At what cost power -- Whither the NDP & Leap?

By A.M.

With its recent rejection of leader Thomas Mulcair, as well as its (decidedly tepid) willingness to at least entertain the idea of debate on the Leap Manifesto, the NDP has shown itself to be more resilient than previously thought. Much to the shock of those of us on the Left, some New Democrats seem to be considering a real political shift. With elected representatives like Parkdale-High Park MPP Cheri DiNovo calling openly for a return to the socialism on which the party was founded - to say nothing of the activists and citizens who have signed the Leap Manifesto - the NDP may yet resurrect the prospect of a socialist Canada. Predictably, this has been met with fierce resistance from the hero-worshiping, and ever-shrinking, cult of NDP partisans. The battle of principles versus power seems to be in full swing.

When Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis unveiled the Leap Manifesto during last year's federal election campaign, I admit that I was quite skeptical of its possible impact. A strongly social democratic political document, directly calling out the plague of neo-liberalism, was not something I anticipated to catch on with Canadians. Predictably, right-wing blowhards like Rex Murphy and Conrad Black somehow managed to denounce it as both unrealistic and horrifically dangerous (after all, conservatives are not known for their logical abilities)! But I took a second look and, despite my reservations, was very impressed. A principled, progressive document that prioritizes Aboriginal treaty rights? Count me in.

The NDP, true to form, pounced on it as wrong-headed and destructive. No less an authority than Nathan Cullen, who then was poised to become Canada's Finance Minister, dismissed the Manifesto as "not the way to build a sustainable government."

And yet the Leap lives on.

The NDP, in a great act of direct democracy and political goodwill, resolved to debate the Leap in its riding associations for the next two years. Amazing! Party brass -- who are likely to be proven correct -- see this resolution as a happy medium wherein they can appear progressive, and actually accomplish less than nothing. Member resolutions, even when they directly endorse a genuinely progressive position, very rarely come within a hundred miles of official NDP platforms.

Left with this latest betrayal by the NDP, where do we turn in the aforementioned debate between principles and power? A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to attend a Leap Manifesto town hall hosted by Avi Lewis and Cheri DiNovo. I saw Torontonians of all social stripes connect their own experiences and activism to struggles like Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Idle No More and many other progressive - that is to say socialist - movements. I was fortunate enough to meet and speak to an older woman who has worked tirelessly for the NDP since before it even formally existed. She told me that she was exasperated to see the party fall so far as to have a leader who defended Margaret Thatcher. Her heartbreak was palpable.

What kind of progressives are we when we praise proto-fascists like Thatcher? When our only fiscal concern is balanced budgets? When we dismiss organic, democratic movements as "unsustainable"?

The answer is - we're Liberals.

The NDP, as the "conscience of Parliament" that so many professional social democrats sneer at, forced major concessions on issues that affect real people. Socialists, working in and outside the CCF and NDP, created Medicare (as insufficient as it is). They demanded and won union rights, employment insurance and workplace safety. Socialists have been at the front of all movements for women's liberation in this country - including the rights to vote, take maternity leave and access on-demand abortion. The idea that socialism is unrealistic is not just historically inaccurate – it’s absolutely insulting to the millions of ordinary people knocking on doors, signing petitions and being beaten and murdered by police for what they believe in.

The NDP faithful, in their aggressive posturing and historical ignorance, often quote Saint Tommy Douglas. We've all heard the "'tis not too late.."-style quotes a million times at this point. But even I, already bitterly cynical about the NDP, was not prepared for the historical and political betrayal trotted out on the campaign trail. Among many other things, Thomas Mulcair had the gall to compare his balanced-budget pledge to the CCF's fiscal record, noting that under Douglas, the party ran seventeen straight balanced budgets and paid down Saskatchewan’s massive debt. This is certainly true, but it ignores the ideological context in which the party was operating, which prevented it from obtaining any significant financial help (no problem for today's Bay Street-friendly New Democrats). It also ignores the religious motivations (good ol' Christian thrift, etc.) that most CCF voters supported.

Even with these constraints - like the crippling debt incurred by the previous Liberal government - the CCF government managed to bring Medicare to this continent, lift millions out of the poverty of the Dust Bowl, create arts programs, expand unionization rights, and so much more.

What would Tommy have thought about today’s imperialist, reactionary party? In an interview later in his life, Tommy was asked if he regretted never having enjoyed power country-wide. His response was, "I'm not interested in getting power unless you can do something with this power. I have watched politicians, for the last 40 years, drop their principles in order to get power." I defy NDP partisans to find more than a handful of their MPs and MPPs who don’t fit that description!

I’m not so stupid as to believe that the NDP will be reformed. I think it’s still possible – after all, who’d have guessed that Jeremy Corbyn would one day become the leader of the British Labour Party? But I see it as a largely futile attempt, if honourable in some ways.

Let’s build a Left movement and get back to being the “conscience of Parliament.”

Let’s get back to being socialists.

“What is this free enterprise system? It is the law of the jungle applied to economics. It is the law of every man for himself, as the elephant said when he was dancing among the chickens. That is not a bad philosophy if […] you happen to be in the elephant class, but it is likely to be depressing if you are a farmer or worker, and belong in the chicken group. Free enterprise means unrestricted competition; the race to the swift and the battle to the strong; nature red in tooth and claw.” - Tommy Douglas

A.M. is a writer in Toronto 

See also: There was no NDP Leap

See also: The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!

There was no NDP Leap

What is going on in Canada's "mainstream" left?


According to many -- including those on both sides of this debate -- it seems that the NDP has taken some great leap to the left by embracing the activist Leap Manifesto backed by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis.


The debate around Leap is one well worth having in Canada's left broadly as well as within the NDP more specifically, I suppose, given that the NDP sadly remains the elephant in the Canadian left's rather small room.

Personally, I think Leap is a flawed document that still deserves critical support. It attempts to confront very real and very frightening environmental challenges that face us both in Canada and globally and does so without the rose-coloured glasses that lead many to diversions like attempts to build "Green Capitalism". While it is nowhere near as radical as some have suggested and while it has its blind spots and even pronounced weaknesses (to one of which we will return), and while its announcement had that pandering to a celebrity lineup that many found off-putting and even counterproductive to such a venture, it still presents the possibility of an important alternative to today's politics and provides a framework that can at least be built upon.

To reject the manifesto in its entirety in some sweeping denunciation or to portray it, as some have, as somehow a product of those fictional clueless Toronto leftist "elitists" that reactionaries and their fellow-travelers like Smokey Thomas love to prattle on about, strikes me as not only wrong-headed but, in the latter case, borderline offensive.

All that aside, however, what is making all of the endless pro-and-con articles and statements about the Leap Manifesto so odd is that so many of them are framed in incredibly over-the-top terms as if what happened at the Edmonton convention was a decisive and irreversible moment that has occurred, for better or worse, in NDP and Canadian social democratic history.

And that would be all well and good but for the fact that the NDP did NOT adopt the Leap Manifesto! At all. The party and its delegates did not even adopt a framework for adopting the manifesto as policy.

All that they did was agree to a resolution that said -- after praising the Leap Manifesto as high-minded and in keeping with NDP traditions -- that its ideas “can and should be debated and modified on their own merits and according to the needs of various communities and all parts of Canada” and that sent the manifesto to be debated within the party until the next convention in 2018.

Despite the hyperbole on both sides this is not a victory for the NDP's "left" or for those serious about the ideas of Leap. Rather, it is a typical NDP say nothing "compromise" non-resolution aiming to make a divisive issue go away for at least a little while -- in this case at least two years -- that has somehow been interpreted as a big victory for the manifesto's backers.

Why exactly?

While many might see it as important that the NDP has agreed to debate it -- which is all that they did -- they should also remember that NDP internal "debates', insofar as they are even allowed to really occur, are usually the kiss of death for anything interesting. The NDP is a place that radical ideas are most often taken to die or to simply fade away -- and two years in more than enough time to allow this to happen as social media and the news cycle move on to other things.

In the end, the NDP, so far, has done nothing more than agree to debate the manifesto after saying a few nice things about it. And that renders much of the commentary of the last few days not simply premature, but in some cases bizarre and totally silly.

It highlights the left's weakness that such intense stances have been taken on such a relatively mundane statement that Canada's social democratic party has not even, in whole or in part, adopted yet!

Beyond that, though, is the reality that what has transpired does highlight one flaw of the idea of the manifesto that many have pointed out from the start -- that being that it sought to get people to sign on to it and to embrace its ideas in a "non-partisan" way as opposed to using the manifesto as a platform to build a coherent electoral political movement and organization,  either inside or outside of a party like the NDP, to fight for its implementation.

For an apparently radical manifesto it has a surprising "appeal to authority" aspect to it that seems more than a bit utopian.

In fact, the compromise resolution, by appearing to keep the manifesto alive within the NDP without doing anything to organize around it or adopt it, might actually help to dissipate or prevent calls to build something like the Waffle or the NPI with Leap as part of its basis.

And without the emergence of such an organized attempt to change the party and its institutions, as well as its entrenched (and relatively small) power elite and profoundly undemocratic practices (especially during elections) it is difficult to see ultimately how Leap will be adopted in anything beyond a token way.

It is important to remember that the NDP has a long established tradition of running during elections on platforms drafted entirely by backroom strategists and the party leader and their clique -- platforms that bear little to no resemblance to any resolutions or polices adopted by its membership!

I think that a strong case could be made that the fundamental ideas of Leap -- as well as a broader truly anti-capitalist platform -- can only be fully realized by the emergence of a new left or "left front" style electoral force in Canada. However, if those within the NDP backing the Leap Manifesto seriously want to see it implemented in a meaningful way , they had best do the work to find and to organize a coherent movement around a leadership candidate who will then actually back it in full.

Otherwise, whether the NDP "debates" Leap for two years or twenty, it is not going to happen.

Period.

See also: 3 silly narratives that have emerged in the wake of Mulcair's defeat

See also: Fred Checkers and the state of democracy in the NDP

The Trouble with the 99%

This piece was written in 2012 as a critique of the "99%" narrative, a narrative that continues to grip many on the left and many people left behind by neo-liberal capitalism. It was first published on my old blog and then a reedited version (reedited by a rabble editor)appeared on rabble. I think that the reedit is better and am sharing it here again to reflect on this continuing slogan within our discourse. To see the original go here: http://mlaxer.blogspot.ca/2012/01/trouble-with-99or-why-i-am-not-fan-of.html


There can be little doubt about the importance of the Occupy movement to our recent political discourse. It succeeded in getting a significant amount of media attention and it forced politicians of all stripes, including those on the Right, to acknowledge the danger that severe and rampant inequality pose to our social order and structure.

This ad hoc movement inspired many and managed to put its issues on the table to a sufficient degree that politicians of both the social democratic and liberal brand, as well as some on the far Right, have attempted to bask in its refracted glow. That none of these political actors offer the slightest threat to the system that Occupy apparently opposes appeared often lost on the participants, however.

Naomi Klein, no less, told them that they were the most important political movement in the world. And perhaps for that moment in time they were.

However, a narrative, to be lasting, has to have longevity in its meaning and analysis, even if that meaning and analysis are distilled down to basics or essentials. In other words the analysis has to be, in essence, true and it must also have transformative solutions to offer and not just injustices to expose.

Is there really a 99 per cent?

Many have embraced the "Us vs. Them" rhetoric of the 1 per cent vs. the 99 per cent slogan, and this needs to be placed under greater scrutiny.

There is little doubt that the 99 per cent slogan became the movement's greatest asset in terms of propaganda and mass appeal. It resonated and enraged and inspired. It motivated and was basic enough in its narrative that it could not help but be picked up by the media.

The theory, from Occupy Wall Street and others, can effectively be distilled down to this blurb from one of the websites:

"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent."

With a variety of small or minor variations, this became the movement's primary ideological message.

But the message is largely false. And this matters, especially in the long run.

There is no question about the grotesque growth of social inequality in the West. That this obvious fact has been ignored and even reinforced by the austerity agendas of all governments, regardless of political stripe, plays into an overall sense of hopelessness and reinforces reductionist and absolutist, totalizing ideologies and political views. The inherent danger when democracy becomes seemingly impotent.

The trouble, however, lies in understanding that undue corporate power and the rise of a new "Gilded Age" ultra-rich power elite does not mean that all of society, the media, politicians, governments, the courts, etc ... are beholden to this elite. More importantly, nor does it mean that the "99 per cent" share common interests and that they can work together, in any meaningful sense, to rectify the problems as raised.

It also does not take into account the basically dangerous aspect to a worldview like this, which is both disingenuous and bourgeois in its desire to eclipse real issues of class, management, Social Mandarins, and the true underpinning of inequality with a slogan that appears to embrace "everyone," in the classic American way. By doing so it in fact embraces and lets off the hook many, if not most, of the basic enemies of working-class and socialist or anti-capitalist politics.

The 99 per cent by the numbers

In the last available stats the top 1 per cent of tax filers in Canada made a minimum of $169,300 as individuals. They made, on average, $404,500.

The 99 per cent is everyone else.

First, I'll take a personal example. In the late 1990s I worked as a manager in a transportation company. I did sales and public relations, but I had managerial control over the office and ground staff in many cases. I made, at the time, $45,000-$55,000 a year, depending on performance bonuses. This placed me well within the 99 per cent -- where, I can assure you, I remain -- but were my class and social interests (were I to follow them) really the same as the phone workers or couriers at the company?

Or take my local Shopper's Drug Mart. The young woman at the cash, with two kids and a husband who works at a non-union job site, makes at most $12-13 an hour. The main Pharmacist who works there, who has a college education, makes in the range of $60,000 a year. Are their class interests the same? They are both in the "99 per cent."

This view of society, while assuaging the guilt of the children of the bourgeoisie, would have you believe that they are "victims" of the system in the same way as the children of the working-class, the underclass and the retail working class. That may make them feel good about themselves, and aid in their often reactionary analysis, but it is pure American nonsense from a society that denies the very existence of social class, despite the fact that even Rick Santorum recently admitted that the U.S. has less social mobility now than Europe or Canada.

The complexity of class

There is no 99 per cent. It does not exist as a meaningful class or political entity.

There are the remnants of the old industrial working class, the underclass, the retail working class, and the very large and growing "white-collar" office level lower "middle-class." Then there are the managerial and middle-managerial class, the small business owners, professionals, media workers, academics and others. Their class and social interests are not the same and a movement seeking real transformative social change and seeking to actually confront capitalism needs to understand this.

Beyond the problems of class analysis that this presents, it can also play into the worst aspects of pseudo-conspiratorial and reductionist ideas.

Our courts, governments, media, economy, and social forces are not actually ruled and governed by 1 per cent of the population. That is a ridiculous idea that does not withstand even the slightest true scrutiny. It is a good way for social democratic parties or liberal politicians like Obama to get out of their complicity in the creation and maintenance of the present ideological hegemony. The reality, however, is that we live in a very complex society where even supposed "agents" of the 1 per cent, like the Toronto Star, for example, will suddenly endorse the federal NDP. Part of the plot? Or is capitalism a system and not a slogan and are its problems a fundamental outcome of this system and not a perversion of it?

Thinking back to the quote from Occupy, consider these:

- "Shrewd and calculating, their hearts are filled with lust for power and consumed by greed for money. Rich and aristocratic, they despise Christians and they loathe the lowly working class. They control the world's press and virtually all our banks and financial institutions. They screen and choose who America's leaders will be and even determine who will run on the Democratic and Republican Party tickets..."

- "...crony capitalists were the ones that benefit from contracts from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don't deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed."

The first is from anti-Semitic Bilderberg conspiracists and the second is from the fanatically right-wing Ron Paul.

The fact is that these kinds of reductionist slogans are dangerous because they imply, by definition, a simplistic social order and a simplistic mechanism of systemic social control.

Once you accept the 1 per cent idea, then that means the other 99 per cent is innocent, so to speak. It is analogous to dangerous notions that imply that "good" common people are perverted or led astray by an almost hidden overclass that shapes the political and social agenda by meeting in Colorado once a year or by being a part of a named or implied Jewish conspiracy.

How capitalism really works

Inequality, at root, is not an aberration of capitalism; it is a function of capitalism. While the assault on the post-war social compromise has led us back to social inequality at levels akin to those of the "Gilded Age" of the 1920s, the inequality inherent to capitalism never went away. And it won't, without changing the fundamental nature of capitalism's economic relations. As the reversing of the economic aspects of the social gains of the 1945-1980 period clearly shows, cosmetic changes, while they have a real impact on people's lives and on our social cohesion, can be undone by shifting the terms of the ideological debate. This is indeed something the Right has done rather successfully. The debate has been so successfully shifted that all major political parties in North America accept the fundamental premises that led us here.

This was not a conspiracy, and it was not done by the 1 per cent and their "agents". It was done by a political movement that stayed true to its principles and objectives, even when confronted by serious setbacks and even when their ideas were at first fringe ideas, and who remade our society by pursuing these objectives relentlessly in the political and popular arena. The degree of this achievement can be seen in the widespread belief in the rhetoric of "tax-relief," or in the amazing contempt that many who would most benefit from them hold for trade union, or in the fact that if one were to propose the social and economic platforms of, say, the Trudeau Liberals of 1976 one would be regarded as an ultra-radical. Not a single political party is even proposing that we go back to the levels of taxation and interventionism that existed in 1980, let alone proposing actual systemic change.

The reversal of this ideological victory can only, in any meaningful sense, be accomplished by doing the same thing on the Left: building a coherent, long-term and ideological challenge to capitalism as a system in the streets, in the popular discourse and, most importantly, in the political arena. It can only be done by advocating for democratic socialism, and doing so consistently and regardless of electoral setbacks and short-term opinion polls. "Winning" on grand rhetoric to then basically implement the essence of your opponent's agenda when in government, or to more "humanely" or "fairly" manage austerity or "growth," is a hollow victory indeed.

It is so hollow that one need only reflect on the fact that the march towards where we are now has continued, without serious detour, despite different shades of government, whether Liberal, Democrat or New Democrat. The victory of this ideological hegemony is so great that the NDP in Manitoba in the last provincial election, for example, did not dispute the widespread media reporting that there was little in terms of economic policies that separated them from the Tories! In fact they seemed rather proud of their record as "sound fiscal managers."

All this is not a cause for despair; it is a cause for an ideological counter offensive that does not paint the 1 per cent as the problem or cause of inequality, a rhetorical flourish that any populist politician, right or left, can embrace, but that recognizes that capitalism itself is the cause. The 1 per cent are simply its effect. While the 1 per cent certainly has an entrenched and direct political stake in the continuation of the present state of affairs and the continued corporate power of State Capitalism, they are not the only people who have this stake, perceived or real.

However, as the effects of the victory of the Right's ideological offensive become clear, the seeds of the turning of the tide are sown: decreased economic and social equality and democracy, decreased oversight of corporate activity, increased environmental degradation, rampant and soulless community destroying commercialism, the loss of social stability, union jobs, industrial production, and so much more.

Occupy, in a very original and inspiring way, has put these problems back into popular consciousness and political discussion. Now it is up to us to build a class-aware, avowedly socialist political force that will present real transformative solutions and alternatives in the coming years and that will work to see these policies enacted and implemented whether in or out of office. It would also, perhaps most importantly, work to popularize anti-capitalist ideas.

When we have won the broad ideological struggle against the ideas of both capitalism and neo-liberalism, we will have won the key struggle in ending grotesque human inequality and social injustice.