New York Times reports on the defeat of the Waffle, 1971 -- Daily LIFT #133

New York Times reports on the defeat of the Waffle, 1971 -- Daily LIFT #133

The New York Times reports (April 26, 1971) on the victory of the "moderate" David Lewis as leader of the NDP in Canada in 1971 after the "radicals showed unexpected strength". The "radicals" were the Waffle whose leadership candidate was James Laxer.

Due to this show of  "unexpected strength" the craven Lewis clan, its allies and the party establishment engineered the expulsion of the Waffle from the party a little over a year later setting the tone for decades of anti-democratic NDP actions and practice.

Note that even then you see the methods used by the party elite as a motion calling for sweeping nationalization of financial institutions and the manufacturing industries "never reached the floor". 

Of course it didn't.

Watkins explains the Waffle alternative, January 1972 -- Daily LIFT #120

Watkins explains the Waffle alternative, January 1972 -- Daily LIFT #120

Report in the "Pro Tem" student newspaper from the Glendon campus of York University on a meeting held by the Waffle, the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada, at which one of the Waffle's leaders Mel Watkins spoke.

This was after the 1971 NDP leadership convention at which the Waffle stunned the party establishment when its candidate for leader, James Laxer, did far better than expected. Laxer is on the left in the photo and Watkins on the right.

Just a few months after this article was published the Waffle was expelled from the party at the behest of the Lewis family leadership clique and their allies in June, 1972. It was a stunning act of political cowardice that has had ramifications on the NDP's dictatorial political culture to this day.

Further readings: Fifty years later it is time to acknowledge the Waffle was wrong

On the 40th anniversary of the expulsion of the Waffle

Fifty years later it is time to acknowledge the Waffle was wrong

As 2019 draws to close so too does the 50th anniversary of the birth of the socialist movement within in the NDP that became known as the Waffle.

The Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada. formed in late 1969, was an attempt led by leftists, economic nationalists and feminists like Mel Watkins, James Laxer, Krista Maeots and others to change the NDP from within from a reformist social democratic party into a more robust socialist party. The Waffle Manifesto and vision called for the NDP to advocate for nationalization, anti-American and anti-imperialist economic and foreign policy and for a radical vision of social transformation that in part flowed out of the student protest and New Left movements of the time.

The Waffle's high point came during the 1971 federal leadership convention when the then relatively unknown James Laxer stunned the party as the Waffle nominee by taking the leadership vote to a fourth ballot and getting nearly 37% against the establishment candidate David Lewis.

In what would set the tone for decades of anti-democratic, nepotist and anti-left behaviour by the NDP leadership to follow, in 1972 Stephen Lewis -- who went on to be a dilettante favourite of the Canadian establishment while pretending always to be a progressive -- would do his daddy's dirty business and engineer the expulsion of the Waffle from the party at a meeting of the Ontario Provincial Council.

I have written about this before on Rabble in the piece: On the 40th anniversary of the expulsion of the Waffle.

The stunning cowardice of this on the part of the Lewis clan and their sycophants was evident to pretty much anyone who was not a party hack at the time. Its consequences were deep and far reaching. There is little doubt that it not only drove a generation of social activists out of the party but that it also made the party template into the paranoid, centralized, leadership driven one it is to this day.

Fifty years later the direct legacy of the Waffle is a mixed one. Many of their ideas, such as gender parity in governing bodies, have become fairly mainstream in NDP and social democratic circles. Nationalization of industry and resources remains almost entirely anathema to the party. One can make a very good case that due to globalization the Waffle's brand of left Canadian nationalism is a fairly dated concept.

Yet the one aspect of the Waffle's legacy that has been shown time and time and time again is that its failure to take the reigns of the party and the establishment reaction against it were no anomaly. Rather it was the sign of things to come.

The Waffle not only failed -- nobly, yes, but still failed -- but every single attempt to imitate it has failed more. No left faction or movement within the NDP has posed anywhere near the threat to the leadership that the Waffle did. No other left leadership candidate came as close to winning the leadership as Laxer.

There have been a number of utterly futile attempts to turn the party left -- including some I have been personally involved in -- but chronicling them would be akin to adding another few hundred pages to the adventures of Don Quixote.

Amusing perhaps, but a waste of time. Tilting at windmills.

There are many aspects of the Waffle that are worth considering but, despite the delusional attempts of "entryists" and leftists within the party to claim otherwise, the idea of anti-capitalists or socialists taking over the party from within is not one of them.

The NDP and its provincial counterparts are far more right wing and wed to capitalism than they were in 1970. The NDP has capitulated to right wing narratives in ways that make David and Stephen Lewis look good.

Had the last fifty years since the Waffle been spent building a serious anti-capitalist alternative to the NDP, socialists in Canada would be far ahead of where they are now. The Green Party stands as evidence that persistence and diligence can pay off even within the limitations of our "democracy". Countless articles and "think pieces" have been written by alleged academics engaging in mental masturbation calling for a new party that end up going nowhere while any real attempts to build something are relentlessly attacked or ignored.

It is not too late however. Regularly I see people who know we need a new socialist or anti-capitalist party outside of the NDP. Many anti-capitalist stalwarts are already fighting for a new society outside of it including in formations like Québec solidaire or the Communist Party.

The best way we now can honour the Waffle is by acknowledging the primary lesson it taught us. Under no circumstances are the careerists and power brokers whose family compacts have controlled the NDP since the Waffle era going to allow any kind of activist, grassroots or left takeover.

If we want to see a triumph of the socialist politics and the ideals of the Waffle we need to act outside of and in opposition to the NDP's capitulation to bourgeois liberal politics and the sooner left activists in the NDP realize this the closer we will be to starting a new and truly interesting chapter in the anti-capitalist struggle in Canada.

James Laxer -- Canadian iconoclast 1941-2018

James Laxer, my father, died suddenly and unexpectedly in Paris on Friday, February 23, 2018 doing what he loved most -- working on a new book about Canadian history while travelling with his constant companion and spouse, Sandy Price.

Jim was an exceptional writer, talent and intellectual whose impact on Canadian left wing politics would be hard to overstate. Having grown up in a Communist household with his siblings, Gord and Linda, and his mother, Edna May and father Robert, he was born into a life of left wing activism from an early age. He wrote about this in his award-winning memoir Red Diaper Baby. 

After the death of Stalin and the revelations about his crimes,  Robert and Edna May left the Communist Party though they never lost faith in the left broadly and the cause of socialism. Jim carried these beliefs forward as well when he was involved in the formation of the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada with political economist Mel Watkins, and others. 

This thread within the NDP became known as the "Waffle" and espoused a radically socialist and left-nationalist position challenging the party's establishment. In 1971 Jim ran for the leadership of the party at a convention that was expected to be a coronation of David Lewis. 

It wasn't.

In fact, Jim had an unexpectedly strong showing, coming in second and taking a third of the vote. The result stunned the party elite and the Lewis family. It terrified them. The following year in Orillia, Ontario the ONDP's Provincial Council at the behest of ONDP leader Stephen Lewis, David Lewis' son, voted to order the Waffle to either disband or to leave the NDP.

It was a petty and terribly anti-democratic action that would have consequences which would reverberate down through the history of  the party to this day. It laid the very foundations of the top-down, leader driven party that we see now, a party that regularly ignores the motions or wishes of its membership.

Jim and many others decided to leave the party and he ran as a Waffle candidate in the federal election of 1974, losing badly. The Waffle disbanded after that and with it a generation of young activists and left intellectuals felt alienated from the NDP, with many never coming back. 

With the end of the Waffle he became a prominent academic, teaching at York University, as well as a prolific writer, commentator and TV personality. In 1981 he became the NDP's research director under leader Ed Broadbent, leaving in 1983 after writing a report that became headline news deriding the NDP's economic policies as being out-of-date. He kept a copy of an editorial cartoon showing him walking with Broadbent past the skeleton of a dinosaur with the caption "I have a bone to pick with you" on the wall of his study to this day. 

His many books have been incredibly influential within the Canadian left and Canadian politics. They covered the range of topics from economics to issues like free trade and the petroleum industry to, more recently, his great passion for Canadian history. Some, like The Liberal Idea of Canada (which he co-wrote with his father) are considered classics of Canadian political thinking. He also hosted both TVOntario's The Real Story current affairs show and the award-winning National Film Board documentary Reckoning: The Political Economy of Canada in the 1980s.

Throughout this my father remained, above all, a left-wing iconoclast. He was never afraid, in any context or any forum, to say that the emperor had no clothes or to take on those in power or with power. He never backed down from intellectual and political debate or discourse no matter the challenge or the alleged authority of those whose ideas he questioned.

In an era when so many bow to party lines, the flavours of the month and political fictions, he never did. 

But Jim was also so much more. He was a wonderful father to my sisters Kate and Emily, my brother Jon and I. He was engaging, approachable, human and funny. He truly enjoyed and embraced teaching. His students meant a lot to him.

He was always there with a smile, a silly joke, a happy countenance. Even in hard or sad times he tried to make people feel better or to make people laugh. He loved his grandchildren deeply and his family above all.

A unique figure during these past few decades of Canadian politics, Jim always tried to fight for and suggest a path forward towards a fairer and more just Canada, an independent and socialist Canada, regardless of whose feathers this ruffled or whose feet he stepped on. Not one to shy away from what he believed, he provides a lesson to all of us on the left of how to stand up for what we think is right no matter the short term cost and irrespective of careerist goals. 

That, as much as anything else, is a legacy worth embracing and one I hope is not soon forgotten. 

Laxer, Lewis and Watkins sitting in a tree!: Leftist Throwback Thursday

(Click on image to enlarge)

Drawn in 1972, this hilarious political cartoon by Montreal's "Aislin" (Terry Mosher). perfectly captures the divide that had been reached in 1972 between the leadership of the NDP and the party's radical leftist wing popularly known as the Waffle.

James Laxer and Mel Watkins (commonly acknowledged as the Waffle's leaders) and both Stephen and David Lewis sit on separate branches of a tree that are growing in opposite directions. Both are trying to cut the other wing loose. Laxer wears a button that reads "Workers of the World Give Us a Call" while David Lewis holds a book titled "Quotations of Chairman Gallup"! 

In the end, of course, the Lewis wing won out and in June, 1972 the Waffle was ordered to dissolve or leave the party. The effect, positive or negative, that this had on the party and whether or not this move was necessary or marked the beginning of the party's centralization of power in the hands of its leaders and poll driven strategists, is still debated by leftists in Canada to this day. 

For my take on the expulsion of the Waffle, written on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, (and, full disclosure, James Laxer is my father!) click here: On the 40th anniversary of the expulsion of the Waffle