Why the NDP Socialist Caucus is necessary
by Barry Weisleder

Since 1998, the Socialist Caucus of the New Democratic Party (the mass labour-based political party in English Canada) has campaigned for a Workers’ Agenda, for socialist solutions to the problems faced by humanity. The SC has openly campaigned to move the NDP sharply to the left. Our many publications and campaigns, especially the Bev Meslo bid for NDP federal leader in 2002-2003, have had a positive impact.

During the 1980s and 1990s the NDP moved steadily to the right. The party leadership took the NDP to the brink of oblivion. Then they stopped, looked over the brink, and stepped back. In addition to the SC, the New Politics Initiative (the NPI was a broad but amorphous movement for grassroots democracy inside and outside the NDP, led by a self-appointed intellectual elite) and other leftist groups sounded the alarm. Unfortunately, the NPI abandoned the struggle to fight for a socialist alternative. But the party brass got the message and they embraced the soft-left populist option represented by Jack Layton, who was elected federal NDP Leader in January 2003. NDP membership doubled as the party appeared to shift slightly to the left, or at least arrested its slide to the right.

The party recovered some of its historic federal electoral support in June 2004, as well as in the Ontario provincial election in Fall 2003, and elsewhere. Today, the NDP leads the polls in British Columbia after being nearly wiped out in a 2001 B.C. provincial vote. NDP ties to organized labour in English Canada continue, despite new restrictive political funding laws.

Clearly, the NDP is back from the brink, again. But its political stance, its priorities, its policies, and its programme remain fraught with contradictions and outright negative features. Despite giving the appearance of an openness to social movements, the party remains totally preoccupied with electoral campaigns. And the latter leave much to be desired. In the June 28 federal election, the NDP did not campaign against capitalist globalization. There was no mention of socialist solutions, let alone any reference to socialism as an alternative to capitalist exploitation and to its destruction of humanity and the environment. No talk of public ownership, much less workers’ and community control.

We must also be clear: Proportional Representation in Parliament would not redress the entire ‘democratic deficit’; far from it.

Despite its preoccupation with elections and government, the party failed to campaign for the most basic goal—an NDP government. Instead, it proposed “a central role for the NDP in Parliament”. This implied support for a Liberal minority government, and made it a bit easier for the great chameleon, Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, to campaign to his left and to usurp some NDP political turf.

Jack Layton ran an energetic effort. However, it was far from socialist, and he back-pedalled on a number of issues. He retreated after initially taking a clear, democratic stance in opposition to previous Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s anti-Quebec Clarity Act.

Layton looked silly trying to dodge the issue in the Leaders’ TV Debate. Then he abandoned the NDP plank calling for an inheritance tax, without explaining where replacement revenue would be found. Then he mused aloud a little more about the conditions for supporting a Liberal minority government. Earlier, he had softened his criticism of Paul Martin’s personal responsibility for cutting funding for social housing, and its dire human consequences.

While vigorously opposing Star Wars 2, along with half the Liberal caucus, at no time did Layton demand an immediate end to the U.S. and allied occupation of Iraq, much less did Layton demand that Canada get its military forces out of Afghanistan, out of the Persian Gulf, or out of NATO-occupied Yugoslavia.

Layton’s stated commitment to a balanced budget is also in tune with the position of the capitalist parties. It is a mark of the unwillingness of NDP leaders to challenge fundamentally the neo-liberal agenda of cutbacks, de-regulation, and privatization. There was no mention of saving threatened jobs or upholding the public interest at Air Canada, or Steel Company of Canada, and he offered only the mildest proposal that the government retain shares in Petro-Canada so as to leverage them into a new clean energy public initiative.

We cannot predict the future, but it appears the federal minority government will last up to two years. Will the NDP get too close to the Liberals, and suffer the consequences NDP Leader David Lewis suffered for too closely associating the NDP to Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal minority government in the mid-1970s?

The answer depends in part on what the Labour movement and NDP members say and do. It depends also in part on what radical socialists in general do, including what the NDP Socialist Caucus does.

On June 28 over 2 million votes moved to the left. Only 61 percent of those eligible did vote. It’s fair to say that more than 2 million voters want to see change; a significant number want big change. With the restored electoral prominence of the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec national question is on the agenda again. Aboriginal issues, feminist issues, labour issues, war and peace issues are all coming increasingly to the forefront as the crisis of capitalism demands new answers.

The provincial premiers want the Feds to fund Pharmacare, but they won’t stand up to privatization of health services already underway. Good jobs are disappearing. Fees continue to climb, while services are eroded. Labour leaders give concessions to business owners who plea poverty.

Who will stand up for the majority, for working people, for those who create all the goods and services for society, for the labour we perform, which is the primary source of profit and wealth?

Today’s NDP leaders, despite some rhetorical shifts, offer the same old tired, pro-capitalist answers. The Socialist Caucus has new and better answers.

Socialists need to better organize ourselves, not just for convention debates, but inside the social movements and in the streets, to convince working people of our answers, and to win them to our banner. The time to get active is now.

The NDP Socialist Caucus Conference slated for Sept. 19 in Toronto can give us a jump start on the tasks we face in the coming months. For details, visit the web site, www.ndpsocialists.com, or telephone (416) 535-8779.

To push the NDP to the left. To build a stronger socialist movement within and beyond the NDP!