When I woke up this morning, to celebrate I put on my favourite record: the Sex Pistols. But when ‘Holidays in the Sun’ came on, it struck me – someday, when I have a child, and I want to tell my son or daughter about my favourite record, I’m going to have to explain what the Berlin Wall was.
– quoted in Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (1995)
"Are you the Judean People’s Front?"
"Fuck off!"
"What?"
"Judean People’s Front. We’re the People’s Front of Judea!"
By 1995, the Berlin Wall – that uber-symbol of the Cold War – had been mere rubble for more than half a decade. Now, 11 years after music historian Greil Marcus recounted his friend’s lament, the possibility that the wall might so quickly be assigned to the dustbin of history is a valid concern, it seems.
I teach history at a post-secondary college. Each term, I like to ask students what their first historical memory is. This year, replies included the attacks of 9/11, the 1995 Quebec referendum, the trials of Paul Bernardo and O.J. Simpson, the death of Kurt Cobain, the first Gulf War, etc. But only a handful recalled even a trace memory of the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989.
This collective myopia is understandable on at least two levels.
First, why should anyone born in 1983 or ’84 – as was the case for many of this year’s cohort – have any lasting recollection of world events that happened when they were only five or so? I’m pretty sure I don’t.
Second, even for those who lived through the last years of the Cold War, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to recall just what it was that drove the world to the brink of extinction. For in hindsight and on reflection, it now seems that those two ideological Cold Warriors – capitalism and communism – actually shared more in common than was apparent at the time.
Both, for example, accepted the basic desirability of an industrial economy. They simply differed over how its wealth should be distributed.
Both similarly accepted the premise of a secular society. It may have been Marx who labelled religion the "opiate of the masses," but free-market capitalists were equally keen to emphasize the benefits of material wealth over spiritual reward, uneasy as they were about the socialistic leanings of Jesus Christ.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, western communists and capitalists alike shared an arrogance that their own respective view of the world could and should be applied to other (all?) parts of the globe. Beyond political rhetoric, they paid little or no regard to the real interests, concerns or needs of indigenous populations in Asia, Africa, India and Latin America.
All this, in a roundabout way, brings me to the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada.
The MLP came into being at a crucial time in the Cold War more than 30 years ago, during the split between Soviet Russia and Communist China in 1970. The ideological roots of that split are complex, but the point here is that the Communist Party of Canada (in business since 1921) sided with Moscow. Others on the left backed China and Mao Zedong, among them Hardial Bains, founder of the MLP.
Well, actually the preferred chosen name was the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), but Elections Canada ruled this out lest the electorate confuse the new party with the older CPC. So the Marxist-Leninist Party it was.
For the next three decades, the MLP would follow the finer ideological twists and turns of the Cold War, for example rejecting Maoism after the Chinese leader’s death in 1976 and instead standing shoulder to shoulder with the unreconstructed ultra-Stalinism of Enver Hoxha’s Albania. But holding the party together throughout was the figure of Bains, who dominated the organization through his force of personality and a willingness to take opponents to court.
Even after Bains’s death in 1997 at the age of 58, his spectre continued to haunt the MLP. Leadership of the party passed over to his widow, Sandra Smith (although she has never run for public office), while the MLP’s central consultative forum resolved that all members "must study the writings of Hardial Bains as a contribution to the development of a new coherence, both ideological and theoretical as well as organizational and practical."
For those who found such a prospect daunting, fortunately the MLP had already adopted Bains’s penchant for sloganeering: "Make the Rich Pay!", "It Can be Done! It Must be Done!" and "This is the Way Forward!" are examples, complete with original exclamations.
Beyond such calls to arms, the MLP’s present platform of policies was set out in a 1997 document entitled Preparing for the 21st Century: Stop Paying the Rich – Increase Funding for Social Programs. On reading this agenda, it’s surprising to see how mainstream some of the MLP’s proposals have become, including emphases on cultural and national sovereignty, on strengthening social programs, on implementing democratic reform, on recognizing the distinct claims of Québécois and Aboriginal Peoples, and on renewing Canadian foreign policy on the basis of "equality and mutual benefit amongst sovereign nations based on peaceful coexistence."
Of course, there’s also much that still sets the MLP firmly on the far left of Canadian politics. A promise to nationalize all banks and other financial institutions, to withdraw Canada from economic unions such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), to similarly quit military alliances such as Norad and NATO, and to offer support for non-democratic North Korea are unlikely to attract too many votes in the near future.
At least, they didn’t this time round. While the MLP fielded an impressive sum of 69 candidates across the country – including 19 in Quebec and four right here in Alberta – they managed to win only 9,289 votes between them (0.1 per cent of the total). In Calgary, Peggy Askin and Andre Vachon received 194 and 125 votes, respectively, while in Edmonton, Peggy Morton and Kevan Hunter fared even worse with 116 and 106 votes. Vachon, Morton and Hunter all placed dead last in their ridings, while Askin finished slightly ahead of the last-place Canadian Action Party candidate.
What, then, are we to make of the Marxist-Leninist Party in 2006? Long after the end of the Cold War, and with memories of that conflict’s passions fading by the year, what does a party rooted in the ideology of a bygone era have to offer? To judge by the votes, not much – maybe. As an electoral force, the MLP peaked early back in 1980 when it secured almost 15,000 votes, roughly a half-full hockey rink’s worth. Today, it can manage barely two-thirds of that.
But like the rubble of the Berlin Wall, the survival of the MLP is perhaps a reminder of what once was, of how things once were. And as long as it survives, it’s still possible for us to recall just how real the Cold War seemed at the time. |
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