‘under the title,

Books

COMMUNIST PARTY HISTORY PUBLISHED

A party dedicated to social change

CANADA’S PARTY OF SOCIALISM:
History of the Communist Party of
Canada 1921-1976. Progress Pub-
lishers, Toronto, 1982. Papger $14.95,
cloth $29.95.

Twenty years ago, the late R. Palme
Dutt, editor of the Labor Monthly and an
outstanding British Marxist scholar,
gave a series of lectures at Moscow Uni-
versity which subsequently were issued
in book form by International Publishers
Problems of Con-
temporary History.

Speaking about the “‘vast array of
fabrication and mythology’’ spread
against the Soviet Union, the other
socialist countries and the Communist
parties of the non-socialist world, by
sheer repetition often accepted as truth

by many sincere people, he observed

that “‘a new generation grows up without

the necessary background knowledge 4 {

from memory, and requiring, not only
current articles or occasional docu-
ments, but the guidance of considered
historical judgments representing the
outcome of collective historical work.”’

While ‘‘the million-fold lies of official
propaganda cannot immediately be over-
taken by historical truth,’ he pointed
out, authoritative historical works ‘‘can
help to equip those who want to know the
truth.”

“Those who want to know the truth
about the Communist Party of Canada
now have that authoritative, meticulous-
ly researched work, the considered polit-
ical judgment compiled by the party from
its own archives, in Canada’s Party of
Socialism: History of the Communist
Party of Canada 1921-1976, just pub-
lished by Progress Books.

No political party in our country’s his-
tory has ever been more systematically
vilified than the Communist Party — and
understandably, for as William Kashtan,
the party's national leader and general
secretary, points out in his foreword:

“This is not a history of just another
party. This is the history of a party dedi-
cated to fundamental ‘social change, a
party which gives ‘expression to the
fundamental ‘interests of the working
class and to the fulfillment of the historic
mission of that class.’

Throughout the party’s 60-year his-
tory. through all the changes, inter-
nationally and nationally, that are strain-
ing the structure of the established order,
monopoly capital and the successive
governments that represent its interests
have understood this very well.

By contrast with the ‘‘million-fold
lies” told from political platforms, re-
corded in Hansard, concocted by the
RCMP, filling incalculable newspaper
columns and spilling in a spate of words
over the air, the party’s conventions and
public meetings go largely uncovered by
the media and party statements on major
issues are ignored. But let a member
break openly with the party, and im-
mediately his or her views become a mat-
ter of absorbing public interest to the
media. And not only to the media —
publishers and universities take a sudden
interest.

Like dissidents who make their ‘‘es-
cape” to the West, some of those who
break with the Communist Party seek to
justify their defection in print, selecting
their facts to distort and falsify events in
which they may or may not have played
the role they claim for themselves. Their
books are ranged on library shelves
alongside those of academics whose
non-Marxist approaches to labor history
also mislead themselves and their
readers.

This underlines the compelling im-

‘SUPPORT

THE :
ANADIAN MEDICA

iSS'ON IN SPA.

‘ »,
mi

Photo from the book: a 1938 meeting in Vernon, British Columbia, in sol
democratic Spain.

portance of Canada’s Party of Socialism.
By placing the historical truth they can
judge for themselves before the two
generations in the labor movement who
have no memory of the earlier events, it
becomes indispensable reading for those

who sincerely want to know what hap-

pened and why.

The value of history is the lesson it
offers for the present. And for all the
changes in the social pattern of our soci-
ety over the past half-century, the
fundamental nature of its class structure
remains unchanged. Today, as in the
Thirties, monopoly capital is striving to
maintain its profits by forcing down the
working people's living standards and
regaining from organized labor all it has
won in post-war years.

The arguments are the same — re-
straint, sacrifice, voluntary wage cuts,
increased productivity — and labor faces
the same need to unite in fighting back.

For those who want to learn, there are
lessons for unionists in the section on
‘The Great Depression — Canadians
Fight Back’’, in the account of the
Workers’ Unity League, the reasons for
its formation and its eventual merger.

What about those workers in break-
away national unions who are being told
that the Communist Party ‘‘betrayed”’
the working class by agreeing to merge
the constituent unions of the Workers’
Unity League with their Trades and
Labor Congress counterparts in 1935?

This perversion of history, of course,
serves these national unions as justifica-
tion for raiding international and even
CLC-affiliated national unions. But it is
the opposite of historical truth.

As Canada’s Party of Socialism points
out, with defeat of the Bennett Conserva-
tive government's ‘‘Iron Heel’’ policies

‘in 1935, conditions for working-class

unity became more favorable.

‘‘As conditions changed, so too did the
relationship between the WUL and the
reformist unions. The WUL’s impres-
sive record of achievements influenced
many workers in the reformist unions.
Even substantial sections of the Trades
and Labor Congress and All-Canadian
Congress of Labor leadership were
changing their attitudes. Canadian sec-
tions of the AFL-affiliated internationals
indicated that they were prepared to or-
ganize the unorganized into industrial
unions around a program of militant
struggle and that they wanted to set up a
united trade union centre. ...

‘The position of the party with regard
to the militant labor unions changed as
conditions and the attitudes of the re-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 16, 1982—Page 10

formist leadership changed. Yet the
Communist Party did not waver from its
goal — to promote and achieve genuine
working-class unity on the basis of mili-
tant policies.”

If I have selected this one issue, which
must be read in the context of the follow-
ing section on ‘‘ The Fight for Peace and
Democracy’’, to illustrate the rich con-
tent of the work, it is only because of its
bearing on the present.

It is impossible within the confines of a
review to do full justice to the history ofa
party born out of ‘the labor struggles
which swept this country in the wake of
the 1917 revolution that established the
USSR as the first state in what since has
become a world socialist system.

It was heir to the finest traditions of the
socialist parties which preceded it. Its
birthright, which it has guarded and en-
riched out of its own experience through
peace and war, depression and cold war,
is the scientific theory of Marxism-
Leninism —a theory that transcends na-
tional boundaries and finds its response
in the working class, just as the capitalist
theories of Keynes dnd Friedman find
their response in the capitalist class of
the Western countries.

The difference is that scientific social-
ist theory has ended exploitation for pri-
vate profit, unemployment and want.
Capitalist theories, exemplified by the
28.5-million unemployed in the West,
perpetuate it.

The principle of international socialist
solidarity has been a foundation stone of
the party since it was rought hewn by
workers across the country in greeting
the Russian Revolution and forcing
withdrawal of Canadian troops from
Siberia during the war of intervention.

Two decades later, the volunteers of the
Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, or-
ganized by the Communist Party, were in
Spain upholding that principle with
honor in the fight against fascism.
Canada’s Party of Socialism chroni-
cles not only the inner-party struggles to
maintain this principle, but frankly exam-
ines the party’s policy errors, such as the
Liberal-labor coalition slogan incorrect-

ml ly advanced in the 1945 federal election.
_ although this slogan was acknowledged a
|_| few weeks after the election to be a sub-

jective reaction to CCF (Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation) rejection of
co-operation, close to 40 years later it is
still being used by right-wing NDP mem-
bers to deride any proposal for coalition
on the left.
Criticisms of this work are more likely

| to. concern omission rather than commis-

i
idarity with

sion, as for instance its failure to record
founding of the B.C. Workers’ News in
1935, and its in a province Which has the
strongest labor paper tradition in the
country.

Former Toronto alderman Stewart
Smith’s assumption of the leadership
after the party was outlawed in 1940 is

recounted in its political essence on page -
138. But this is not linked as it might

better have been with the conference
held at Montreal in February, 1942, as
reported on page 141. In fact, the under-
ground conference in Montreal, which I
attended from Vancouver with William

Ross from Winnipeg, brought together ©
the leadership in exile and the leadership |
within the country to formulate a united —

policy, with differences set aside to be
dealt with later, as they were at the
Labor-Progressive Party’s 1944 conven-
tion.

In face of the difficult task of com-
pressing 60 years of history into a single
319-page volume, such criticisms are
minor, for they illustrate the problem of
preparing the final draft.

Canada’s Party of Socialism is an out-
Standing example of collective historical
work. It has no single author, but rather it
represents the collective effort over a
period of years of a history commission
established by the party,

It is, however, to the credit of Gerry

van Houten, who did the research and
final writing, that the published work is
so clearly and concisely woven into a
whole, the more so when it is apparent
that each section could readily be en-
larged into a separate volume.

Above all, the book, amplified by its
historic photos, is a tribute to the dedica-
tion and courage of thousands of Com-
munists over three generations, named
and unnamed, who have died, endured
jail, discrimination and hardship, firm in
their conviction that socialism is the
truth of our historical epoch.

— Hal Griffin

y,

ia

V6B 1T3

CANADA’S PARTY OF SOCIALISM
History of the Communist Party
of Canada 1921-1976

A book which covers all the major events in Canadian working class history, but
more than that: This history analyses the political significance of every event in

Canadian and international terms and more than that: It brings out the importance

(and the difficulties) of the struggle for principled policy and flexible tactics.

Index 180 photographs 319 pages
Cloth $29.95 paper $14.95
Available at. . .

People’s Co-operative
Bookstore
353 West Pender, Vancouver

Ph. 685-5836