“What Is To Be Done?” (WITBD) is the question a lot of us are asking ourselves. More and more working-class and oppressed people have identified capitalism as the root cause of poverty, imperialist war, and attacks on civil rights, but don't know what to do about it. The politicians aren't listening, protests feel like little more than outlets for blowing off steam, and the reformist parties seem to abandon their promises as soon as they gain power.

The Communist Party of Canada was established to gather the most militant class fighters into a collective struggle against capitalism. However, they long ago abandoned the strategy of independent working-class self-organization in favour of class collaboration with the non-existent “progressive” bourgeoisie. The Trotskyists made a valiant attempt to right the ship of the communist movement by forming the Fourth International in 1938, but their relative disconnection from the workers' movement and inability to accurately assess the new situation following WWII led them to take opportunist and sectarian shortcuts. Some buried themselves within the reformist parties and adopted reformist logic, some isolated themselves from workers' struggles entirely, and some took a reductive approach to important struggles against oppression like feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and LGBT liberation. Following the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, most members of these organizations gave up, and their leading bodies ossified into self-preserving bureaucracies. The result is the mess we see on the left today: a milieu divided into small sects, mired in bad habits, and lacking a coherent revolutionary strategy that can unite the working class and oppressed.

WITBD aims to rectify this problem. It's a platform to amplify voices on the front lines of the class struggle, and a forum to debate the most pressing issues in the socialist movement, with the goal of moving toward a united revolutionary strategy. It's named after Lenin's famous pamphlet, which argued that a political newspaper should be a collective propagandizer and collective organizer, a tribune of the people that generalizes all manifestations of tyranny and oppression into a single picture of state violence and capitalist exploitation. Ultimately, we hope this publication will help form the skeleton of a new communist party in Canada that connects and regroups with likeminded revolutionaries around the world.

This party should not be built according to the politics of the lowest common denominator, but on firm, revolutionary principles, namely:

• Class independence: workers will emancipate ourselves through our own organizations, not by changing the capitalist state or its parties from the inside
• Anti-imperialism: supporting oppressed nations’ right to self-determination while organizing for the defeat of our own imperialist bloc; ie, Canada, the U.S., and its European, Japanese, and Israeli partners
• Anti-oppression: immersing ourselves in struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism as their working-class, revolutionary wing

WITBD emerged in late-2023 out of a split from the RCP (formerly Fightback). We crystalized our criticisms of our former org into a political balance sheet, but that was only the beginning of discussions about how to build an organization that truly combats all forms of oppression and maintains a class-independent perspective. We have members in Vancouver, Kelowna, Thunder Bay, London, Brantford, and Toronto. If you're interested in our project, we invite you to join the discussion in our Discord server, check out our Facebook and Instagram pages, or send us an email if you'd like to collaborate with us.

The budding radicalism in the Canadian working class needs a voice — let's build it together!