Open Letter for a "NEW" Democratic Socialist Party
Sisters and Brothers,
In his Oct. 9th, 2010 column, titled "The NDP: Not your father's socialism," John Ivison of The National Post wrote about the NDP's "metamorphosis of an old 20th-century socialist party into a vibrant 21st-century social democratic party." What exactly a "21-st century social democratic party" looks like is hard to discern though a few clues were provided by Ivison in a lower paragraph in the story:
When I was a toddler I recall my parents discussing something called the Waffle. It caught my interest not just because I was raised in a politically charged environment but because it was my favourite breakfast food.
Back then towering intellects of the left tired with the direction of the NDP took it upon themselves to write a manifesto. When I heard that the Waffle was a manifesto I quickly lost interest, but for those who cared it was an attempt to write out the aims of the NDP as a socialist party.
Parti Québecois leader Pauline Marois has all the qualities necessary to be premier of Quebec. First elected in 1981, Mme. Marois has been minister of finance and of health, and has held other significant ministerial positions. Not many figures in Canadian political history have been as well prepared as Marois to become head of government.
All she is lacking is one thing. Her party does not hold the majority of seats in the national assembly.
As the race for New Democratic Party federal Leader draws to a close it is painfully evident that none of the seven remaining candidates proposes a clean break with the pro-capitalist direction of the party. Keep in mind that this is the fourth year of the global Great Recession. Crippling austerity measures, rising environmental havoc, and the growing threat of a widening war in the Middle East loom on the horizon. The party's current course is a recipe for disaster.
Under the circumstances, in our estimation, the best hope for progressive change in the NDP's top office is represented by Niki Ashton, MP for Churchill (Manitoba).
Making the social democratic movement operate like a "normal" more centrist political party is the kind of advice the mainstream press has been offering to the NDP since shortly after it was founded in Calgary, as the CCF, in 1932.
NDP members want the party to build upon its newfound status as a national party, and ready itself to take on the role of government. However, to win office, few New Democrats want NDP policies to mirror recent Conservative and Liberal practices, or expect the party to move away from supporting workers, or tone down talk about empowering equality-seeking groups.
Occupy Wall Street -- and now Bay Street? The 99 per cent? Conservatives losing elections all over the country? American billionaires demanding to be taxed at higher rates?
Is something happening here?
Perhaps the first indication was the totally unexpected reaction to Jack Layton's death. It may be that it was unexpected because so many people had become numbed by the state of the world. It was not just the election of a majority Harper government and the terrible consequences it would bring, but famine and war and economic meltdown and the pushing to the back burner of the life-and-death issue of climate change. Wasn't everyone at home with the blanket pulled over their heads? Would they even know that Layton had died?
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![James Laxer](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/picture-62_0.jpg "James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.
In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada’s largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.
In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party’s economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.
In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada’s place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.
Instead it was broadcast by a hook up of all the English language educational networks in the country. The series was also broadcast in the United States, as well, by a large number of PBS stations. The Reckoning series has won awards in both the United States and Canada. One of its films won the blue ribbon, first prize, at the prestigious American Film and Video Festival, for best political documentary. The same film won the Atlantic
Film Festival and national Gemini Awards in Canada for best writing in an information series, awards which went to Laxer and the film’s director as co-authors.
In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing. In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics
After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Dalton Camp wrote that the Undeclared War "is an informed and cogent book on the great and growing dilemma of our time: how to preserve a free society in the face of increasing disparity and the creation of a new class society---‘a dominant class and a dominated class.’ This is stuff we need to know." Laxer’s book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." Stalking the Elephant is to be published by The New Press in New York in September 2001. In 2003, his book, The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel, was published by Doubleday Canada. In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer’s childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.
James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto")
