Canada - On the upcoming federal election and its implications for the working class

Welcome to the second issue of The Red Flag quarterly magazine, a periodical promoting the views of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada [PCR-RCP] as well as those written by the revolutionary milieu of supporters, sympathizers, and fellow travellers. The theme of this issue is the upcoming Canadian federal election, with a particular focus on the PCR-RCP’s boycott campaign.
There has been a lot of noise about how this election is uniquely important, a chance to oust the Conservatives, an opportunity for the NDP to outflank the Liberals and form the government for the first time in history. On the contrary, commentators have said that every single election—whether federal or provincial—since the PCR-RCP began calling for a boycott of the bourgeois electoral circus was “uniquely important,” and they’re just as wrong this time as they were before! In the last Federal election, where the NDP under the late Jack Layton succeeded in winning more votes than the Liberals, some even argued that people should vote for the Liberals instead of the NDP to “get rid of Harper at any cost.”
In our opinion, and as many of our articles will argue, this electoral situation confirms precisely what we claimed in the past: all parties are now part of a rightward drift and the NDP, far from representing the interests of any strata of the working class, is in some ways even to the right of the Liberals. Moreover, whereas the first boycott took place only in Québec when the PCR-RCP was predominantly limited to that province, and the second with only a few supporters in Ottawa and Toronto, we now have a boycott movement that, while still small, will for the first time be in numerous major cities across Canada from coast to coast. Whereas the NDP has accumulated more neo-liberal supporters, we have accumulated more activists who want to boycott the state altogether and openly demonstrate their support of revolutionary politics. As we have argued in the past, for a long time there has been an implicit boycott of the electoral circus amongst the masses; we are slowly and doggedly working to make it more explicit.
But we will let the articles speak for themselves. Also, even if readers are not entirely convinced of the boycott line we believe that much of this issue will still be relevant in its expose of ruling class wheeling-and-dealing, Canadian Imperialism, the failed model of Syriza, etc.
Our next issue will be primarily dedicated to revolutionary culture, broadly understood, and we want to encourage our readers and supporters to submit anything from art work, poetry, short stories, and radical analyses of the meaning of the cultural sphere as soon as possible. Depending on what we receive, we would like to dedicate some space in every Red Flag to cultural production.

The Editorial Team

Please submit articles to: editors@theredflag.ca