Response to Alan Maki in Regard to CPUSA
Contribution to 12th IMCWP
The Webb Thesis
By: Don Currie
Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism
Editor Focus on Socialism
February 4, 2011
www.FocusOnSocialism.ca
Canadians for Peace & Socialism
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February 4, 2010
Dear Alan
CC: Sam Webb, Miguel Figueroa
Thanks for asking if I had read the CPUSA contribution to the last IMCWP meeting.
I read Sam Webb’s thesis last night and this today. Sam’s thesis came after this CPUSA
presentation to the IMCWP published on Solidnet on December 9th. They are not exactly
the same in emphasis indicating there is division in the CPUSA over its uncritical support for
President Obama and the general estimation of the CPUSA leadership of US and global class
politics, where it is at and where it is going in the near term as you confront the next
presidential election and beyond into the 21st century.
Sam’s thesis, in the face of mounting criticism, is an attempt to justify the line he has
convinced the leadership of the CPUSA to accept and around which it now conducts its
work. He refuses to adopt a self‐critical approach and because of that some in the CPUSA
have felt compelled to go outside the Party to express their views. That should be a wake up
call to the CC of the CPUSA that there is need for an organized discussion. It was never right
for the leadership of CP’s to attempt to contain an erupting discussion in the name of
democratic centralism. Democratic centralism correctly applied in periods such as now, can
afford to allow a more open expression of what may be at this time a minority viewpoint.
However it can’t be argued that it is an insignificant viewpoint considering a lot of it is
coming forward from veterans of our movement with long histories of militant and
unblemished partisanship for communism. More than that, the discussion that is now
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underway in the CPUSA has been extant in our international movement for some years and
many parties are well on their way past that phase in their theoretical work having resolved
many of the issues that comrade Sam seems to be hung up on.
Comrade Webb’s line is encountering the hard objective reality in the USA of an electoral
movement against Bush that has been subverted by the extreme right wing manifested in
the Tea Party that is the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and carries with it the
threat of American fascism. The reasons are there far all to see, the main one being that
President Obama, essentially a right wing social democrat, has failed the movement he leads
on every essential issue around which he was elected. Ignoring that fact, and attempting to
embellish what is essentially a defeat for the people of the USA by exaggerating the
significance of small gains that have been made is right wing opportunism.
The fact is that the line of the CPUSA, well intentioned and it can even be argued
unavoidable in the beginning of the rise of Obama and designed to lend strength and
courage to the Obama presidency has run its course. It has failed because Obama a
reformist is behaving as all reformists do and as Jack Layton the leader of the NDP does in
Canada. Confronted with what appears to be overwhelming power of right wing reaction,
they retreat and attempt to confine the struggle with the right wing within Congress and in
our case within Parliament. That is a limited battle field, not unimportant, but strictly limited
and where the class enemy is the strongest and in control of the state apparatus. Should we
abandon the legislative, electoral struggles? Of course not Lenin dealt with such left
infantilism long ago. It is sad to see the CPUSA withdraw from running in national elections
and liquidating much its work in that area. Had it hung in there it would be in a stronger
position today to lead the genuine pro‐democracy, labour and peace forces in your country.
In Canada the Communist Party of Canada has problems and they are very serious, but to
their credit, they have not abandoned the electoral field and if they can overcome some
infantile confusion about electoral tactics and strategy they have a future at all levels of
electoral politics, federal, provincial and municipal going forward. It is tough sledding but it
is essential mass work. I hope to see the day when the CPUSA re‐enters that field of
struggle.
What is the root of comrade Webb’s opportunism? In my view the opportunism in comrade
Webb’s analysis is his propensity for speaking about US politics as though the USA was not
an imperialist state and not the leading imperialist state. For comrade Webb the illusion of
US democracy is the reality. He has developed the notion of a Bill of Rights Socialism into a
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doctrinaire absurdity something that Gus Hall never intended when he enunciated that
correct slogan. When comrade Webb does that, and I am sure he will complain bitterly that
he has not spared US imperialism, he invites American workers to believe and worse, not
only to believe, but to limit their struggle to the support of Obama’s tepid reforms. That is
essentially an argument that US imperialism has the ability, and even the inclination to
reform itself.
Comrade Webb has stated many times, as did our former general secretary Bill Kashtan that
socialism is not on the agenda. That is neither historically true, nor dialectically supportable.
That is a serious misreading of Lenin on the development of capitalism to the state
monopoly capitalist stage, imperialism. That is classic reformist ideology. Comrade Webb
because he has not found what he is looking for in Marxism‐Leninism proposes a new
Marxism and wants to remove Lenin from the definition. He does that at great peril to the
theoretical and ideological credibility of the CPUSA.
Comrade Webb in his thesis reflects the confusion of ideas that he seems unable to crack, ie.
the contradiction between reforms and the struggle for socialism. Leninism, call it what we
will, is Marxism in the period of imperialism that solves the problem of the relationship
between the struggles for reform and socialism. What is imperialism? Sam lists his recent
reading of Lenin. He needs to include Lenin’s Imperialism and explain to us why it still isn’t
relevant, applicable, and resonant with truth and power today. The global system of
imperialism today is not exactly what it was in Lenin’s time, but in its essentials it is the
same. What Lenin described and analyzed led to an understanding among communists of
how it was possible to win socialism in one or a group of countries, without a complete and
total world‐ wide victory of the socialist revolution (Trotsky’s baleful view). Without Lenin’s
thesis on Imperialism the Bolshevik Revolution would not have been victorious. The thesis
simply described the fact that imperialism is the complete preparation for the transition to
socialism and within its global system there were weak links where during periods of
economic and political crisis revolutionary break‐through is possible. It continues to be so to
this day.
Lenin was clear about this. Imperialism is capitalism in the state monopoly stage of its
development, the final and last stage of its development beyond which there are no
intervening stages in which all of the necessary prerequisites for socialism are present.
Monopoly devoid of private ownership, is socialism. Lenin said that in Tax In Kind and other
works. What the American people and the Canadian people have achieved by their labour
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from the advent of the earliest days of capitalism when objectively speaking capitalism was
still in a progressive stage of its development has evolved today to its extreme reactionary
stage, the final stage, state monopoly capitalism, imperialism. Canada and the USA are
imperialist states, the USA entering a period of its relative decline, and Canada I would assert
entering a phase of imperialist expansionism.
Historically speaking that confronts the people of both our countries, in slightly altered
circumstances, with the unavoidable necessity to engage in struggles to take what they
have created into their own hands. That means taking into their own hands that which
actually exists, what is at hand, monopoly but devoid of its private ownership. That is what
confronts the working class of all advanced capitalist states. Monopoly is the prerequisite
for socialism about which Lenin was speaking. Worker’s labour for monopolies and derive
their wages from monopolies but not the product of their labour which is appropriated by
the owners of monopolies. It is simplistic to say, but nonetheless true, that socialism will
retain monopoly and refashion it to serve the needs of the people.
Anti‐monopoly coalitions and alliances, now the buzz word is social alliances, requires
definition. State monopoly capitalism is imperialism. By definition, anti‐monopoly coalitions,
social alliances, mass movements that arise carry with them, unavoidably so, an anti‐
capitalist content and an anti‐imperialist content which is in addition to the democratic
content associated with all bourgeois democratic capitalist states of the type of Canada and
the USA. Democracy does not and cannot obviate the anti‐democratic content of capitalism
and imperialism. Comrade Webb can’t seem to get his head around the fact that democracy
in our respective countries is not pure democracy it is capitalist democracy in the period of
imperialism and that democracy serves the system from which it springs. Bourgeois
democracy affords the working class a more favourable objective condition within which to
conduct the class struggle, it does not guarantee it. We fight to expand democracy, not as
an end in itself, but to maintain and expand the favourable conditions to struggle for
progress and socialism. The forces attempting to appropriate democracy for itself to fashion
an elitist democracy serving the classes of wealth and privilege needs exposure. That is why
it is wrong as comrade Webb suggests to speak of democracy and other categories of
progressive human activity under capitalism in the abstract. Democracy is concrete or it is
nothing. Democracy serves the cause of the working class or it is not democracy. We have a
class approach to democracy not an above class approach. I am not an expert on the US Bill
of Rights, but I would suggest that what was in Comrade Gus Hall’s mind when he coined
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the slogan was the concrete possibilities afforded to the working class by the Bill of Rights,
not an abstraction of those rights.
Comrade Webb argues we can’t say that socialism is on the agenda because the working
class will not understand us. Fair enough. We should strive at all times to be understood and
with the utmost clarity and in language that workers and their families understand. Lenin
also gave us advice on how to confront that problem and said (I don’t have the reference in
front of me) that communist parties had to find the “approaches to the revolution” by that
he meant to seize upon those issues, that the people themselves were raising and in the
course of struggling for them, the need to overthrow the system becomes apparent.
Revisionists and reformists don’t like the term “overthrow”. Fair ball. This is the 21st Century
we have lots of clever wordsmiths around; let them come up with a better one so long is it
doesn’t throw out the content of the meaning of overthrow, which is to get rid of…
What is surprising in Comrade Webb’s thesis is to declare the CPUSA has unequivocally
broken with the period of Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union and then in another
passage to describe all of the economic, social and democratic demands he says the
American people have yet to win and need to struggle for, without stating that upon close
and careful examination these urgent and necessary reforms were achieved under Soviet
socialism and a lot of them during the period of Stalin’s leadership.
There is a well defined and contrary view to that of comrade Webb enunciated by many
parties in the IWCP in particular the KKE and those parties that support its general world
view that correctly situates the role of Stalin in the struggle for socialism. I have enunciated
my views on that matter which have been published and surprisingly well read, on our
website. I have also been bitterly attacked by some members of the CPC, from a Trotskyist
standpoint as well as anti‐communist revanchist and pro‐fascist types in our country.
I will not comment at this time on Comrade Webb’s thesis on the Party itself and what in his
opinion should constitute the requirement for membership except to say it invites your
party to transform itself into and association of like‐minded people which is much less than
what a Communist Party is by Lenin’s definition and by practice. The Communist Party of
Canada is celebrating its 90th Anniversary this year. There are no proposals that I know of to
consider an abandonment of the basic tenets of what a Communist party is in this country. I
can only suggest that comrade Webb may want to revisit Volume 31 of Lenin’s Works and re‐
read the “Terms of Admission Into the Communist International” before he goes too far
with his proposals to refashion the CPUSA. The 20 points that parties were required to fulfil
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90 years ago prior to entry to the International, may sound archaic in the 21st century, but in
their essence they sum up what is still valid for what a worker’s party requires, to be called
Communist. More needs to be said on this question and I have confidence as the comments
following comrade Webb’s thesis attest, there are many that do not agree with his view on
the Party.
Returning to Lenin’s advice on approaches to the revolution, what are those approaches to
socialist revolution that confront Communist parties in developed capitalist states? What are
those issues that in many respects are general for all countries such as ours? What are those
approaches which in the course of their struggles, the people will out of their own
experience begin to accept and support demands for an entirely new type of people’s
government?
First of all, there is already, at least in Canada a mass popular rejection of the imperialist line
that war means prosperity and moreover that it is necessary for prosperity. War can’t be
sold to the people using that argument. If it can, then it speaks to a corruption of the
working class that is very dangerous. The militarization of the US and now increasingly so
the Canadian economy, has become an excrescence (to use a favourite Lenin word) on the
economy depriving millions of our people of the funds necessary for health care, pensions,
low cost housing, publicly funded day care for children, and to overcome poverty. To speak
of reforms without speaking always about the burden imposed on the working class by war
is indefensible. Webb does not do that well. Obama agrees with the modern day industrial
military complex that war expenditures must rise as a percentage of GDP even at the
expense of the needs of the people and even if it drives the US government deeper into
debt. Obama is a servant of the war profiteers and what makes it worse, he knows better.
That issue it seems to me, above all others needs to be at the top of the list of approaches to
the revolution. There is mass weariness in the USA about serial wars on the one hand, and
the most virulent chauvinistic and self serving support for them by the right wing on the
other. That is among the sharpest fronts of struggle in the USA because of its obsession with
militarism.
Secondly; There is mass if not majority support, if correctly and popularly enunciated to raise
the demand for the people to fight to take into public ownership and control all of assets of
the country that involve the delivery of essential services such as utilities, (water, light,
sewage, roads etc., hospitals, schools, transportation, recreational facilities). There is a
powerful lobby in both Canada and the USA to privatise all of that. That is a huge battle
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ground for arguing for public ownership. We read in our media here that many if not over a
half of all US states are in bankruptcy and cannot pay their public servants. The approach to
the socialist revolution is to advance a national program to provide a communist answer to
that crisis. That also applies in Canada. That means to reject the IMF plans for austerity for
the people and state support for finance capital and in particular the banks, which both
Obama a right wing social democrat, and Prime Minister Harper and right‐wing Conservative
both subscribe to and endorse. That involves taking issue with, and exposing state
monopoly capitalist internationalism versus working class, people’s democratic
internationalism. The foreign and the domestic policies of monopoly are always and
everywhere at the expense of the people. That is an approach to the struggle for socialism.
That also is the issue around which we argue for tax justice and that can cut the ground from
under the likes of the Tea Party and Palin and their counterparts in Canada.
Thirdly, and for Canada most importantly, an energy program that restores the sovereignty
of the Canadian people over this most vital of all resources to ensure the future independent
economic development of our country. I would argue that is also a necessity in the USA
where the USA is largely energy self sufficient if its resources were under the ownership and
control of the people. The USA would not have any excuse for waging war for oil if it would
develop and live on its own ample resource. It doesn’t do that because it can get cheap oil
from Canada, rob it from the Middle East, and pollute the Gulf of Mexico where it is
relatively cheap to extract. Canada is a great exporting country and there are surpluses here
we can sell. That is not an issue. Who gets the benefit is the issue. Under the current
arrangement the benefit goes to big oil investors on both sides of the border at the expense
of the long term energy needs of Canadians. We in Canada and you in the USA I would argue
need a joint working class internationalist approach to the development of the energy
resources of our shared continent that provides work for energy sector workers, reduces
environmental damage, assures the long term energy needs of Canada and which is still in a
development stage, and which deprives the US‐Canadian NATO military of cheap fuel for
foreign wars. Can we consider that? Has comrade Webb considered that? The next time he
turns on the bathroom light switch he should because the power he is paying for is probably
coming from a North American hydro electric and fossil fuel power grid, that was at least
partially paid for out of the sweat and taxpayers dollars of the people of Canada. Our hydro
rates are going up in our province to pay for that absurd situation, all rationalized by the
Harper Government as undoable because of NAFTA. These are questions missing in comrade
Webb’s thinking. He even suggests without saying so openly that he has little interest with
what takes place outside the USA. That is wrong and needs to be critically evaluated. The
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CPUSA is not just another party. It is the party in the heartland of imperialism and that
imposes upon certain responsibilities other parties do not have. That is a shared
responsibility and being the neighbour of the USA and a history of joint work between our
two parties there is ample historical experience to work on.
Our group CPS has argued long and hard for a tri‐lateral approach to the energy issue that
would unite working class public opinion in North America around this issue. That is a
practical question of internationalism. The Communist Party of Canada has developed an
energy policy calling for nationalization and public ownership. Mexico has a nationalized
energy industry. The Communist Party of Mexico to everyone’s delight seems to have re‐
emerged. CPS has tried on several occasions to appeal to the comrades in the CPUSA to
wake up to the continental energy issue and to explain to the people of the USA that their
ruling class is misleading them on what was a major factor in their post‐war economic
expansions, cheap oil appropriated by theft and war. When will the CPUSA tell its people,
and for a start its own members, that they must address that issue and in the only way
acceptable to communists on the basis of internationalism. A joint declaration on the future
of North America, enunciated by our three parties with the participation of socialist Cuba
would be an audacious answer to the Harper, Calderon, and Obama imperialist view of our
continent.
Comrade Webb makes a passing reference and alludes to the demand of the people of the
America’s and the world that US imperialism withdraw from empire and suggests that the
USA still has an important role to play internationally. Without explaining what that role
would be, comrade Webb evades discussing the rejection by global humanity of the present
US imperialist concept that it is predestined to continue to rule. The CPUSA can’t be fuzzy on
that point. Comrade Webb comes at the matter of US withdrawal from foreign military
bases late in his thesis. It needs to be front and centre. That is a global demand of our
international movement. The USA has no mandate from the world to rule. I fear that there
is still wide spread illusions among Americans that that is the case. What is true for the USA
is not true for the world. That is a hard reality but it won’t go away soon. The CPUSA has a
proud record and has paid a heavy price for standing up to the Manifest Destiny doctrines of
US imperialism. Due to the fact that it lives in the belly of the beast the CPUSA is called upon
to do that again today and with great vigour. I do not detect that commitment in comrade
Webb’s analysis.
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Both the CPUSA and the CPC underestimate the internationalisation of imperialism as
expressed in the enhanced policing role in NATO, NORTHCOM, and now AFRICOM and the
imperialist attempts to corrupt the original mandate and intent of the United Nations. We
are critical of the failure of the Communist Party of Canada to participate fully and in a timely
way in support of the initiative of the World Peace Council and its campaign to denounce
and expose the recent NATO meeting. It is important for the CPUSA to take the lead on that
file. The US imperialists dominate and control much of the gendarme role played by NATO
and are its principal financial support. Comrade Webb barely mentions it. The irritations
between the EU and the USA are not so great that the imperialists of these states will fail to
unite in attacking people’s revolution wherever it arises. The US imperialists and we count
on the CPUSA to fully and in detail to reveal who they are, constitute the greatest threat to
peace, the anti‐imperialist movements of the people and to real socialism. Comrade Webb
does not enunciate that reality with vigour as he must. That is the ABC’s of internationalism
today. The next assault by US imperialism will be Africa. CPS has warned about this in
relation to imperialist plans to subvert the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What is
happening in North Africa, the sub‐Sahara, the Middle East is the other side of that
contradiction where the anti‐imperialist forces are not quiescent and that revolutionary, pre‐
revolutionary social explosions will more than likely be the norm going forward. Our task as
Communists is to not create any illusions, that our own imperialist bourgeoisie is not heavily
involved through the IMF, NATO, NORTHCOM, and AFRICOM in attempting to suppress the
rising anti‐imperialist struggles. It is disappointing to read how weakly and superficially
comrade Webb has addressed some of these historical tendencies.
Fourthly; I think comrade Sam is just plain wrong to muse about the end of economic
development. That is not our view of Canada which we Canadian communists believe still
has enormous potential for progressive development of its economy on behalf of the social
needs of our people and in particular the youth. We reject the imperialist view of the world
and uphold the concept of people’s sovereignty over economic development in the fullest
sense of that term. We believe in the entitlement of the people to all of the resources of this
land and the right of the youth to have a future with a purpose. We are opposed to
cosmopolitanism and the suggestion that our future lies with global imperialism and that
there is no future in the development of our own country, with our own resources and the
labour of our own people.
Imperialism has turned the whole world into a market for the export of capital, abandoning
completely any pretence of interest in the planned and systematic development of the
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home market and treats sovereignty as an outdated relic of the past. That doesn’t mean that
the people have. Free trade in our time means as it did when Lenin wrote Imperialism, the
freedom of finance capital to penetrate all markets at will, to alter economies, and if
necessary to destroy them, to ensure the dominance of international financial oligarchies
and their quest for maximum profit. Today progressive capitalist economic development is
virtually impossible, and I say that advisedly because there are still sectors that are in
development phases such as electronics. However we are not wrong, to go the people and
say forthrightly, capitalism cannot develop except towards more war and increased
exploitation of our own people and people everywhere.
Once we say that, we are obliged to provide the broad outlines of what a progressive plan
for economic development would look like for our respective countries. Comrade Webb
does not offer any vision of America except to say that it will not be what it was in the Soviet
Union. There is a certain combination of despair and utopianism in comrade Webb’s vision
that is not communist. He urgently needs to rethink his world view and in particular the
achievements of real socialism.
If it is true, and I believe that it is, that the people of the USA in greater and greater numbers
are falling into abject poverty, fewer and fewer have health care coverage, homelessness is
a national emergency, social breakdown is widespread, disintegration of public oversight
and control of government is declining, the strata of wealth and privilege are arbitrarily
taking into their own hands all of the levers of the state, if more a more of the social
hierarchy lives parasitically while millions are out of work and suffering…to continue to
speak as comrade Webb does of contemporary US democracy as it was at the turn of the
century, and then by citing the wonderful and moving statements of its great people’s
leaders as evidence supporting a belief in a superior type of abstract democracy today,
better than that practiced by other people’s in other countries, that is not only illusory it is
not internationalism and not in conformance with reality and most certainly not in step with
the emerging line of the IWCP.
I may have more to say as this discussion unfolds. This is my initial response…and thanks for
asking and greetings from Canada.
Regards
Comradely
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Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism
PS Because this is my first response to Comrade Webb’s thesis and I am not one to conceal
my views not because I consider them particularly unique but because I feel there is need for
more open discussion, I am copying comrade Webb and the CPC as well as the members of
CPS. The item will be posted to our website.
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