Breaking With the Parties of the

Breaking With the Parties of the Profit System – A Step Towards a Labour Majority

CPS 2011 Election Statement

The May 2nd Federal Election


As this is written a week before election day on May 2nd 2011, the mass media is reporting an upsurge in support for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Quebec and possibly across the country. If that translates into mass voter support for the NDP on election day, it will be another indication of the latent desire of millions of Canadian working class voters to weaken, and if possible defeat, the dominance over government of the two major parties of the profit system, the extreme right-wing Harper Conservatives and the centre-right Ignatieff Liberals.

In the absence of a mass revolutionary party of the working class and its democratic allies, an upsurge in electoral support for the NDP would objectively represent the growth of the idea among organized and unorganized workers, confronting attacks on unions, wages, working and living conditions, for a new type of government with a labour majority in Parliament.  

Even a modest swing by voters away from support for the two major parties of the profit system would create better improved conditions for advancing the cause of peace, labour and socialism.

What is now happening in the federal election campaign is happening quickly. The corporate mass media has raised the alarm on behalf of finance capital that things may not be under total control. The gang up on the NDP by the Liberals and Conservatives and the media has started and will become frenzied. 

Left progressives must support and encourage every voter trend to oust the Harper Conservative Government. A defeat for the right-wing Conservatives will strengthen the cause of labour and its allies. That means in the first place the Communist campaign must consider issuing its response to this development avoiding all doctrinaire and detached rhetoric. What needs to be said must be said plainly, urgently, without illusions and in working class parlance.

The Communist Party while calling for increased support for its candidates, for its anti-monopoly program of peace and socialism, must at the same time welcome mass voter support for the NDP representing in real terms, now, in this election, at this time, a tangible expression of the desire of the working people for a stronger labour voice in government.

Does that mean endorsing the reformist program of the NDP? Does that mean closing our eyes to its unconscionable support for the US-NATO-Canadian aggression on Libya? No it doesn’t. What it means is there is a change taking place in the election campaign in real time that has to be taken into account. All parties are adjusting their tactics. So must the Communist Party.

For Communists in Canada in this election, at this time, it is important to avoid sterile debate beloved of petty bourgeois intellectuals. That should be left with them in their sand box. The responsible left has better things to do.

What monopoly fears in this federal election, at this time, is not the NDP. Under pressure the NDP has a record of capitulating to monopoly pressure. What monopoly fears is losing control over the working class, the laboring masses the non-monopoly classes.

Finance capital depends on the two major parties of the profit system to contain independent political movements of the people. The big employer and investor classes count on a docile working class for ease of exploitation so as derive maximum profits from unpaid labour time without problems. It relies on the two major parties of capital to give the stamp of approval to imperialist wars of aggression.

Finance capital above all fears restiveness even small expressions of defiance of their control over the state and their dominant status in society. Any democratic electoral movement that has labour support and begins to assume an organized independent political form arouses the fear and hatred of the ruling class. 

May 2nd is a bourgeois election. Not a revolution. The election can be a step forward or a step backward for labour and its allies. If the Communists are going to punch above their weight in this election now is the opportunity to do it and call for a step forward.

Communist leader Miguel Figueroa must issue a statement today on behalf of the Communist Party and its supporters, welcoming the reports of millions of Quebec voters considering breaking with traditional bourgeois politics and calling upon workers everywhere in the country to emulate that trend. Every Communist candidate must issue a statement and say likewise in the context of the prevailing situation in their respective constituencies.

Communists are realists. We should have no fear in saying forthrightly that on May 2nd Communist votes will not defeat Harper. We can say with the utmost confidence that the Communist election campaign is a contribution to the struggle to defeat the far right minority Harper Conservatives. More important than Communist votes is a victory for Communist electoral policy rooted in the fundamental interests of labour and its democratic allies. 

The reality is that if the Conservatives are to be defeated it will be the result of a combination of NDP, Green, Bloc and Liberal votes on May 2nd. The people will learn quickly what to do about any new configuration of government that arises. The entire responsible left has made the case why it is important to defeat the reactionary program of the right wing Conservatives. A swing of voters to the NDP would be a vindication of that assessment.

The Communist slogan to block the right is a correct one. Life is giving it meaning. It is important to recognize the voter trends that verify the correctness of Communist policy are small but important victories for the revolutionary forces of peace and socialism.

What the Communists say and speak to in the next week is an investment in the future of the struggle for working class power.

What the Communists are called upon to do in response to a voter swing to the NDP even if it is small, is to utilize that trend to speak today about what a post-election Canada can look like given a thumping defeat for the Harper right-wing Conservatives.

That was the issue when a Liberal, NDP, Bloc coalition was poised to oust the minority right wing Harper government. It is convenient now for those who poured scorn on that development to forget that it also came with a program that gave some expression to what the Canadian people were demanding at that time. The right wing Conservatives hornswoggled the opposition and with the betrayal of the Liberals gave Harper another three years of misrule. That must not happen again.

That was then, this is now. The people have learned some lessons from those events. Prime Minister Harper’s attempt in this election to frighten the electorate with the word “coalition” is back-firing.

 These types of rapid evolving events in capitalist politics will continue to occur. That is the nature of the growing instability and limitations of capitalist parliamentary politics today that requires of the Communist Party an unshakeable grasp of Communist principle and a mastery of flexible Communist tactics to turn such events into small victories for the working class and its allies.  

These events are opportunities to speak to Canadians about what Canada could be without state monopoly capitalism. That is what Lenin meant when he talked about finding the revolutionary approaches to the struggle for socialism in our time.

The Communist candidates in the short time left must speak about what Canada can be if there is a movement away in this election from the dominance of the major parties of the profit system. It is opportunity to speak about the limitations of a political system in which two major parties of the profit system dominate and determine all of the decisions of economic, politics and peace and war.

Below we list those factors we believe are underlying voter restiveness and that are a vindication of the stance taken by the combined forces of organized labour, the peace movement and the left progressive forces led by the Communist Party.

This election, dumbed down by a compliant and corrupt media, corrupted by scandal ridden Conservatives and Liberals desperately attempting to ingratiate themselves with the working people may herald a new type of electoral politics in Canada, where the people begin the process of not only voting, but acting independently of the state monopoly capitalism.

Left Turn Canada!


CPS considers the factors that are motivating thoughtful democratic Canadians to consider a swing away from the right wing minority Harper Conservatives and the centre-right Liberals to other opposition parties in this election, the NDP, are listed below. The list is not new or original. It is important to restate these issues because they form the basis of the social alliance led by the working class that must emerge if Canadians aspire to take our country onto the high road of progressive development and away from the swamp of US-NATO-EU imperialist war and endless boom and bust global capitalist economic crisis.

Factors motivating voters to break with the Conservatives and Liberals include:

  • The reactionary movement to scuttle the Canada Health Act in 2014 can be stopped. Mass voter anxiety of a right-wing Harper majority in power as the Canada Health Act comes up for renewal in 2014

  • The growing gap between wages and salaries of 17 million Canadians who must work to live, contrasted to the massive profit taking of the banks, big investors, foreign and domestic capital and a small minority of wealth and privilege that live parasitically on the labour of the people.

  • An unjust tax system where the real purchasing power of wages decline as monopoly prices rise and taxes on corporations fall.

  • Workers retired or looking forward to retirement deeply concerned about what a Harper majority will do with their Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefits taking into account Finance Minister Flaherty’s collusion with private pension providers and rejection of the Canadian Labour Congress’s (CLC) proposals for expanding CPP pension coverage to the millions that have no pensions. 

  • Awareness among Canadians from all social classes that a majority Conservative Government will accelerate the privatization of lucrative publicly owned capital assets, under fund and slowly privatize health, food and transportation inspection agencies, and devote more government research funding to the military and private corporations

  • Awareness that by stealth and underfunding a Harper majority will revoke the principle of universality in all social programs including health, education and public pensions and in the process by legislative chicanery stick Canadian taxpayers with ongoing maintenance and the “costs of doing business for business”; in a word dedicating the state exclusively to the interests of private profit.

  • The affront to Canadians by the Conservative Party’s injecting into a Canadian federal election of US style right-wing Republican gun lobby, anti-abortionist, racist, anti-immigrant and “support the troops” chauvinist rhetoric and fear mongering.

  • The right wing Conservative pandering to faith based 19th century hostility to Canadian working women expressed in rejection of the labour movement’s demand for pay equity and universal publicly funded child care

  • The right wing Conservative market theories that permit profit gouging of working class incomes for food, housing, home heating and transportation.

  • High rates and interest gouging on credit cards, internet, cell phone use.

  • The Conservative government’s massive military spending at the expense of the social needs of Canadians and its knee jerk support for US-NATO-EU wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Libya.

  • The Conservative Government’s adoption of the decisions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the cine qua non of government fiscal and monetary policy

  • Finance Minister Flaherty’s slavish adaptation of all government fiscal and monetary policy to suit the interests of corporate finance capitalism.

  • The Conservative Government’s cozy relation to big oil and gas interests permitting the export of cheap energy resources and falling royalty rates, rising prices for gasoline and the integration of clean hydro resources into a US grid at Canadian consumers expense.  

On May 2nd Defeat the Harper Conservatives!

Left Turn Canada!

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