Political Gurus: Harpo Marx and John Lennon

The NDP has become the party of do-gooders, reformers, and social workers. And its policies over the years have generally been aimed at the bottom 20 per cent of society. That in part explains why the other 80 per cent, including working-class and middle-class folk, rarely vote for them. The NDP is a party that is sometimes called socialist. But it has never understood the most basic and rudimentary tenets of socialism or economic planning, namely, that socialism is about political power and economic control, not only in parliament or the legislature, but more importantly, control at the point of production or job site. NDPers know little about their own party’s history, no less the history of socialism. The CCF - NDP has little in common with the European tradition of social democracy as espoused by Bernstein and Kautsky, no less Liebknect or Luxembourg. The intellectual and organizational origins of the NDP are grounded in the Protestant social gospel, the British Fabian Society, and Labour Party traditions. It is no accident that many of the early CCF leaders, such as Tommy Douglas, were Protestant clergymen. The early CCF, the precursor to the NDP, had a decidedly evangelical quality about it. But few today know about the CCF’s classic manifesto, Social Planning in Canada (1935), which was a comprehensive critique of Canadian capitalism and served as a good programmatic starting point. Alas, in its rush to become respectable, the NDP confuses Harpo Marx with Karl Marx, and John Lennon with V.I. Lenin. More importantly the NDP has no ideological grounding and suffers from limited vision. In the post-war era the Swedish and German social democratic parties at least experimented with various forms of works councils and workers’ control, as well as union participation on the corporate board of directors. The Swedish Meidner proposal to use pension funds for socially useful macro-economic investment confronted the issues of who controls investment, for what purpose, and in who’s interest? Such ideas have been lost on the NDP, even when they formed various provincial governments. Since the 1970s, no one really wants to talk about power and the distribution of power. Socialism, as conceived of by its intellectual founders and practitioners, was about more than putting money into the pay packet, it was intended to expand democracy and decisionmaking at all levels of society. It was also intended to create a new wellrounded and creative person.

But at the end of the day, the NDP has assiduously avoided using the term “socialist” or “socialism,” terms that that the NDP establishment has gagged on for years, fearing an adverse electoral reaction. Similarly, the term “capitalism” is also avoided because of its confrontational tone. The fact of the matter is that the NDP has no critique of the existing capitalist order and social arrangements because, being reformers, it merely wants to “humanize” the system. The NDP are trapped as “angels in marble” by the cyclical nature of the capitalist system and market forces they can’t control, and have little stomach for extra-parliamentary action. The NDP’s vision is limited to economic incrementalism supported by the post-war welfare state. In reality, senior bureaucrats in various NDP governments have been warned in no uncertain terms never, ever, use the word “socialist” or “socialism “in a minister’s speech, or a memo, or put an orange cover on a government document. The NDP is the party of clean government, nothing more. Time for the NDP to give up Marx’s ghost and become the left -wing of the Liberal party where they might have some influence. As some wit once said, “The NDP is to socialism, what muzak is to Mozart.”