Jack Layton dies at 61

[jake williams]

NDP Leader Jack Layton, who led Canada's Official Opposition, has died at his Toronto home at age 61 after a long battle with cancer.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/08/22/layton-obituary.html?ref=rss

[danyboy27]

Got a bad feeling that the party will just fucking desintegrate beccause of this, too much focus on jack layton, too much people voted for the guy rather than voting for the core idea in Quebec.

you got to give that to the conservative, their leader is an absolute turd that could be replaced at anytime by any other conservative anf still carry their ''goals''.

[danyboy27]

on a more human note, may his family find all the courage necessary to deal with this tragedy.

[jake williams]

Got a bad feeling that the party will just fucking desintegrate beccause of this, too much focus on jack layton, too much people voted for the guy rather than voting for the core idea in Quebec.
There's a couple of things that could happen.

Best case scenario there's going to be a major internal crisis fairly quickly, and it's hard to say what the consequences would be. Otherwise the right wing simply takes over the party.

Even if there's an open struggle for the leadership in the next few months, there's a good chance the right wing will take over. The right wing is a lot more serious, better organized, and is going to be a lot less sentimental about Jack. If anything this is their opportunity, something the left within the NDP is a lot less likely to be excited about.

It's conceivable the party will be able to maintain something like an unstable political peace internally for some time, but if that doesn't get resolved by the next election, it's hard to say what'll actually happen. It's not especially likely anyway though.


you got to give that to the conservative, their leader is an absolute turd that could be replaced at anytime by any other conservative anf still carry their ''goals''.
I'm not sure that's true. Not only is Harper clever and competent - as evidenced by the fact that he'll be Prime Minister for almost a decade at very least (barring a revolution), as evidenced by the fact that he's been able to keep most of his cabinet under his boot and really only lets Jason Kenney mouth off about things, as evidenced by his virtually unanimous support among Canadian business - but he's also politically important to the party. Remember, he's the one who was actually able to unite the Christian fundamentalists, the Alberta separatists, the technocrats, the petty bourgeoisie, the finance and resource capitalists. His is the most united Conservative Party in many decades.

[The Stalinator]

Gonna miss Jack Layton.
Saw him at Pride a month and a half ago.
Say what you want about the NDP and their slant, but I think he did a lot of good for us and for Canada.
And now he's gone, and I don't know what to say about that except that I'll miss him and I'll miss the opportunity he gave us. I'll really miss him.

[ApparentlyASocialist]

Gonna miss Jack Layton.
Saw him at Pride a month and a half ago.
Say what you want about the NDP and their slant, but I think he did a lot of good for us and for Canada.
And now he's gone, and I don't know what to say about that except that I'll miss him and I'll miss the opportunity he gave us. I'll really miss him.

It's a shame he died so soon after his glorious rise from leader of the NDP, to leader of the official opposition.
When I found out he died I shed a tear or two. I will miss him.

[blake 3:17]

An obituary from Toronto's gay press: http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Jack_Layton_19502011-10661.aspx

Two fine pieces from prominent Leftists. Judy Rebick on Layton: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/judes/2011/08/le-bon-jack

Rick Salutin on Layton: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1043382--salutin-tribune-for-the-powerless

[blake 3:17]

Best case scenario there's going to be a major internal crisis fairly quickly, and it's hard to say what the consequences would be. Otherwise the right wing simply takes over the party.

That would be kind of natural, but I'm not sure. Suddenly having a Quebec caucus of rookies totally throws things off. I'm optimistic. The new MPs from the rest of Canada may also play important roles.

I think Layton was smart in pushing a leadership conference back several months following his death. Turmel was an excellent choice for an interim leader. I had issues with Layton, and even more with people in his circle, but that was very good call.

[blake 3:17]

I was in tears Monday morning. I lived around the corner from him for many years, when he and Olivia Chow were both on city council, and would bump into them here and there, not just at political events. He was very strong on a number of issues: fighting homelessness, against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for LGBTQ rights.

I basically stopped supporting the party a few years ago when they voted with the Conservatives in support of law&order bill which included mandatory minimum sentences for adolescents in gun "related" crimes. That's the same legislation which caused Judy Rebick (her tribute is posted above) to drop her membership. I did vote NDP last election given the "orange surge" -- it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity.

He was a really wonderful person, usually on the right side of things, and willing to agree to disagree. His death has shaken many of us with quite divergent political opinions. He was a very honest, very decent person. I didn't like some of the ways he moved the NDP to the right, but he did move it to be more effective for which I can't fault him.

[blake 3:17]

I went down to the funeral today. I waited for the procession and left shortly after the service began -- the sun was too hot! Thousands and thousands of people were there and there was a very positive energy.

The main eulogy was by Stephen Lewis, former head of the Ontario NDP and well known for his advocacy work on the AIDS epidemic in Africa. The eulogy is here: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1045918--stephen-lewis-s-eulogy-to-jack-layton?bn=1

Anot bad piece by Wayne Roberts, who was part of Layton's inner circle for many years. It details some of Layton's contributions which haven't been detailed so closely in other media outlets: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=182399

Now magazine has also put together an archive of their articles on him going back to 1983: http://www.nowtoronto.com/daily/news/story.cfm?content=182332

This a link of an interview Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, two of Canada's most prominet Marxists, did with Layton in 2003. I've posted this before on this board but for those who haven't read it, I think it's worth it. It was done shortly after Layton won the party leadership. http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2009/

Layton was a strong proponent of win-win (or even win-win-win) politics which evades questions of conflict and crisis. Some of his ideas have the ring of Owenite socialism. At other times, as Rick Salutin noted, he seemed more a Leftist in the sense of the French Revolution -- which I suppose is a radical liberal.

It's going to be a very strange time in Canadian politics.

[Kiravana]

It is very sad to hear the passing of Jack Layton as I truly enjoyed seeing him around the city and at various events. When I saw Jack Layton I could relate to him on a more personal level as he was always trying to be involved in a lot of the community no matter if it was a East Asian Gala or the Gay Pride festival. You could always see he had no problem hiding his emotions and showed how compassionate he really was. I never get this sense of feeling from seeing Harper and feel like I can't relate to him at all.

[The Intransigent Faction]

1 1/2 weeks later and there are already a few NDPers saying it's a good idea to merge with the Liberals.
Yeah, because the best thing for a party that was just launched into becoming the official opposition is to jump on board that proverbial titanic...

[genstrike]

You know, I've held my tongue on this for over a week now, but I think we need to have a serious analysis of Jack Layton and the NDP, instead of the fawning, uncritical adulation that we have been inundated with over the past week and a half.

If even half the little anecdotes I've read online in the past few days are true, it seems like Jack Layton was a fairly decent guy personally, and seemed to be at least moderately passionate and committed to something, given that he was working pretty much right up to his death.

But, we need to seriously look at things in context. Despite getting elected as party leader with the support of a lot of people on the left of the NDP (particularly the NPI, who pretty much declared victory and folded after he was elected), under his leadership the NDP moved even further to the right - a trend so prominent that I've heard the 2011 campaign be referred to as "the most right-wing NDP campaign in history"

That is also to say nothing of the NDP's continued support for imperialism and colonialism around the world.

But maybe all of this is bigger than Jack Layton. If so, we need to look at the problems with social democracy in an age where the postwar Keynesian welfare state is dead. And we need to look at the fact that parliamentarism is a dead end, and the NDP is bullshit.

Finally, Jack Layton's death changes nothing about the role of the NDP in demobilizing and diverting class struggle. We can't let sentimental bullshit for a popular social-democratic politician distract us from the reality of the situation we're in, and from what we need to do as revolutionaries.

[blake 3:17]

@genstrike: I think we're pretty much in agreement. I would suggest that a serious take on the NDP cannot be reduced to how leftwing it is at any given moment.


Finally, Jack Layton's death changes nothing about the role of the NDP in demobilizing and diverting class struggle. We can't let sentimental bullshit for a popular social-democratic politician distract us from the reality of the situation we're in, and from what we need to do as revolutionaries.

???

[mosfeld]

Layton's Death Means Less Than The Weight of a Feather

Much hoopla is being made, and many tears being shed, amongst certain sectors of the self-proclaimed "left" about Jack Layton's recent death. (For those readers who live outside of Canada, Jack Layton was the leader of Canada's New Democratic Party.) But why should we, as the Canadian left, feel any grief for the death of a parliamentarian who was, by the time of his death, no longer a social democrat, let alone an anti-capitalist? It's not like the people who are currently writing Facebook homages to the man knew him personally; these dewy-eyed obituaries are all about how he was a great crusader for justice or some other nonsense. And yet Layton was more to the right than the classic social democrat traitor, Eduard Bernstein, and was leading a New Democratic Party that has become little more than a Trudeau era Liberal Party.

Mao often quoted Szuma Chien's proverb about how some deaths carry meaning that is heavier than a mountain whereas other deaths mean less than the weight of a feather. For Mao the proverb was used to argue that those who died in the service of the people––who fought against capitalism and imperialism––were those whose deaths possessed real significance, whereas those who died in the service of the exploiters––or who were exploiters––should be treated as insignificant. The point was to reverse the normative valuation that the oppressors place upon life and death, a valuation that claims that the only lives/deaths that matter are those of the upper classes, military heroes, politicians, and all the running dogs of the exploitative world system.

Jack Layton was not a comrade but a parliamentarian who supported capitalism and imperialism. He has supported Canadian imperialist adventures, most recently in Libya, just as he has never been interested in dealing with the Canadian state's internal colonialism. He supported a soft occupation of Afghanistan, just as he wanted to maintain ties with Israel at the expense of Palestinian self-determination. Clearly he was never seriously interested in getting rid of capitalism, otherwise he would have never joined a social democrat parliamentary machine, but only in making it more "liveable"––which, of course, means making it more liveable here at the expense of increased exploitation at the peripheries of world capitalism. And under his command, the NDP has progressively moved more to the right so that now it barely resembles even a social democratic party.

I'm not saying that we should celebrate Layton's death, I'm just saying that we as the left should not care because the death of a liberal capitalist politician should be treated as meaningless. I care more about the anonymous deaths of women and children in third world factories than the death of a man whose policies, if he had ever been in power, would allow these factories to continue functioning.

The point is not that a human being's life isn't worth mourning but, rather, why some of us on the Canadian left seem to care about mourning the life of a social-dem-turned-liberal, meaning another capitalist pig no matter what clothes he wore, when we don't mourn the deaths of other people we don't know personally. All the celebratory obituaries about the man, after all, are pitiful attempts to make a welfare capitalist seem like some sort of champion of the people––they aren't about how "sad it is when another human being dies." Would the same people writing these obituaries shed a tear if Harper died? No, of course not! And though Harper is more to the right than Layton, they're both part of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. If you're a leftist, and if Jack Layton isn't a member of your family, then there is no reason to mourn another running dog.

http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2011/08/laytons-death-means-less-than-weight-of.html

[Salyut]

But, we need to seriously look at things in context. Despite getting elected as party leader with the support of a lot of people on the left of the NDP (particularly the NPI, who pretty much declared victory and folded after he was elected), under his leadership the NDP moved even further to the right - a trend so prominent that I've heard the 2011 campaign be referred to as "the most right-wing NDP campaign in history"


This has been true of the NDP as a whole since Douglas went out. In Saskatchewan the provincial NDP is currently led by a oil executive who came out of Alberta when Calvert got out of politics. I doubt we'll see a swing to the left again.

On a sidenote; here's Layton at a ARA rally. (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wKTp14bAJS8/TlWyvGs3TAI/AAAAAAAAE1I/-spVaE_Xdig/s1600/ara-lay1.jpg)

[CynicalIdealist]

Boohoo people are mourning a social democrat's death. To make my tears more nuanced here's a provocative Mao quote.

[JoeySteel]

Comrade JMP is absolutely right.

[Crux]

CWI Canada: Death of NDP leader, Jack Layton (http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/5262)

[The Intransigent Faction]

That is also to say nothing of the NDP's continued support for imperialism and colonialism around the world.

:confused: I completely agree that parliamentarism is a dead end and with pretty much everything else you said, but I'm pretty sure you're dead wrong here. This is one of the things the NDP had going for them that set them apart from the other parties. It doesn't make them saints, but I don't think unabashed support for imperialism is one of their flaws.
EDIT: Well, not when it was Layton's party, at least.

[Ismail]

:confused: I completely agree that parliamentarism is a dead end and with pretty much everything else you said, but I'm pretty sure you're dead wrong here. This is one of the things the NDP had going for them that set them apart from the other parties. It doesn't make them saints, but I don't think unabashed support for imperialism is one of their flaws.
EDIT: Well, not when it was Layton's party, at least.http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/cana-a23.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/cndp-a24.shtml

And in 2007: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/ndp-j05.shtml

[JoeySteel]

Brad,

Just from personal observation, being around the NDP and around Canadian politics, the NDP has been pretty pro imperialist through and through. They used to oppose NATO, which was a more common thing when the USSR was still around. Now, they either supported or paid no mind to regime change in Haiti and Libya for instance. On Afghanistan their anti war stance was typical of the most right-wing and opportunistic social democratic positions, either wavering and changing "opposition" in Parliament depending on the mood of the day, or opportunistic sloganeering to take advantage of the natural anti war sentiment among people. Like most yellow rats, they have never and would never really lift a finger to fight imperialism or oppose an imperialist war, or possibly if it would get them some votes and good media coverage, but it would not. The positions these snakes take have been the same since Lenin's time and he correctly diagnosed them then.