Canada - Introducing the new Red Flag

“There are two principles for the united front: the first is to unite, and the second is to criticize, educate and transform. In the united front, capitulationism is wrong, and so is sectarianism with its exclusiveness and contempt for others. Our task is to unite with all intellectuals [and] artists… to help them, convert them and transform them. In order to transform them, we must first unite with them.”

Mao Zedong, The United Front in Cultural Work

We are proud to present the first issue of the new Red Flag magazine, the first result of the PCR-RCP’s efforts to reinitiate its propaganda work that, for the past several years, relied on old documents, online essays/interventions, and the Partisan newspaper. The Red Flag is intended to be a medium in which party members, supporters, mass-members, sympathizers, and fellow travellers will have their work printed and disseminated as a small part of developing a broad cultural counter-hegemony in which we, and other parallel movements, can operate.
Although we are starting humbly, with a small offering of articles/interventions/reviews, the hope is to eventually develop into the sort of magazine that our sympathizers, as well as friendly anti-capitalists, will submit all sorts of documents––from analyses to poetry––in the interest of intervening, to some degree, in the way in which social and cultural phenomena is popularly thought and imagined.
Despite the fact that The Red Flag will primarily be a medium for the PCR-RCP, due to the importance of a united front against contemporary crisis capitalism, we also feel it is important to print, for the sake of discussion, those creative interrogations of today’s state of affairs that intersect with our political line so as to provide a revolutionary, counter-point to the popular periodicals produced according to ruling class ideology. We also see this magazine eventually becoming a space to support the multiple and militant anti-capitalist struggles that are erupting throughout Canada––a space to support those organizers, activists, artists, and intellectuals, particularly those from and/or connected to the most oppressed and exploited layers of the masses––in a manner that is principled but not sectarian.
To be clear, while some party analysis, theory, and interventions will necessarily be promoted in The Red Flag, longer theoretical work that reflects the rich interior life of the PCR-RCP, will be printed in our journal, Arsenal, which will be released in the fall. Here in the pages of The Red Flag, though, we will find shorter articles of various types, cultural interventions, reports, and documents from Canada’s revolutionary history. We hope that, by the end of the year, this magazine will find a growing audience that is sympathetic to its aim, and that this audience will desire to contribute.

The Editorial Team