Statement of Intent

The View of the Canadian Syndicalist Federation and its Program

The basic view of the Canadian Syndicalist Federation is that inherent to Capitalism’s laws, there is a process of centralization towards banking cartels which has developed a sort of “socialism for the rich”. Understood in this way, capitalism is a sort of artificial intelligence that develops, as a result of both its inherent laws and the feedback loops of production and exchange, its self by enclosing human action to a smaller and smaller series of outcomes. To combat this, it is necessary to wield the independent political economy of the proletariat to rapidly build up the forces of decentralization. Capitalist centralization has established a usurious rentier economy, enclosures on the access to capital, and a series of imperialist wars. In combat with this fact, the Canadian Syndicalist Federation declares its mission to build up a dual-power economy and create a political machine that will work to transform municipal politics and disrupt the proceedings of provincial and federal politics. Our aim is a federal syndicalist Canada that is aligned with the multipolar world. Because the American unipolar hegemony is most representative of the system of centralized, planned capital stocks, the Canadian Syndicalist Federation pledges itself to the realization of a multipolar world that will usher in the fracturing of centralized capital in the realm of geopolitics.

The Canadian Syndicalist Federation posits that state socialism of all its varieties is insufficient towards redirecting the centralization of capital into decentralized, autonomous, self-governing institutions. Hence, it advocates for its mode of socialism the “agro-industrial federation”, which will be a national legislature of the useful occupations of the land, each represented by its syndicate, which will be established as a legal entity. Outside of the national legislature, which is entrusted to govern production and distribution, all political functions will be entrusted to a patchwork of municipal democracies. The Canadian Syndicalist Federation also declares its intention to nationalize the banks into a people’s bank whose board of stakeholders is to be elected by the national syndical congress. The people’s bank will be chartered in the new constitution to provide loans at an interest rate covering only costs, as well as the administration of capital flows to the syndicates. The syndical republic will declare for the abolition of a national standing army and decentralize police and military functions into a municipal system of people’s militias. It will be declared in the constitution that the new people’s militias will be held responsible to a people’s tribune elected by the municipality at large. The Canadian Syndicalist Federation stands for the abolition of what is called in jurisprudence “petitoire” property rights, meaning the bourgeois right inherent to a thing. But in contrast with communism, the Canadian Syndicalist Federation advocates for a higher synthesis. In our view, common property is viable insofar as its participation is made as voluntary as possible and its administration is made as decentralized as possible. The Canadian Syndicalist Federation advocates for the syndicalization of infrastructure, heavy-industry, industrial monopoly agriculture, and large to medium-scale industries at large into chartered legal-entities called syndicates. The property is to be syndicalized based on either expropriation or contract with the previous owners as determined by the newly established industrial courts. Furthermore, the ownership and administration of land is to be entrusted to the municipal governments. As part of this transformation of the economy and politics, the Canadian Syndicalist Federation also has the annulment of debts, both public and private, as its aim. As it appears to us these debts were enforced through centralized, monopolistic power structures that are unrepresentative and therefore form contracts in conditions of force and coercion; these debts are illegitimate and therefore void. Because Canada is, by its mores and history, federal, and in contrast to the American republic, much more collectivistic, we find that our higher synthesis of federative socialism is acceptable to the people and the mission of Canada.

For our mode of politics, we find that the vanguard party and its democratic centralism are relics of social democracy that are to be discarded. Modern monopolistic, hegemonic politics requires asymmetrical social war, that is, a party form adapted to decentralized forms that propagate a sort of myth in spite of the ideological disunity of its members. It is through the decentralization of our organization that chapters can organize themselves according to their local conditions and therefore best make use of the spontaneous nature of the proletarian struggle. However, while rejecting vanguard politics, we inherit its love of hierarchy and differentiation in the political organization. Because of the voluntary nature of political parties, the Canadian Syndicalist Federation requires its members to submit themselves to the command of the rank and file and the party constitution. While chapters will be autonomous in their decision-making, they will be asked to follow a set of guidelines. In contrast to democratic centralism, the Canadian Syndicalist Federation posits the neo-Machiavellian idea of the socialist prince. The socialist prince is he who is endowed with the entrepreneurial spirit of collective wealth. He who shows himself to be in the command of dual-power and social networks will be rewarded in rank and entitled to the possesiore ownership of his labor. Therefore, the federation has as its aim a union of socialist princes who, through the Virtu they build around the river of Fortuna, will be the makers and legionaries of revolution. The Canadian Syndicalist Federation is not a political party in the conventional sense, but a revolutionary econo-federation that demands its differentiation and representation to complete what Proudhon called the absorption of politics by the economic organism. We aim to unite workers’ syndicates, mutual-aid societies, credit unions, and co-operatives within our federation and network and expand our apparatus through a system of voluntary taxation. In Machiavellian terms, we aim to be the redeemers of Canadian civilization who can pave the way for the cause of decentralization as well as constitutional and economic reform. A socialist and truly federal Canada is within our reach!