blake 3:17
12th September 2014, 22:44
Working Class Politics After the NDP
Sam Gindin and Michael Hurley
Introduction: Crisis in Labour Politics
The issue that we can't ignore this Labour Day is the disorientation in our movement's politics. List the issues working people are most concerned about today – whether deindustrialization, unemployment and underemployment; access to healthcare, childcare and pensions; poverty, racism, conditions of foreign workers and appalling levels of overall inequality; the environment, transit costs and transit services; another corporate-friendly trade agreement that is insensitive to workers and communities; or the horror of Gaza – and two things especially stand out. First, how fundamental the actions of the Canadian state are to what is most important to us. Second, how distressingly unable we have been to influence those actions.
This speaks to the limits of capitalist democracy, but it also highlights the profound failure of our movement's politics. For a good many years labour has farmed its politics out to the New Democratic Party (NDP). When members asked what the union was doing to ease the latest attack on the working class, the quick reply was often ‘wait for the next election’ and vote NDP. For some this was a matter of unquestioned principle and solidarity. It was also a convenient answer for leaders either stumped by what else might be done, or uncomfortable with – even fearful of – the implications of broader working class engagement.
Exasperation with this response had surfaced in the past, but it reached a new level of disenchantment during the recent Ontario provincial election. The frustrations were of course not unique to this province. They mirrored the experience with social democratic parties across Canada as well as in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The confusions and divisions of Canadian labour over its political direction raise the question of whether it will continue to stumble along with a half-hearted (and no longer unified) commitment to the NDP or finally concede that the NDP is not the answer to its problems. Until such an acknowledgement occurs, labour's politics will remain ineffective and largely irrelevant to working people (i.e. all those who don't have the privilege of living off their financial assets or the power to live off the labour of others – those with and those without a union, the employed, unemployed, and those condemned to poverty by the ‘labour market’).
Moving On
Breaking with the NDP is a core condition for confronting the need to develop a more creative and fruitful politics. But it is only the first condition for moving on. The issue of what might follow is a difficult one and as the socialist left addresses this, it must do so – given our own lack of success – with humility. Though there are pockets of socialists in unions, movements, at universities and indeed in the NDP, there is at this moment no socialist left in Canada with any degree of coherence, significant ties to the labour movement, or a program and strategy adequate to addressing what the Canadian working class faces.
How then do we start a process to move beyond the NDP and make the question of moving to a socialist party a matter of serious discussion within the labour movement? This is inseparable from simultaneously advancing labour's renewal, forging more substantive ties between unions and social movements, and reviving a socialist left.
The Contradictions of Social Democracy
The issue isn't fixing the NDP or the problems with any particular leader, policy or tactic. It's about the essence of the party. Social democratic parties like the NDP have no vision of a society beyond capitalism, no ambition beyond administering the existing society a bit more fairly. But capitalism is a social system based (as its name itself suggests) on putting the expansion of private capital above everything else, especially the well being of workers, whose potential to make gains can threaten capitalist control and profits. So while social democratic parties like the NDP claim to represent working people, the contradiction is that a party committed to capitalism cannot ultimately defend and advance the needs of working people.
The NDP tries to get around this lack of an independent vision by looking for ‘social harmony’ between capital and labour that looks to gains for working people without risking the alienation of business. It characterizes this as being practical. What it blindly ignores, however, is that for decades now business has asserted and demonstrated that it isn't interested in any such ‘social contract’. And so while the ‘practical’ NDP has been running around naively mumbling about creating a ‘good capitalism’, its refusal to launch at least an ideological counter-offensive against corporate Canada has left its working class constituency largely disarmed. Among other things this risks leaving workers to find answers to their frustrations in the simplistic and false remedies of the right.
This conflict between supporting capitalism and supporting workers is directly related to another contradiction: the role of mass mobilization to bring about change. Challenging capitalism is no small task and demands the development of a broad and deep-rooted mobilized social force capable of taking this powerful system on. This can't be done without workers playing a central role because of workers’ potential leverage in the economy and their organizational resources. Yet apart from certain individuals in the party, the NDP has little respect for working people as social actors. Since it can't imagine ‘ordinary’ workers developing the capacities to one day play a leading role in transforming capitalism, it has no reason to concern itself with – never mind prioritizing – equipping working people with the vision, analysis, ideology, organizational skills and the structures to counteract the power of, and constraints imposed by, capitalism. The NDP consequently reduces politics from the complexities of building and mobilizing the working class to the restricted politics of focusing on the next election.
But voting itself is simply not enough to get real change. Moreover, to get that vote social democratic parties engage in ‘transactional’ politics – a politics driven by cynical trade-offs. The poorest sections of the working class don't vote so don't worry about them. The more politicized workers don't really have anywhere else to go electorally, so they can be taken for granted. Minimum wages are opposed by small business, and big business is scared by anti-scab legislation, so don't push too hard on these issues.
To be fair, the constraints that social democratic governments point to can't be ignored; capitalism imposes well-known costs on any attempt to escape its established boundaries. But such constraints are in a sense also self-inflicted since social democracy does so little to prepare for stretching those limits or overcoming them. In fact, the NDP expresses its acceptance of these constraints as a matter of being realistic. But if being realistic means more or less giving up on significant change, then this is actually an argument for the need to become more radical. In the polarized state of the current world, where moderate solutions seem ineffective, solutions demand that we be more ambitious. The radical is now what is in fact realistic/practical – something that business has, from its own perspective, well understood and acted on.
In short, the NDP doesn't really see itself as a workers’ party. Occasional rhetoric aside, it doesn't think, or speak, or act in class terms. Social democracy runs from the very notion that class conflict is an integral part of capitalism – even as this is today more obvious than ever – and it recoils also from worker struggles as positive expressions of resistance that should be nurtured. When running for office, the NDP finds a militant working class and its economic disruptions a liability. In office, working class expectations stimulated by the electoral success are to be kept in check, and it is social democratic governments who so often end up carrying out wage restraint and social cutbacks – think Bob Rae. In the end, social democracy tends to confuse workers rather than develop their understandings, to lower rather than raise worker expectations, and in its transactional politics it contributes to the disorganization of workers as a class.
Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire
In raising the spectre of leaving the NDP, one particular dead-end that has been tempting for some prominent unions must be rejected: responding to the NDP's pragmatism by going one step further and arguing that because the Liberals are in power (or generally closer to being so), they can offer more than the NDP.
The history of the Liberal party and its business base should be enough of a warning against moving in this direction but there is an additional reason to oppose such a dangerous step. The bid on the part of some unions to make deals with the Liberals to address their own particular interests reinforces the sectionalism of the trade union movement. It undermines any counter-attempts to build, out of the disparate and different segments that make up the working class, the solidarity the class ultimately needs.
So, for example, making deals that grant union rights for only the construction sector, or joining with auto employers to support corporate subsidies in the midst of cutbacks for everyone else, or accepting a wage pattern that seems to fit teachers but undermines other education workers – all this may indeed lead to some short-term gains for particular workers. But since these deals aren't rooted in the strength of labour but its weakness, they have not surprisingly delivered only relatively weak deals, vulnerable to reversal as circumstances or political leaders change. And when the unions involved find they cannot depend on these deals and need broader labour solidarity, they not surprisingly find themselves isolated.
Breaking with the NDP
A debate over the NDP is already percolating. But this itself won't go anywhere unless the discussions are brought to a head. One way for this to happen is for activists to put forth resolutions to end their unions’ funding for the NDP (or the Liberals as the case may be). This would initiate a more formal internal debate over labour's direction and open the door to a discussion of prospects for a socialist party and steps to get there.
An immediate issue would be the importance of preserving (or even increasing) the political funds formerly going to the NDP and addressing alternative uses to support the development of a new politics. One obvious use of the funds is putting them toward a mass mobilization of workers and their allies around campaigns. Another is support for social movements that are currently under-resourced, with limited ties to the labour movement and still far from being mass movements, but creatively and energetically involved in organizing the non-unionized sections of the working class and servicing and mobilizing around aspects of working class lives not generally addressed by unions.
Full article: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1030.php
Sam Gindin and Michael Hurley
Introduction: Crisis in Labour Politics
The issue that we can't ignore this Labour Day is the disorientation in our movement's politics. List the issues working people are most concerned about today – whether deindustrialization, unemployment and underemployment; access to healthcare, childcare and pensions; poverty, racism, conditions of foreign workers and appalling levels of overall inequality; the environment, transit costs and transit services; another corporate-friendly trade agreement that is insensitive to workers and communities; or the horror of Gaza – and two things especially stand out. First, how fundamental the actions of the Canadian state are to what is most important to us. Second, how distressingly unable we have been to influence those actions.
This speaks to the limits of capitalist democracy, but it also highlights the profound failure of our movement's politics. For a good many years labour has farmed its politics out to the New Democratic Party (NDP). When members asked what the union was doing to ease the latest attack on the working class, the quick reply was often ‘wait for the next election’ and vote NDP. For some this was a matter of unquestioned principle and solidarity. It was also a convenient answer for leaders either stumped by what else might be done, or uncomfortable with – even fearful of – the implications of broader working class engagement.
Exasperation with this response had surfaced in the past, but it reached a new level of disenchantment during the recent Ontario provincial election. The frustrations were of course not unique to this province. They mirrored the experience with social democratic parties across Canada as well as in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The confusions and divisions of Canadian labour over its political direction raise the question of whether it will continue to stumble along with a half-hearted (and no longer unified) commitment to the NDP or finally concede that the NDP is not the answer to its problems. Until such an acknowledgement occurs, labour's politics will remain ineffective and largely irrelevant to working people (i.e. all those who don't have the privilege of living off their financial assets or the power to live off the labour of others – those with and those without a union, the employed, unemployed, and those condemned to poverty by the ‘labour market’).
Moving On
Breaking with the NDP is a core condition for confronting the need to develop a more creative and fruitful politics. But it is only the first condition for moving on. The issue of what might follow is a difficult one and as the socialist left addresses this, it must do so – given our own lack of success – with humility. Though there are pockets of socialists in unions, movements, at universities and indeed in the NDP, there is at this moment no socialist left in Canada with any degree of coherence, significant ties to the labour movement, or a program and strategy adequate to addressing what the Canadian working class faces.
How then do we start a process to move beyond the NDP and make the question of moving to a socialist party a matter of serious discussion within the labour movement? This is inseparable from simultaneously advancing labour's renewal, forging more substantive ties between unions and social movements, and reviving a socialist left.
The Contradictions of Social Democracy
The issue isn't fixing the NDP or the problems with any particular leader, policy or tactic. It's about the essence of the party. Social democratic parties like the NDP have no vision of a society beyond capitalism, no ambition beyond administering the existing society a bit more fairly. But capitalism is a social system based (as its name itself suggests) on putting the expansion of private capital above everything else, especially the well being of workers, whose potential to make gains can threaten capitalist control and profits. So while social democratic parties like the NDP claim to represent working people, the contradiction is that a party committed to capitalism cannot ultimately defend and advance the needs of working people.
The NDP tries to get around this lack of an independent vision by looking for ‘social harmony’ between capital and labour that looks to gains for working people without risking the alienation of business. It characterizes this as being practical. What it blindly ignores, however, is that for decades now business has asserted and demonstrated that it isn't interested in any such ‘social contract’. And so while the ‘practical’ NDP has been running around naively mumbling about creating a ‘good capitalism’, its refusal to launch at least an ideological counter-offensive against corporate Canada has left its working class constituency largely disarmed. Among other things this risks leaving workers to find answers to their frustrations in the simplistic and false remedies of the right.
This conflict between supporting capitalism and supporting workers is directly related to another contradiction: the role of mass mobilization to bring about change. Challenging capitalism is no small task and demands the development of a broad and deep-rooted mobilized social force capable of taking this powerful system on. This can't be done without workers playing a central role because of workers’ potential leverage in the economy and their organizational resources. Yet apart from certain individuals in the party, the NDP has little respect for working people as social actors. Since it can't imagine ‘ordinary’ workers developing the capacities to one day play a leading role in transforming capitalism, it has no reason to concern itself with – never mind prioritizing – equipping working people with the vision, analysis, ideology, organizational skills and the structures to counteract the power of, and constraints imposed by, capitalism. The NDP consequently reduces politics from the complexities of building and mobilizing the working class to the restricted politics of focusing on the next election.
But voting itself is simply not enough to get real change. Moreover, to get that vote social democratic parties engage in ‘transactional’ politics – a politics driven by cynical trade-offs. The poorest sections of the working class don't vote so don't worry about them. The more politicized workers don't really have anywhere else to go electorally, so they can be taken for granted. Minimum wages are opposed by small business, and big business is scared by anti-scab legislation, so don't push too hard on these issues.
To be fair, the constraints that social democratic governments point to can't be ignored; capitalism imposes well-known costs on any attempt to escape its established boundaries. But such constraints are in a sense also self-inflicted since social democracy does so little to prepare for stretching those limits or overcoming them. In fact, the NDP expresses its acceptance of these constraints as a matter of being realistic. But if being realistic means more or less giving up on significant change, then this is actually an argument for the need to become more radical. In the polarized state of the current world, where moderate solutions seem ineffective, solutions demand that we be more ambitious. The radical is now what is in fact realistic/practical – something that business has, from its own perspective, well understood and acted on.
In short, the NDP doesn't really see itself as a workers’ party. Occasional rhetoric aside, it doesn't think, or speak, or act in class terms. Social democracy runs from the very notion that class conflict is an integral part of capitalism – even as this is today more obvious than ever – and it recoils also from worker struggles as positive expressions of resistance that should be nurtured. When running for office, the NDP finds a militant working class and its economic disruptions a liability. In office, working class expectations stimulated by the electoral success are to be kept in check, and it is social democratic governments who so often end up carrying out wage restraint and social cutbacks – think Bob Rae. In the end, social democracy tends to confuse workers rather than develop their understandings, to lower rather than raise worker expectations, and in its transactional politics it contributes to the disorganization of workers as a class.
Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire
In raising the spectre of leaving the NDP, one particular dead-end that has been tempting for some prominent unions must be rejected: responding to the NDP's pragmatism by going one step further and arguing that because the Liberals are in power (or generally closer to being so), they can offer more than the NDP.
The history of the Liberal party and its business base should be enough of a warning against moving in this direction but there is an additional reason to oppose such a dangerous step. The bid on the part of some unions to make deals with the Liberals to address their own particular interests reinforces the sectionalism of the trade union movement. It undermines any counter-attempts to build, out of the disparate and different segments that make up the working class, the solidarity the class ultimately needs.
So, for example, making deals that grant union rights for only the construction sector, or joining with auto employers to support corporate subsidies in the midst of cutbacks for everyone else, or accepting a wage pattern that seems to fit teachers but undermines other education workers – all this may indeed lead to some short-term gains for particular workers. But since these deals aren't rooted in the strength of labour but its weakness, they have not surprisingly delivered only relatively weak deals, vulnerable to reversal as circumstances or political leaders change. And when the unions involved find they cannot depend on these deals and need broader labour solidarity, they not surprisingly find themselves isolated.
Breaking with the NDP
A debate over the NDP is already percolating. But this itself won't go anywhere unless the discussions are brought to a head. One way for this to happen is for activists to put forth resolutions to end their unions’ funding for the NDP (or the Liberals as the case may be). This would initiate a more formal internal debate over labour's direction and open the door to a discussion of prospects for a socialist party and steps to get there.
An immediate issue would be the importance of preserving (or even increasing) the political funds formerly going to the NDP and addressing alternative uses to support the development of a new politics. One obvious use of the funds is putting them toward a mass mobilization of workers and their allies around campaigns. Another is support for social movements that are currently under-resourced, with limited ties to the labour movement and still far from being mass movements, but creatively and energetically involved in organizing the non-unionized sections of the working class and servicing and mobilizing around aspects of working class lives not generally addressed by unions.
Full article: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1030.php