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Description
Written in 1946, Fergus McKean’s book “Communism versus Opportunism” exposes the revisionist aims of the Communist Party of Canada (then named the Labour-Progressive Party) and its leader Tim Buck, who departed from all the fundamental theses of Marxism in the same way the Second International did. They forged a liberal-labour alliance with the King government and promoted the peaceful parliamentary road to socialism, as well as continued collaboration with the bourgeoisie in socialism, under the guise of “national unity.” The leaders of the Communist Party completely followed Earl Browder’s anti-Marxist line on our epoch, specifically his disastrous interpretation of the Tehran Conference, by which the above-mentioned collaboration was theorized. Indeed, they went further than Browder in capitulation to Mackenzie King and the bourgeoisie, refusing to self-criticise their line, even as Browder was exposed as an agent of U.S. imperialism by the Duclos letter. The leaders refused to educate the mass members and allowing their ideo-political level to be confined within carrying out the leader’s dictate — every democratic centralist, Leninist party norm was violated. In doing so, they set the communist movement in Canada back decades, and the author lays out a proposal for a new party in this book, a party which never realized. Canada was thus without a party until the emergence of a movement and party of a new type in the 1960s and 70s.
By renewing the availability of this book, the publishers sincerely hope it lays out the disasters modern revisionism inevitably leads to. It liquidates the independent role of the party of the working class and the independence of the working class itself; it destroys the force for affirming the rights of all and for defence against state attacks; it sits as a malignant tumour to turn the unbeknownst militant workers into pacifists; it turns itself into a agent of the bourgeoisie and their state.