Let's Stop Kidding Ourselves About
the NDP
By Ulli Diemer
I am, I have to admit, a bit of a packrat. As a consequence, I
have in my basement a hoard of back issues of Canadian Dimension,
going back more than 20 years.
The first issue I have is dated July-August 1967. Flipping through
this relic of my long-lost teenage years, I find in it a series
of articles on the theme "Paralytic New Democracy". In
these articles, Dimension's contributors diagnose a terminal
disease within the NDP, leading to a "fatal drift to the right
and ultimate absorption into liberalism". One reads of the
political rot being caused by "the doctrineless pragmatism
which the party has so sedulously cultivated."
Skipping ahead a couple of years, to the August-September 1969
issue, one finds the lead editorial lamenting that "over the
years the NDP has melted into the conservatism of Manitoba".
In October-November 1969, we Dimension readers were advised
that the time for a fundamental decision had arrived: "The
New Democratic Party is now faced with a choice for the future....
Is it going to remain a reform group within the framework of the
private-enterprise system? Or is it going to choose to be a socialist
party?"
By April-May 1970, the choice was more urgent that ever. We opened
our copies of Dimension to learn that something had to be
done, and soon, to transform the NDP to render it "capable
of leading the Canadian people in a struggle for national survival
and socialism. Otherwise, the NDP will become at best irrelevant
and at worst a dangerous illusion."
Alas, the party apparently didn't adopt Dimension's prescription,
for in 1977 (Vol. 12, No. 6), Dimension's editorial board
was informing us that "The NDP has ceased to be a party that
agitates for fundamental reform."
And so to the present day (April-May 1989). Dimension's
editorial, with an unerring eye for fast-breaking developments on
the cutting edge of social change, gives us the latest news: "The
NDP stands at something of a crossroads. It has spent the last several
[sic: "several" -- my Concise Oxford Dictionary
defines "several" as "more than two but not many"]
years distancing itself from the social activists of this country
while building an image as the party of moderation and reasonableness....
The party will either rebuild itself from the bottom up, listening
to its members, embracing and involving itself in the coalitions
it abandoned during the election -- or it will be abandoned by `ordinary
Canadians'".
Simultaneously, another Dimension contributor, chosen to
help "spark a lively debate" on the NDP, tells us that
"the NDP has been increasingly prepared to sacrifice socialist
principles on the altar of momentary popularity" ... It has
moved increasingly toward being a political party, and away from
being a social movement."
My point in dredging up this collection of quotations is not to
pick on Canadian Dimension -- though arguably its thinking
on this issue is in a bit of a rut. I could have compiled a similar
collection of quotations from any number of sources on the Canadian
left; all of them lamenting the NDP's rightward drift, its abandonment
of principle, its failure to put forward a socialist alternative;
all of them proclaiming the need for it to change fundamentally.
Canadian socialists have been saying much the same thing ever since
the very founding of the CCF (the predecessor of the NDP) in 1932-33.
In fact, a few days before I read the latest Dimension,
I happened to be visiting a friend who was active in the CCF at
its beginnings. He was a member of a small socialist party which
decided to join the newly formed CCF, hoping it would prove to be
a vehicle for socialism in Canada. Their hopes, he told me, were
quickly dashed. By the mid-1930's, he said, the CCF had degenerated
from a movement into a political party lacking a real commitment
to a socialist transformation of society. (Perhaps he's biased:
he was expelled for being part of a radical caucus in the party
in 1934, and was bounced out again in 1972 as part of the Waffle.)
One could go back even further to hear the same story: one of the
most cogent critiques of social democratic politics ever written
is Rosa Luxemburg's Social Reform or Revolution -- published
in 1899!
So what is the point of all this? It is this: It is time we
stopped kidding ourselves. Canadian socialists have been hoping
for over 60 years that the NDP, and the CCF before it, would somehow
become a socialist party leading a socialist movement, rather than
an electoral machine interested in nothing more than bringing in
a few reforms to make capitalism more humane and more efficient.
We are deluding ourselves.
Unfortunately, as the above collection of quotations from Dimensions
past illustrates, Canadian socialists are terribly reluctant to
give up their illusions about the NDP. No matter how often we are
beaten over the head with the hard facts, no matter how often the
party lets us down, no matter how far to the right it drifts, we
don't want to face the bitter conclusion.
But if we are ever to move ahead, we have to face it: The NDP
is not a socialist party. The NDP has never been a socialist party.
And the NDP never will be a socialist party.
The NDP is not at a "crossroads" between "socialist
principles" and "pragmatism". It is not about to
"rebuild itself from the bottom up" and become a "social
movement'. It is not about to "choose to be a socialist party".
It is not going to miraculously transform itself and start "leading
the Canadian people in a struggle for national survival and socialism."
The NDP of the real world, as opposed to the NDP of our fantasies,
was conceived, founded, and has always functioned as an organization
that seeks to tame or improve the capitalist system, not to overturn
it. Obsessed with parliamentarism, it sees the state as neutral,
rather than as the principal instrument of capitalist rule.
If anyone doubts this, they need only examine the records of the
various CCF-NDP governments which have held office provincially.
When it has been in government, the NDP has done some worthwhile
things -- and it has also done things that grossly betrayed the
hopes of those who elected it. It has never shown any inclination
or capability to bring about fundamental, socialist change.
A `labour' party that is quite willing to crack down on unions
when it feels it is necessary, the NDP's idea of social change is
to bring in government auto insurance.
It may be that we are able to keep our illusions about the NDP
alive partly because the party has never been able to form a government
federally. As a result, we have been sheltered from what the French,
the British, the Germans, the Greeks, the Spanish, have experienced
at first hand: the actual performance of social democratic parties
in office.
The record of social democracy world-wide is clear. No social democratic
party in office anywhere in the world has ever attempted to pursue
an anti-capitalist agenda.
And, of more immediate relevance, no left-wing caucus within a
social democratic party has ever succeeded in transforming such
a party into a real socialist party.
Those of us who still had illusions about the NDP should surely
have lost them after the party's pathetic performance in the free
trade election of 1988. That election demonstrated in the clearest
possible terms a fundamental truth about social democratic parties:
when it comes to the crunch, they always fail to meet the challenge.
When the choices are posed most sharply, the social democratic party,
whose entire existence is based on refusing to adopt a consistent,
pro-working class, socialist position, invariably finds itself incapable
of decisive, principled action.
My purpose in arguing this is not to suggest that we ought to abandon
all efforts to work with the NDP. The NDP is and for the foreseeable
future will remain an important political force on the Canadian
left. While it has never been able to claim the allegiance, or even
the votes, of a majority of working class Canadians, it is still
seen by many as `the' party for working people.
Perhaps most importantly, the members of the NDP include some of
the most decent, most committed, and most militant supporters of
progressive change in Canada. Many of them are good people, people
we want and need to work with if we are ever to achieve fundamental
social change.
What is at issue is not whether to relate to the NDP, but how to
relate to the NDP.
What we should emphatically not be doing is joining our efforts
to those of the several generations of Canadian activists who have
pursued the mirage of trying to "win the NDP to socialism".
While there are many good people in the NDP, the NDP as an institution
is never going to be converted to socialism. On the contrary, the
dead weight of its own political and organizational logic will lead
the party to become ever more "moderate", ever more compromised,
ever more frustrating to those who join in the hopes of using it
to create socialism.
Our collective political energy is limited and precious. Let's
not squander it beating our heads against the organizational brick
walls of the NDP. And let's not waste it by putting it at the disposal
of party bureaucrats who want us as election fodder and to hold
riding associations together between elections.
Finally, let's not delude ourselves by imagining that if somehow
the NDP could be more closely tied to the union movement, it would
mean the party's salvation. While the union movement, like the NDP,
contains many good, decent, progressive, militant people, trade
unions, as institutions, are just as inexorably tied to reform within
the capitalist system as are the social democratic parties. This
is not anyone's fault; it is the nature of unionism. Unions exist
to win a better deal for workers within capitalism, not to get rid
of capitalism.
Again, this is not to say that one ought not to support unions
in what they do, or that one shouldn't support efforts to improve
unions, and certainly not to say that we shouldn't be seeking to
build links between unions and other grassroots organizations. But
it is to say that it is another mirage to believe that the kinds
of unions which now exist can be transformed into agents of fundamental
socialist change.
Nor does it make sense to believe that by joining a fundamentally
reformist party like the NDP more closely to fundamentally reformist
organizations like the unions a revolutionary new organization will
miraculously be produced.
This does not mean that socialists should be attempting to create
a new party to compete with the NDP at this time. The base of support
for such an endeavour does not exist. A new party would be small
and probably subject to infighting. Even if it was formed successfully,
creating a new party to compete with the NDP would be likely to
further divide, rather than unite, the left and the working class
movement.
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.
What we have to do, in effect, is to start doing the work of a
socialist movement, outside of the NDP, and indeed outside of any
party structure.
The beginnings of such a decentralized, democratic movement already
exist. They exist in the network of grassroots groups woven across
this country: in the women's groups, environmental organizations,
senior citizens', native peoples', cultural and many other groups.
Many of these organizations have been making efforts to create more
links and build broader coalitions, with each other, and importantly
with trade unions, a process that was accelerated by the alliances
formed during the fight against free trade.
If we are able to build on the connections and alliances that have
already been fashioned, we have the potential to create a social
movement in this country that goes beyond single-issue organizing
to work toward an integrated vision of a fundamentally different
society. The fact that groups have been learning to work together
is a hopeful sign and an important beginning, for a true movement
must encompass and represent a diversity of constituencies, regions,
issues, and ethnic and linguistic groups.
As we work to create such a movement, we need to work to develop
a shared vision, a set of goals and principles which give the movement
direction while leaving room for differences and organizational
autonomy. It should be our objective to arrive at common approaches
to strategies and tactics to the greatest extent possible, because
the more we are able to work together and combine our efforts, the
greater our potential power will be. Working together does not have
to mean the politics of the `lowest common denominator', if we remain
committed to respecting each other's right to take autonomous initiatives
within a pluralistic movement.
Of course it is not possible to spell out in advance what such
a shared vision might look like. Below, however, is a quick list
of suggested principles which we as socialists should be seeking
to bring to a wider social movement:
* Democracy. We need to make a real issue of democracy,
to challenge our society to take seriously its oft-proclaimed commitment
to democratic ideals. We have to make an issue ofthe fact that what
currently passes for democracy is a best a two-dimensional shadow
of what a democratic society ought to be. In contrast to the parliamentary
obsession of the NDP, we should be offering the model of a radically
democratic society, in which power is taken away from corporations,
governments, bureaucracies, and experts, and dispersed widely. This
means a real commitment to popular control of social life, including
workers' control in the workplace and community control in our towns
and neighbourhoods.
* Looking beyond the state and the corporations. We have
to develop the idea we can't look to the state and to corporations
to solve society's problems. This is especially obvious at a time
when virtually the entire Canadian business class, as well as its
government, have made it clear that their agenda is to reduce the
role of the state to the greatest extent possible, except of course
when it comes to ensuring a `safe' climate for business activity.
If we wish to pursue a different set of economic and social goals,
we will need to wrestle power away from the corporations. At the
same time, we should be acutely aware of the fact that reliance
on the state is no answer either, as the crisis of state-controlled
societies around the world is making clear. `Neither the state,
nor the corporations', should be our motto.
* Sustainable, ecologically sane economic activity. The
ecological crisis is tied to destructive economic activities that
are harmful or useless, and that cannot be sustained. Economic activities
should have to justify themselves on grounds of social usefulness
if they are to consume our resources, rather than on the grounds
that they make a profit for someone. They have to clean up after
themselves and safeguard the health of their workers and of the
communities in which they are situated -- something that can only
be guaranteed by giving workers and communities the power to ensure
that they do so.
* A class perspective. Capitalist society seeks to make
us believe that `we are all in this together', that we all share
the burdens and benefits of the system. It is our responsibility
to make clear that society is comprised of classes, and that our
interests are directly antagonistic to those of the capitalist class.
We need to learn to think in class terms and to identify all those
groups in society with whom we have shared interests, and to learn
to work together with them.
* Solidarity and internationalism. As the right mounts its
attack on social spending, on unions, on women, on the poor, on
minorities and immigrants, our response must be to stand together,
to practice solidarity, to remember the old union slogan that `An
injury to one is an injury to all'. Because the system which we
are opposing is a worldwide system, our response too needs to be
international. We need to think globally, to join together across
international borders and other dividing lines to work together
and support each other.
We have a special responsibility to the Third World, which, already
desperately poor, is being plunged into further human misery and
environmental devastation by massive debt payments and irrational
economic patterns dictated by multinational corporations and the
local elites they enrich. We owe the people of the Third World a
debt of solidarity, but beyond that we must realize that the issues
of world peace and the global environment that concern us here in
the West cannot be solved unless the issues of poverty, women's
liberation, and sustainable economic development are dealt with
in the Third World. In the final analysis, we can only succeed if
we succeed internationally, although we must of necessity concentrate
most of our efforts in our own country.
* The idea that change is possible. One of the most important
and difficult tasks of a social movement in Canada is to persuade
ordinary Canadians that there are possible alternatives. We have
to break through the deadening conviction that `nothing can be done'.
We have to promote the idea that there are alternative ways of dealing
with day to day problems, and also that it is possible and desirable
to have a fundamentally different world, in which our dreams of
freedom, justice, security, and cooperation can be realized. We
have to make people aware that the women's movement, the environmental
movement, the trade union movement, have had significant successes
because they have joined together and worked for change. We have
to encourage people's impulses to come together with others to fight
against what is harmful and to fight for what is desirable and just.
When they do,
that which seemed impossible to achieve becomes possible, because
enough people believe it is possible and are working to make it
so.
If we are successful in creating a dynamic movement that can do
these things, we may find that even the NDP, or large parts of it,
will want to join us in our efforts to transform society.
Ulli Diemer is a freelance writer.
Phone: 416-964-7799.
E-mail:
www.diemer.ca
Published in the November-December 1989 issue of Canadian
Dimension.
Aussi disponible en français: Arrêtons de se faire des illusions.
See also: Debating
the NDP.
Subject Headings: Canadian
Politics - Left,
The - New
Democratic Party - Social
Democracy - Socialism
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