Right on the Marx

Herman Rosenfeld


I found many elements of Ulli Diemer’s article to be right on the mark. As a labour activist, Marxian socialist and Dimension reader, I am happy to see, at long last, a point of view on the NDP which recognizes that it can never be, by its very nature the kind of transformative instrument necessary to play a leading role in the building of a movement for socialism in Canada. He points out that the most such a party can ever be is an ally in the struggle for immediate (albeit extremely important) reforms.

I also agree that for the foreseeable future, “we will have to content ourselves with giving our votes to the NDP while giving our energies to more promising causes.”

Where I do have a problem is in the general direction he sees we need to move (i.e., the “more promising causes”). Whiles many of the points he makes regarding the types of principles we have to develop are good, he tends to fall into the trap of negating politics; a problem which seems to be quite fashionable on the left these days.

While quite properly calling for the building of a socialist movement (which we agree does not exist today), he doesn’t seem to believe in the centrality of political organization in the construction of such a movement. His vision seems to reflect a series of sum–ups of collective discussion coming through tying together the experiences of the many single issue progressive movements which exist in Canada today.

These movements have an importance, integrity and independence which needs to be preserved and strengthened. In many instances, they have also made, or will make some of the important political and ideological contributions we will need to help develop a socialist movement in this country. But the “shared vision” articulated by Diemer will never attain an organized and effective form unless it can be concretized into a series of political programmes, and eventually made real through one or many political organizations or parties.

I agree with him that now is not the time to create these new parties. This is not because it would “split” anyone, but because there is no clear base of understanding a agreement on what ideas, what vision of socialism, social change, party organization etc., that such groups would seek to organize around, and thus win people to.

But here lies the problem. How is such agreement and understanding to be reached? I do not believe that it can take place spontaneously, through a magical coming together of single issue causes. It can only come about through major theoretical research, debate, discussion and yes, sumups of ongoing practical experience.

What is needed is nothing short of a major re–synthesis of Marxism, analogous to and built upon the best of the previous syntheses (i.e., Lenin’s synthesis in 1905–1917), considered in the light of present historical conditions.

No doubt, this requires a conscious effort to solve many theoretical and practical problems which currently plague us, with the aim of creating political organizations and eventually political parties which are capable of bringing the message of socialism to the working people of this country. This would allow us to intervene in their “day to day problems”, with a long term perspective of winning them away from their present commitment to pro–capitallist forms of social and political organization.

That includes the things that Diemer lists: democracy; pattems of social ownership which differ from capitalist and discredited “state socialist models”; forms of, and attitudes towards economic growth which are environmentally compatible; new types of relationships with the third world, etc. But it also demands the resolution of an entire sphere of additional problems: the relationship between reform and revolution in bourgeois democracies; types of party organizational models; socialist economic goals in middle level states in the age of capital mobility; the entire nature of the socialist period etc.

There are a slew of problems than must be solved before a real socialist movement can develop. But these problems will never be dealt with unless there is an open commitment by a large number of socialists to identify and solve them. This must be part of an attempt to once more come out of the woodwork and develop political forms of intervention on the Canadian political scene, as socialists, not hiding on the sidelines, or buried under the cover of reformist projects like the NDP.

That time is regretfully still far away, but it will never come if we consciously avoid commitment to politics and political parties, and the rebuilding, albeit on a healthy basis, of a socialist movement as a political movement.

 

Published in Canadian Dimension, March 1990

 

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