CM

You don’t necessarily look to the old labor battalions. What are they doing? They’ve been propping up the Democratic Party hierarchy. You look to what’s really moving, and what’s grabbing people’s attention is all of those young workers who are facing a precarious future. Who are the most highly educated, informed, and articulate labor force in the history of the planet.

Clearly, they organize in unorthodox ways, through social media and all sorts of things. But that’s the future. And just like capitalism threw manufacturing workers onto the junk heap, these younger workers are facing the same fate. Automation, not twenty-five years from now but over the next decade, is going to throw even more people into the ranks of the unemployed or the precariously employed.

These are the people that any new party has to reach out to, and make the argument for a new kind of organization that is not separate from their struggles but is a part of them. The Democratic Party is pathetic at that, and the NDP is pretty bad, too.

The big danger for any new party is getting sucked into the electoral-politics holus bolus, when that becomes the be all and end all. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be involved in electoral politics. Revolutionary movements always have. It’s when electoral politics comes to dominate. Then the movements and the struggles outside the electoral arena begin to take second place, and that’s when the distances begin to open up.

Any new party that takes that constituency seriously can make some major headway. The task is not to channel that into some new electoral vehicle as an end in itself, but to build a new kind of third party that is able to organize and feed off of that energy, so people begin to see politics as not narrowly electoral but much more than that.

These are people who are prepared to go out into the streets to protest police shootings and organize these magnificent events like the Women’s March. You always have to be asking yourself: what’s moving, where’s the energy, how can this be organized in a way to strengthen the movement and not just the electoral machine? And that’s a really hard balance.

Unfortunately, the history of social democracy in Canada and Europe and elsewhere has been to become electoral machines and all the other stuff gets tossed into the back seat.

So over time, the NDP has not just lost its credibility, but its capacity to intervene strategically in social movements and struggles. They may come along to demonstrations and hold a placard, but their idea of meaningful political engagement is to say: “Why don’t you get involved in our candidate’s campaign in the upcoming by-election?”

Therein lies the conservatization of social democracy. When it has won power in the last few decades in the Canadian provinces, it has been swept along, rudderless, by the forces of neoliberalism, without having a mobilized base to check it. In Bolivia and other places, they say, “The leaders obey.”

Once you see your role in electoral terms, then a passive base is okay because you only need them to be mobilized at election time. And mobilized means: go out and canvass for us.

I’ve canvassed for the NDP at election time, and it’s a dispiriting kind of anti-politics. You do once in a while knock on a door and get to talk to someone about politics, but by that point the idea is simply: “Please come out and give us the thirty-two seconds it takes for you to put an X on a ballot and then go home.” The ultimate passive citizenship.

But I think there’s another way of doing it which starts with going to the self-activity where it exists. And that’s not to romanticize it and say it always exists and people don’t get tired. There are ebbs and flows to all sorts of struggles. But that’s always your starting point. How to take that and bring it to a higher level of organization?

That implies some kind of party organization. But I hope it wouldn’t take the form of a traditional social-democratic party, because while they may have had roots in those movements that gave them a real vitality at one point in their history, today they’ve lost most of that.

That’s why you’ve seen phenomena like Blairism in the UK. Blair was able to shift the Labour Party to the right in the 1990s because it had become moribund. It had lost its bearings and many of its working-class militants, leaving Labour membership to be seen as little more than a vote at election time.

Arguably, the British Labour Party had much deeper and more solid roots in the labor movement than the Canadian NDP could ever claim. And yet even there, they were swept along the neoliberal tide as so many other social-democratic parties have been.

So how to avoid that? If the project is to form a third party, number one let’s study the history of social democracy, in and out of power, and look honestly at the deficits. If you live in a culture like the US where you’re desperate for some third-party alternative to the two parties of business, then it’s easy to romanticize social-democratic culture. And for some good reasons. But you’ve also got to look at the really profound weaknesses and the way the tectonic shift to the right over the last thirty years has also dragged social democracy in its train, with profound consequences.

If you look at the number of trade unionists in Canada who vote for the NDP, you will not find a majority, far from it. That’s a disgrace, but it’s an outcome of neglecting the issues that matter to that base when in power.