheer weight alone of the
material directed against such views is strong evidence that the Sino-Soviet dispute has caused grave disquiet in Canadian CP ranks, Early in October, in contradiction with the policy of many other CP's, the national executive committee of the Canadian party urged the calling of a conference for a. showdown with the Chinese. “We feel that it [a conference] is needed as soon as possible in view of the factional and splitting activities of the Chinese leaders, . ." While it is not excluded that the Canadians are thinking of the problems in other CP's it is more probable that they would like the authority of such a conference to settle matters in their own backyard.
Concrete evidence of ferment in the Canadian CP is the rash of letters of an extremely critical character and in support of the Chinese viewpoint that have appeared in Tribune on several occasions over the past year. In their attempt to gloss up and rewrite Kennedy's role following his assassination, the editor's offensive charge that those who "will point to the fact that he was a millionaire, an ardent defender of capitalism and U.S. imperjalism. ... have a distorted unrealistic view of the world" and "indulge in irresponsible leftism" would seem to be directed against dissident forces. The Tribune's hailing of Prime Minister Pearson's signing of the test=-ban treaty and its flaying of the Chinese over this issue was too quickly exposed by the same Pearson's acceptance of nuclear warheads with the other hand to go by unnoticed,
Whether the opposition currents will prove able to coalesce and develop along effective lines is highly problematic. There certainly is no tradition.of democratic debate in the CP, Even with the revelations of the Twentieth Congress, which shocked almost the entire leadership into conflict with Buck, no organized opposition developed. The result was a falling away of almost the entire leading cadre, a collapse and sag of the party so that the skeleton forms of the Finnish, Ukrainian and Jewish fraternal | and cultural organizations now have a startling bare and bleached look, The decline has been steady with the loss of the Mine, Mill and Smelter union and weekening of the United Electrical Workers, two unions where the CP had apparatus-control, marking sharp downturns to where it now no longer represents any vital force in Canadian political life.
In his announcement of the coming national convention, slated for next Easter, national leader Morris speaks of the “isolation” of the party, the “wide gap between the party's organized strength and influence and the popular and growing movements of protest." "We can close the gap == we can change things for the better," he declares -- we can make this "a con= vention of change." The pitch is going to be close ranks, show a common front. But whether this will silence the criticism is yet to be seen.