Tuesday, July 18, 2006

New Politics Initiative

(This article was originally written in 2001)

In the often static world of the Canadian left, the New Politics Initiative, to be launched at a press conference in Ottawa today by social movement activist Judy Rebick and NDP MP Svend Robinson, is an important development. The sponsors of the NPI have challenged the NDP to decide at its autumn convention to dissolve itself to make way for the formation of a new party that can embrace both those inside and outside the NDP. The fundamental goal of the NPI is to bring a new generation of social movement activists into a radically redefined version of party politics, a highly laudable goal.

In its draft vision statement (dubbed Discussion Paper #1), the NPI claims to hold the key to an understanding of the world and the process of political change. It presents itself as a far-sighted alternative to the ineffectual ways of the present NDP. Do the ideas of the authors of this initiative provide a sound basis for the coming era of left politics in Canada? I confess I find them wanting. The NPI lacks clarity on three fundamental matters: social class, the state, and the United States.

Even though the NPI’s vision statement touches on many things---among them, the environment, proportional representation, a renewed and enlarged public sector, and the problems of aboriginals----the NPI’s seminal point is that direct action politics holds the key to the future of the left. The mantra of the NPI can be summarized as activism to the limit.

In some ways, this is an understandable reaction against the lackluster parliamentary politics of the NDP. Like the authors of the NPI statement, I too was much energized when I attended the protests against the IMF and the World Bank in Washington D.C. last April and those in opposition to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas in Quebec City this spring. The huge mobilization of demonstrators at the recent G 8 meeting in Genoa shows that protests against the existing order are far from a flash in the pan. The fact that so many young people have taken up the banner of anti-capitalism heralds a brighter future for the left.

The NPI is strongest in its advocacy of a style of politics which is participatory at all levels, to replace the top-down decision making that is as much a part of the NDP as it is of other parties. In its vision statement, a powerful case is made that we need a whole new concept of democracy that will affect all the aspects of our lives, in workplaces and schools, in the designing and administration of social programs, in the running of a political party, and in the governing of a society that needs to come to terms with its diversity.

Unfortunately, beyond its insistence on participatory democracy, the NPI vision is a murky one, clouded by a long list of worthy causes, without the necessary coherence among them to fashion a political party.

The NPI is wedded to the proposition that through activism and by grouping activists together, the way ahead will somehow become crystal clear. This is highly reminiscent of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition that flourished in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With anarcho-syndicalism, you get plenty of fireworks, but not much pressure for basic change, as the "New Left" of the 1960s and 1970s so clearly demonstrated, when it fell into the trap of substituting activism for analysis. Along with Stalinism and right-wing social democracy, anarcho-syndicalism is one of the three dead ends against which the left has repeatedly butted its head over the past century.

In addition to peripatetic activism, the NPI is obsessed with decentralization, apparently believing that the more local the decision making authority, the greater its potential for democracy. The enthusiasm of today’s radical-chic for localism----read the columns of Naomi Klein in the Globe and Mail---is eerily similar to the distaste for strong governments that is so much in evidence among neo-liberals and the reactionary-chic. In the Canadian context, the further dismantling of the Canadian state and the enhancement of localism opens the way for real power to be exercised by global corporations and the United States, exactly what the left ought to oppose. It is a right-wing myth, which the authors of the NPI do nothing to demolish, that all states in the world are losing power to a force called globalization. Far from shedding it, the American state is rapidly accumulating power at the expense of the sovereignty of countries like Canada. Under the unilateralist leadership of George W. Bush, the United States has served notice that it intends to impose its will on others on economic, environmental, cultural and defence issues.

The NPI does not face up to the fundamental fact that Canada lives in an American Empire under the sway of American corporate and state power. The vision statement is so tepid on the issue of the American domination of Canada that half the members of the Liberal caucus in Ottawa could easily sign off on it. The failure of the statement to align itself solidly with the aspiration of Canadians to run and shape their own society, free from domination south of the border, is no small matter.

While the NPI is better on the issue of social class, it fails to assert with any clarity that the goal of a left party ought to be to mobilize the majority of the population, made up of wage and salary earners, in opposition to the power exercised over them by corporations and the wealthy. A socialist statement on the matter of social class, this is not.

What the NPI seems to be aiming at is the creation of a party to represent activists, rather than working Canadians in general. In its own way, that is as misguided as the present NDP whose leadership imagines that a move to the right will save it from political oblivion.

The NDP needs to put itself through a process of fundamental change that may lead to the launching of a new party. The New Politics Initiative should be welcomed as contributing to the debate. Unfortunately, at least in its current manifestation, the NPI does not provide a road map to guide the left through the difficult terrain that lies ahead.

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