letter to richard collier facilitator revolutionary bulletin board

Letter to Richard Collier Facilitator Revolutionary Bulletin Board

Over Posted Attacks Personally and Against the CPS by CPC Member

By: Don Currie Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism Editor Focus on Socialism

September 2, 2010

www.FocusOnSocialism.ca

Canadians for Peace and Socialism www.focusonsocialism.ca Box 168 Slocan BC V0G 2C0 September 1st 2010 Phone: 1 250 355 2669 Email: [email protected]

Richard Collier Facilitator, Revolutionary Politics [email protected]

Copy: Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada Central Committee, Communist Party of Canada Provincial Committee, Communist Party of Alberta Jason Devine, Zachary Crispin, Johan Boyden, Dave McKee, Sam Hammond, Mike Lucas, Sean Currie, members CPS.

Dear Rick

I am writing to you and copying those referred to in this communication. I do so as Chair of Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS).

I will not be sending you any further CPS E Bulletins or CPS communications of any kind for posting to [email protected]. If such material appears on your bulletin board it will not be sent by me. As you know I have never subscribed to the group and have always sent CPS bulletins to you personally so that you had the option of posting or not posting. Without fail, you seemed to have considered that our views had merit and you posted them always with fair comment.

This decision on my part has nothing to do with you or anything you have done. Although we have never personally met what has passed between us in correspondence has always been done with mutual respect.

www.FocusOnSocialism.ca of 11

http://www.focusonsocialism.ca/

mailto:[email protected]




The bulletin board you manage has become a place where anything can be said. What has been said about me and my comrades in CPS, living and dead, in one of the recent postings by a member of the Communist Party, who is also a candidate of the Party and who I believe may even be a member of the CC of the CPC is deeply perturbing and completely unacceptable.

If this is what the members of the Communist Party are permitted to say, and to say publicly, it should be of deep concern to all as to where the CPC is at, at this time, and where it is headed. I want nothing to do with this type of discourse. It does not serve any useful purpose for the cause of peace and socialism and I believe does a disservice to the Communist Party of Canada.

Because of what was said by a public spokesperson of the Communist Party about me, CPS, the USSR, Tim Buck all of it purporting to be said in the name of the Communist Party a response for the record is required.

I am now entering the second half of the seventh decade of this mortal coil. My loved ones and contemporaries are passing away. What lies ahead tends to focus the mind. When one reaches this point, there is little left to those of us who shared the same road, but our dignity and integrity as Communists.

I fully intend to defend mine and those who shared the same struggle.

For the record…

I joined the Communist Party (LPP) in 1953 when I was nineteen years old. My wife and comrade for 52 years Sylvia Bradley joined at age 18 a full year before me. During those twenty‐five years, we were members in good standing of the Party organizations of Thunder Bay (Port Arthur‐Fort William), Toronto Ontario, Winnipeg Manitoba and Regina Saskatchewan.

Sylvia and I were active members with our dues fully paid up until 1978 when the CEC in violation of our constitutional rights ordered the then leader of the Communist Party of Alberta Bill Tuomi to block our membership transfer from Regina to Calgary. Bill complied. Sylvia, who was never charged with any violation of Party discipline in her entire life, was also refused a transfer. She was the wife of an alleged transgressor and being a mere woman, was denied her rights by reason of association.


Sylvia who at this time was thoroughly inured to such events, responding as she always did when such things arose, retained her calm and in her usual dignified manner simply said, “If they won’t let you on the wagon. Why hang onto it…”. Indeed…

Since we were not called to Party meetings in Calgary we stopped paying dues and went to work and became active in those movements that would welcome us for who we were, not who we were alleged to be.

During our twenty years in Calgary we for a time led the Calgary Peace Council and were active in the Canada USSR Society. We organized public meetings and film showings at the Calgary Public Library, went door to door petitioning during the time of the cruise missile issue, marched in peace demonstrations and publicly supported other campaigns of the Canadian Peace Congress and the Canada‐USSR Society. We publicly participated in hosting Soviet delegations to Calgary including appearing on cable TV with our Soviet friends, and worked with Mike Lucas and Lillian Aikens and others in Calgary in the best way we could to promote Canada‐USSR Friendship. The Calgary Peace Council often met in our home including one meeting attended by then leader of the Congress Gordon Flowers.

During the 25 years I was a member of the Communist Party I was active at all levels of the Party organization, from the rank and file, as a youth organizer of the NFLY and the Socialist Youth League (SYLC) later the Young Communist League (YCL) and later, after returning from the Lenin Higher Party School in Moscow, 1959‐60, for 12 years as a full time Party functionary at both the provincial and national levels of Party responsibility.

During the period of my membership in the Communist Party I was a candidate in federal, provincial and municipal elections. I was given responsibility to author briefs and lead delegations on behalf of the Party to both municipal and provincial levels of government. I was repeatedly elected as delegate to provincial and national Conventions and was a member of Party delegations to international meetings and Congresses. Sylvia and I represented the Communist Party of Canada at the 150th Anniversary Celebrations of the Birth of Karl Marx in Berlin in 1958. We both attended the WFDY sponsored Moscow Youth Festival in 1957 where I was the official delegate representing Canada at the World Assembly of the WFDY. Sylvia’s role in organizing the Saskatchewan delegation to the Moscow Youth Festival was exemplary. That is a separate and remarkable story and the record of that work has been preserved and will be published as time allows.


From 1958 or thereabouts, memory fails me at the moment I was repeatedly elected at National Conventions as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada. I was a member of the CC even after I resigned as Manitoba Provincial Organizer in 1973. After resigning as a full time functionary of the CPC I continued to be a member of the CC, the Manitoba PC and continued to be a public activist at the rank and file level for the Party accepting and carrying out various public duties assigned to me to the best of my ability. During this period Sylvia and I were active in organizing several youth camps, public educationals, schools and seminars. Sylvia was likewise a member of the Manitoba PC and while working full time as a wage earner, and a mother and playing a leading role in her club, the Norman Bethune Club, she accepted the assignment as public spokesperson, leader and organizer of the most active committee in the entire country in the public campaign to Free Angela Davis.

The full account of our life in the Party during those years is presently being written. I have neither the time nor inclination at the moment to verify what I have just said but it is all a matter of public record.

In 1968 or 69 (I can’t remember the exact date) I was elected at a national convention of the CPC to the CEC and at the personal invitation of Bill Kashtan, we moved to Toronto with our son Sean where I was appointed National Organizer. After a short time working as an office worker in Toronto, Sylvia was invited by Mark Frank, Manager of Progress Books to work on staff. She fulfilled that role with her usual meticulous attention to her duties that she was noted and respected for by co‐workers and friends in the progressive movement. Sylvia Bradley was always and everywhere, from the earliest days of her activity in the Communist youth movement to the day she died, noted for her calm bravery, her wit, her generosity, her kindness, her sense of proletarian culture and for her studious attention to Marxism. Her memoir is partially written and will soon be published.

In the early spring of 1970 I took up my duties as National Organizer and fulfilled that function until the fall‐winter of 1971. While fulfilling my duties as National Organizer of the Communist Party I was a member of the three‐person Secretariat of the CEC, comprising General Secretary Bill Kashtan, Org Secretary Alf Dewhurst (I can’t recall his exact title) and myself, National organizer. In that capacity I was privy to much of the internal workings of the CPC. As national organizer I was sent on two national tours, and attended, along with Bill Kashtan and Jeanette Walsh as a member of the official Canadian Communist Party delegation to the 24th Congress of the CPSU. Following the 24th Congress I was asked by Bill Kashtan to go to Hungary and meet with Party representatives and report back on the


progress that was being made in the construction of socialism in that country at that time. I was also entrusted by the CEC with the duty of attending an international seminar on anti‐communism where I presented a paper on behalf of the Party which was subsequently published and circulated internationally.

I was given other important assignments, the most notable being to help organize the 100th Anniversary Celebrations of the birth of Lenin and to assist Dr. McFadden with the re‐establishment of the Young Communist League and its re‐founding convention in Toronto in 1970. I was given many writing assignments for the Canadian Tribune, participated actively in all pre‐convention discussions and had many writings accepted for publication in the Party’s theoretical journals.

To that point in our lives in the Party Sylvia and I were not aware of any public criticism of our loyalty and adherence to the line and discipline of the Party, its program and its constitution or had any reason to believe that we had anything other than approval of our public role as Communists and our personal conduct.

In 1971, Bill Beeching, editor of the Canadian Tribune, and Dr. Charles McFadden, General Secretary of the YCL and I were accused by the CEC of acting as a faction promoting a left opportunist deviation from the united front policy of the CPC, in particular as it applied to healing the split in the labour movement between communism and social democracy. The definition of a faction is a group that has its own internal discipline and works outside democratic centralism of the Party Constitution to organize opposition to the Party line. The evidence provided by the CEC to the CC that we had acted as a faction was the fact that on several key questions we had expressed our opposition and voted against the majority position in meetings of the CEC. No other evidence was provided because there was none.

The charge of factionalism was spurious and trumped up and came as shock to Sylvia and I who had never experienced anything like that in our entire life in the Party.

Bill Beeching, Dr. McFadden and I each vehemently denied the charge of factionalism, upheld our political views on the matter of the united front, each presenting their own individual understanding of that policy, and did so in individual written documents to a meeting of the CC. The CC rejected our standpoint. In addition to us Mark Frank also voted against the majority. I believe there were some abstentions.

The CC suppressed the position papers we had presented, adopted a resolution that was circulated to the membership from coast to coast that we had been censured. What was


emphasized in the CC document and discussed at report back meetings was not that legitimate differences had arisen in the CEC, nor what the substance of those differences were about, but that we had acted as a faction. That canard continues to be promoted by some veteran members of the CC to this day.

In protest, I resigned as National Organizer and in the winter of 1971 returned to Winnipeg where Sylvia and Sean joined me later. I was reappointed to the position of Manitoba Organizer of the Communist Party. Sylvia with her usual stoicism went back to work as a wage earner and rank and file party activist.

Bill and Elsie Beeching also returned to Regina, where Bill was promptly re‐elected to the leadership of the Communist Party of Saskatchewan. Dr. McFadden and his wife Karen left for the east coast, where both subsequently launched distinguished careers as educators.

The events of 1970‐71 are briefly recorded in the official history of the Communist Party. This is not the time to recount the full details of those differences which were rooted in differing assessments over what policies and actions the Party should adopt during the War Measures Act October Crisis of 1970. Our point of view on that history is presently being written and will be published.

In 1973 I voluntarily left the position of Manitoba organizer and went back to work in industry as a welder in the steel fabrication and construction industry. We moved to Calgary in 1978 where I worked part‐time in industry while attending technical school and Sylvia in accounting offices. After achieving a diploma in technology I worked as a welding inspector and was eventually hired to the staff of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) where I worked as an instructor until my retirement in 1997. Sylvia retired in 1995 after 43 years as a bookkeeper office worker. We then retired to Slocan BC. While in Slocan we both were active in the Nelson Peace Coalition and played a role in the struggle to re‐establish the Canadian Peace Congress. We were part of the Canadian delegation to the World Assembly of the World Peace Council in Caracas Venezuela in 2008. Following that event I was a delegate to the re‐founding Convention of the Canadian Peace Congress in Winnipeg which elected Dave McKee its new President.

Sylvia died in April 6, 2009. I continue to live in Slocan, work on behalf of CPS, follow closely the work of the CPC and the International Communist and Peace movement and do what I believe useful for the cause of peace and socialism.


This brings me to the Committee of Canadian Communists and Canadians for Peace and Socialism.

In 1978‐79 the entire Saskatchewan Committee of the Communist Party was removed from their positions, their office and funds placed under receivership. An appointee of the CEC, Gordon Massie, who recently died at age 81, was flown in to administer what was left of the Saskatchewan Party organization.

The charges against the Saskatchewan PC were that they supported Bill Beeching, Saskatchewan Provincial Leader of the Communist Party in defiance of a CEC edict that he was to cease work on the publication of the memoirs of Tim Buck, “Yours In the Struggle.” Bill refused to do so, explaining that he intended to honour a pledge that he had made to Tim Buck, while Tim was dying in Mexico, that no matter what the consequences, he would see to it that Tim’s memoirs (CBC taped interviews) would be edited and published. Bill honoured that pledge and paid for it with his expulsion by the CEC from the Party, for life, and without the right of appeal, a gross violation of the Party Constitution and his rights as a life‐long Communist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, veteran of WW2, and respected leader of the Communist Party of Saskatchewan from 1953‐54 to 1978. As an aside I would like to mention that while we were in Caracas attending the WPC World Assembly, a left wing NDP veteran and former member of the Blakeney Cabinet in Saskatchewan was also there. We struck up a conversation and the topic of the role of Bill Beeching in Saskatchewan labour and farm struggles arose. The NDP veteran said in the presence of all those attending, “Bill Beeching towered over all of us and we knew it.”

The book “Yours In the Struggle” today is circulated at Party gatherings and is widely read by members and supporters alike, many of whom know nothing about this history, and read and study it, strictly for its insightful historical importance and for what was intended by Tim, an important memoir by the longest serving and noteworthy leader of the Communist Party to that point in time. I happen to believe Tim Buck remains the most influential Marxist‐Leninist ever produced by the Canadian working class. His legacy lives on.

After being forced out of the Party in 1978‐79 and with nowhere to go but back into the struggle, those who supported Bill Beeching helped him to organize the Committee of Canadian Communists (CCC). Following Bill’s death in 1990 CCC was led by Ed Lehmann then John Beeching and now by me.


We changed our name to Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS) after evaluating the struggle waged by the CPC under the leadership of Miguel Figueroa, General Secretary, to maintain the legal status of the CPC in the face of an attempt by the state to emasculate the party and its rights. We were motivated to change our name from CCC to CPS so as not to leave any doubt, that we former members of the CPC, now members of CCC not only hailed that Party victory for its rights, but were also not intent on forming another Communist Party, hence the name change. Everything said here is on the record in writing much of it posted to the website of CPS and hs been communicated and is well known to the present leadership of the CPC.

In all of that time, CCC, CPS and I personally have been called many things. We have been severely criticized by members and leaders of the CPC. At the same time there are also many instances when CPS members and CPC members have worked collaboratively together, and still do, in particular in the movements for peace, with the most notable achievement being the re‐establishment of the Canadian Peace Congress. Occasionally People’s Voice have published our statements and continues to accept our May Day greetings. The CPS website www.focusonsocialism.ca provides links to the CPC, the YCL, People’s Voice, Solidnet and the Canadians Peace Congress and to the best of our ability we publish the statements of the CPC, support the fund raising campaigns for its press and promote its federal and provincial elections campaign materials.

What we do not do, is provide knee jerk, uncritical support to all of the policies, statements, programmatic positions of the CPC some of which we consider as weak and in need of more work. We have expressed those critical views publicly and in the pre‐convention discussion of the Communist Party in the lead up to its 34th Convention. We attended that Convention as observers. Our contributions to the 35th Preconvention Discussion of the Communist Party were suppressed. After the suppression of our contributions during the last preconvention discussion we saw little to be gained either for the Party or ourselves by requesting to attend as observers.

In the last federal election I was called at my home in Slocan by the election manager of the Communist Party of Canada’s candidate in my constituency asking to meet with me. I of course readily agreed. Two young people, Johan Boyden and Zachary Crispin showed up. I met them at the local grocery store and introduced them to all present by name, identifying them as the candidate of the Communist Party in our constituency and his campaign manager who at that time was also the General Secretary of the Young Communist League.

http://www.focusonsocialism.ca/


We spent the afternoon together. At the time there were members of my family visiting. I gave the CPC canvassers a donation as did my relatives. I agreed to post a Party election sign on our front lawn where it remained throughout the campaign. I accepted Party election campaign literature and gave it to neighbours that visited our home. I directed the young people to use my name as an introduction to the editor of the local regional newspaper, for which I was Slocan correspondent at the time. They did so and if memory serves me correctly the interview was published. I also attended the public meeting of the CPC candidate in Trail and took my granddaughter to her first Communist Party meeting. The Provincial leader of the Communist Party was the main speaker at the meeting. I did not participate but listened with great interest. My recollection of that meeting and my views about what was said there was published to our website.

I considered the young men who represented the Party in my constituency to be examples of what I believe young Communists should be. They were well groomed, clean and modestly and neatly dressed. They were open and courteous, good natured and well informed. They graciously accepted and shared a meal and fulfilled every expectation one could have about what a public spokesperson of the Communist Party should be. I was pleased to introduce them publicly to friends. Their campaign efforts in that election were held up in People’s Voice as exemplary and I agree with that assessment.

None of what is said here is that remarkable for anyone who has been and remains a member‐supporter of the CPC. We all have our personal journeys and I do not consider mine to be any more or less significant than any other of my generation who voluntarily joined the struggle for socialism. I have the utmost respect for those who publicly step forward on behalf of the Party, give their all, and do it out of conviction and without expectation of any reward.

In that entire journey I have been called many things. I accept that as the price one pays for having convictions and advocating them. However, I have searched my mind and I cannot remember ever having been publicly called a liar by friend or foe and certainly to my recollection never by a Communist. What has been said behind my back I have no control over and doesn’t concern me.

I repeat, I see no useful purpose either for CPS or the CPC to participate in that type of discourse.

That is why I will no longer send material to you for publication.


What the CPC leadership does is their affair.

Respectfully

Don Currie.

letter to richard collier facilitator revolutionary bulletin board

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