Maoism in the Developed World

The Progressive Workers Movement also attacked the Canadian Labor Congress and its provincial group in British Columbia on the grounds that they were affiliates of the AFL-CIO, railing instead for purely Canadian unions. The results of the campaign were disastrous for the PWM. “Ultraleftism led to the isolation of some of its best trade unionists, most notably Jerry Le Bourdais. During his term as an executive member of the Vancouver Labor Council, Le Bourdais and the PWM had a caucus of almost a dozen VLC delegates.” But by 1970, it was said that “Nothing now remains of the PWM presence in the unions on the local level or at the VLC.” The remaining PWM unionists joined with Liberal Party workers and others to form the Committee for the Canadian Unions.

The PWM gained control of the local Canada-China Friendship Association. According to Ron Haywood, “The association was converted by the Maoists into a propagandists mouthpiece for the thought of Mao Tsetung. One had no business in the CCFA unless the thought of Mao was foremost in his mind and he supported the cultural revolution.”

The PWM followed the evolving antipathy of the Chinese for Fidel Castro. In February 1968, the PWM’s paper, Progressive Worker, argued that the Cuban regime was “essentially a bourgeois-democratic revolution masquerading as socialism.” It was headed by “petty-bourgeois leaders,” who sought only “a patching of the capitalist system.”

Finally, the Progressive Workers Movement separated itself from the broader movement of protest against the Vietnam War. It claimed that that movement was controlled by “counterrevolutionaries.”[102]

There is no information available concerning how long the PWM survived into the 1970s.

The Canadian Party Of Labor

The Progressive Workers Movement, although centered in British Columbia, did have some branches in the rest of Canada. One of these was in Toronto, and it was its breaking away from the PWM that gave rise to the second Canadian Maoist organization. This was the Canadian Party of Labor (CPL).

The splitaway of the CPL was over a disagreement concerning Vietnam and the war there. The Toronto group in November 1968 adopted a position which was then being propagated by the Progressive Labor Party, which then held the “Chinese franchise” in the United States. They argued that the North Vietnamese and the NLF in South Vietnam had become “revisionist,” because they had agreed to enter peace talks with the Americans and the Republic of Vietnam in Paris. The Vancouver-based PWM would not accept this position and so the Toronto group broke away to form the CPL. Shortly afterwards, when a Vietcong (NLF) delegation visited Canada, the CPL strongly attacked them for the NLF’s taking part in the Paris talks.

The CPL shared the PWM’s antipathy for the United States-based international unions that were joined in the Canadian Labor of Congress. They labeled these organizations “Yankee loyalists” and “agents of U.S. policies.” In a strike in a Continental Can plant in Toronto in February 1969, the CPL temporarily gained leadership of a strike called by a small union that had broken away from the International Union of Operating Engineers, and they blocked efforts to get the International Pulp and Sulphite Union to aid the walkout, which was subsequently lost.

The CPL had some following among students on the local campuses in Ontario. They followed the policy of getting these students involved in local workers’ strikes. According to one hostile (Trotskyite) source, “In the trade-union arena, CPL had a consistent strategy of organizing picket-line mobilization for selected strikes, preferably small strikes which they have a chance of taking over. Although CPL nominally supports unions, its activities actually undermine, rather than complement the existing unions.”[103]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the separatist movement gained much support in Quebec. There arose the Parti Quebecois urging independence for the province. To its left, there also appeared a terrorist group, the Front de Liberation de Quebec (FLQ).

Late in 1970, the FLQ kidnapped two politicians, Cross and Laporte, presumably to put pressure on the Canadian government to allow the separation of Quebec. The Canadian Party of Labor opposed the FLQ.