Maurice Spector

Maurice Spector (1898 - August 1, 1968) was the Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada and editor of its newspaper, The Worker, for much of the 1920s and an early follower of Leon Trotsky after his split from the Communist International.

Spector was born in the Russian Empire and immigrated to Canada with his family as an infant.

Spector was influenced by Trotsky's work The Bolsheviki and World Peace, which was published in the Toronto Mail and Empire in January 1918, and by Social Democratic Party of Canada (SDP) Dominion Secretary Isaac Bainbridge who introduced him to Lenin's writings and inspired him to join the SDP. Spector engaged with the left-wing of the Canadian SDP, and eventually left to form the Communist Party of Canada.

In 1928, Maurice Spector, while attending the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, accidentally got hold of a copy of Trotsky's Critique of the Draft Programme of the Communist International, which criticised the position of Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin, and especially exposed the anti-Marxist theory of "socialism in one country". This critique was a landmark in the ideological arming of the International Left Opposition. In a truly prophetic statement, Trotsky warned that if this position were adopted by the Communist International, it would inevitably mark the beginning of a process that would lead to the nationalist and reformist degeneration of every Communist Party in the world. Three generations later, his prediction - which was ridiculed by the Stalinists at the time - has been shown to be correct.

Stalin had no intention of circulating Trotsky's document. But by a strange accident of history, that is what happened. At that time, when the Stalinist regime had not yet been consolidated, the Communist International still had to observe certain norms of democratic centralism, which permitted the circulation of minority opinions. Although Trotsky had been expelled from the Russian party a year earlier, he took advantage of the Congress to appeal to the Communist International. In the process he submitted his document on the Draft Programme. Through a blunder in the apparatus, they circulated Trotsky's document to the heads of the delegations, including members of the programme commission. It was here that the American James Cannon and Maurice Spector first saw and read Trotsky's document.

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