Modern Communism and the Political Legacy of Hardial Bains - Part 3: Towards the Founding of the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Party

By 1967, the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" was raging in China and in the West Bengal region of India a revolutionary peasant uprising had begun under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar, a leading member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) and the founder and leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Both events had a profound effect on revolutionaries everywhere and Hardial Bains was no exception. A significant section of The Internationalists had already come to the conclusion that they were, in fact, communists and that it was necessary to reorganize on that basis. That reorganization took place following the historic Necessity for Change conference, held in London, England August 1-15, 1967 and which was attended by hundreds of revolutionaries from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.

In preparation for that conference, Hardial Bains wrote a pamphlet entitled Necessity for Change in which he presented a profound philosophical repudiation of the consumer culture of modern capitalism. In that pamphlet he developed his thesis that dogmatism and prejudice were the hallmarks of modern capitalist society and that society could advance only on the basis of their overthrow and the emergence of fully conscious, rational and enlightened human beings.

During the course of the Necessity for Change conference a fierce debate developed on the issue of whether the communist movement could be renewed on the basis of intellectual opposition to revisionism (the discovery and promotion of the "most correct" positions), by linking onself to one or another "centre" of communism, or by actually organizing within the concrete conditions presenting themselves in each country.

Following the Necessity for Change conference, those members of The Internationalists who championed the latter position, including Hardial Bains, decided to reorganize on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Like millions of other young revolutionaries of the day, they saw the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Mao Tsetung as a titanic struggle against the dogmatism and bureaucratism of the old communist movement. They believed that Mao Tsetung had discovered the method of ensuring the constant renewal and revolutionization of the communist movement, and that Mao Tsetung Thought represented the re-establishment of Leninism in the communist movement. During this period a significant section of the New Left in Canada, as elsewhere, was also looking towards China and Mao Tsetung for political leadership. However, The Internationalists never did adopt many of the methods of Maoism, insisting that every organization must stand on its own feet and do its own thinking.

In mid-1968 Hardial Bains returned to Canada and re-established the Canadian Internationalists in Montreal. The Internationalists issued a call for the unity of all Canadian Marxist-Leninists and within a period of a few months several other political groups joined with The Internationalists in the working towards the establishment of a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist communist party on Canadian soil.

During the period from the summer of 1968 until the founding of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) hundreds of Canadian youth and students joined in the work to build the party. All but a small handful had not been involved in the early years of The Internationalists and they brought with them a variety of political outlooks, experiences and methods of work. Although The Internationalists had been very broad-based and non-sectarian, the inclusion of these groups and individuals brought new challenges because of the sectarianism which was so characteristic of the New Left. Hardial Bains fought against those alien tendencies, but, consistent with the conclusions of The Internationalists, he understood that the creation of a new political culture was a slow process and that it would require the establishment of a revolutionary organization to deal with this problem in a systematic fashion.

Right up until his death, Hardial Bains remained convinced that a communist party, a party capable of attracting the most advanced thinkers and organizers that emerge from the broad movements of the people, was absolutely essential for the creation of human beings of the new type - rational, enlightened and independent-thinking human beings. He argued for a communist party which could provide a vision and a perspective to all of the struggles of the people, a communist party which could assist the movement to become far greater than the sum of its individual struggles.

At the same time, Hardial Bains did not accept that the form taken by a communist party or its methods of organizing were written in stone. He had first-hand experience of the betrayal of revolution by large sections of the old communist movement. In the years following the founding of CPC(M-L), his experiences with the Communist Party of China and many of the newly-formed parties which based themselves on Mao Tsetung Thought would soon lead him to question the entire old communist movement. Indeed, by the mid-1970s CPC(M-L) repudiated and rejected Mao Tsetung Thought altogether. However, unlike many others before (and since) him, the discovery of flaws in the old communist movement did not lead Hardial Bains to reject communism as a failed experiment. Far from it, it led him to identify what was best in the old communist movement and how those positive qualities could be expressed in the world of today. Of the utmost importance was his insistence that relations between people within a communist organization must fully reflect the kind of relations which we envision for the entire society. Anything less will inevitably result in the kind of disaster which struck the Soviet Union and the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe.