"Communists love Canada!": The Communist Party of Canada, the "people" and the Popular Front, 1933-1939

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2002 by John Manley

Like all member parties of the Communist International (Comintern), the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) embarked on a dramatic change of political direction - the Popular Front Against Fascism - after the Seventh (and last) Comintern Congress in summer 1935. Declaring that Fascism was now an imminent and equal threat to the Soviet Union, the democratic world and progressive civilization, shelved its aspiration to lead the advanced sections of the proletariat in direct revolutionary struggle for socialism and set out to broaden its appeal among the "people," a category embracing every Canadian except those in or closely aligned with the small stratum of finance capitalists, who, communists argued, formed the core of Canadian Fascism. Attempting, with some success, to reinvent itself as reformist, constitutionalist and "Canadian," it demonstrated the possibilities for a Canadian party of the left willing to combine parliamentary and extra-parliamentary methods. Between 1935-39, it more than doubled in size, gained for the first time a small but significant bourgeois membership, and saw its ideas begin to percolate into national debate. This paper nevertheless argues that the Popular Front re-making of the CPC was primarily driven by Soviet rather than Canadian needs, compromised the party's socialist objectives and failed to alter fundamentally the party's Stalinist character.

Comme tour les partis membres de l'Internationale communiste (Komintern), le Parti Communiste du Canada (P.C.C.) s'est radicalement tourne vers une nouvelle orientation politique - le Front populaire contre le fascisme - A la suite du septieme (et dernier) congres du Komintern tenu pendant l'ete 1935. Declarant que le fascisme etait des maintenant une menace imminente tout aussi importante pour l'Union sovietique, le monde democratique et toute civilisation progressive, le P.C.C. a alors mis sur les tablettes ses aspirations de mener les sections avancees du proletariat dans une lutte revolutionnaire directe pour le socialisme, et s'est plut6t engage A 61argir son charisme aupres du - peuple ), une categorie regroupant tous les Canadiens sauf ceux alignes avec - ou faisant partie de - la fine couche des capitalistes financiers, laquelle, selon les communistes, constituait le coeur du fascisme canadien. Tentant, avec un certain succes, de se reinventer comme reformiste, constitutionnaliste et canadien -, le P.C.C. demontrait qu'un parti canadien de gauche pouvait combiner des methodes parlementaires et extra-parlementaires. Entre 1935 et 1939, il a plus que double de volume, il s'est acquis pour la premiere fois un petit mais important nombre de bourgeois et a vu ses idC-es commences A s'infiltrer dans le debat national. Get article soutient neanmoins que la reinvention du P.C.C. en Front populaire repondait davantage aux besoins sovietiques que canadiens, qu'il a compromis les objectifs du parti socialiste et n'a pu modifier de faton fondamentale le caractere staliniste du parti.

By the late 1920s, western parties did not dispute their collective obligation to defend the USSR or its right to strengthen its national security through diplomatic manoeuvres. The Seventh Congress of the Communist International (CI, Comintern), however, which met in July-August 1935, caused unusual complications for the struggle against their own national bourgeoisies, whose support the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry was soliciting (Claudin 166-210). The Seventh Congress imposed a sharp change of tactics, replacing the (already much eroded) "ultra-left" line of "class against class" with a call for the construction of "Popular Fronts" against Fascism. Where the former had been predicated on the imminence of a probably decisive revolutionary upsurge, in which communists were to stand apart from and against all the other forces of the left, the latter urged them to find common ground with all "progressives" (including the social democrats they had recently reviled as "social Fascists") to defeat the threat of Fascism, which was no longer the ultimate expression of crisis-ridden capitalism but, as CI president Georgi Dimitroff put it, "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital" (Dimitroff 1938). As such, it was as grave a threat to the rights and freedoms enjoyed by the working and middle classes of the capitalist democracies as to its primary target, Soviet socialism. Building anti-Fascist unity to defend bourgeois-democracy was to take precedence over direct revolutionary struggle.

Like many sister parties, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) harboured anxieties about the new line's apparently non-revolutionary character; and these anxieties persisted (Morgan 44; Ottanelli 131-33). More than a year after a special enlarged plenum of the CPC central committee endorsed the "Canadian People's Front" in November 1935, "many comrades" still believed that the defence of bourgeois democracy was "a sort of 'going over to the right."' An educational letter issued in January 1937 attempted to clear up this misconception. Yes, Party leaders acknowledged, bourgeois-democracy had paved the way for Fascism and had not "become all right overnight." Yet, while reassuring members that they would "never be satisfied until we have Soviet-democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat," they insisted that the rise of Fascism had changed the political situation and necessitated a change in tactics. The new policy was not a retreat. Vast masses were moving left and while most were unprepared to join the Party, a "large percentage" were willing to unite "against the old line capitalist parties" in defence of the "democratic traditions of their country." It was time to recognise that bourgeois-democracy allowed "a certain freedom of organization and right of assembly which is [sic] not granted under Fascism ... [and which] gives greater legal scope for the work of the revolutionary movement" (Kealey and Whitaker, Depression Years IV, 68-9). A year later, Montreal party leader Fred Rose was still justifying this position: when socialism returned to the immediate agenda, he pointed out, it would be "a million times more difficult" to achieve under a Fascist regime; meanwhile, all "sectarian" priorities had to be set aside to ensure that Fascism was repelled (Rose 4-5). This paper delineates the CPC's attempt to implement the Popular Front and evaluates the latter's impact on the party.