First Published: Challenge, January 22, 1876
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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(Reprinted from the WORKER, newspaper of the Canadian Party of Labor)
Members and supporters of the Canadian Party of Labour look forward to the coming new year with tremendous optimism about the growth of our party and the prospects for working class revolution.
1975 will be remembered as the year of a major breakthrough for CPL. Our efforts in organizing workers under communist leadership in the Toronto Post Office represent a turning point for us. The fact that our comrades there attempted to put forward an unwavering position at the crucial points in the strike, called for shorter hours and attacked and exposed the local and national sellouts was the single most important factor in forcing the postal strike on the Canadian ruling class. Although we made many mistakes and our experience with this form of organizing is still limited–it is significant because we learned one crucial lesson. When we apply communist strategy in a consistent and disciplined way we meet with success. There is nothing holding workers back from communism within themselves.
The major obstacle has been our failure to provide the leadership needed to build a Communist movement. We are determined to change this and we have this experience to prove it can be done.
The ruling class darling, Trudeau, tells us that 1976 will bring doom and gloom. His anti-inflation program is only the beginning. What’s in store is all out war on the working class by the capitalists and their government. He’s now telling us what we’ve been saying all along. Free enterprise–capitalism–doesn’t work. The ruling class solution is fascism–taking away the rights that workers in this country have fought for, as Trudeau has begun to do with the controls–and war–where they try to get workers to kill each other so they can get a bigger piece of the world by knocking out some other imperialist. This is what is on the agenda for every capitalist power.
But from the point of view of the working class there is another solution–REVOLUTION–getting rid of capitalism and establishing working class dictatorship.
CPL pledges to do just that. Our New Year’s commitment is to take revolutionary politics to workers everywhere and to make the prospect of revolution in this country in our lifetime a certainty.