It's becoming an increasingly pressing question.
As currently constituted, on the watered-down-to-nothing platform and policy book the seemingly unremovable party bureaucracy insists on imposing on the party, the federal NDP represents no one, fights for no one, and is stuck at a useless 15%-17% support base in the polls. After the 2019 election, it will likely have no seats in Quebec again-a fact which by itself guarantees that the party can't significantly increase its support in the 2023 election-and it will lose many of the seats it currently holds. It could fall as low as 15 seats nationally.
Given that this is the case, given that there is next to nothing that can happen between now and the next federal election that could possibly prevent the humiliating outcome I predict above...what is the point of continuing the party in its current form, keeping it in its current space on the political spectrum, just barely to the left of the Liberals if indeed it is to the left of the Liberals at all, indistinguishable from the Liberals and the Conservatives on foreign and military policy, indifferent to the struggles of working people, dismissive of the need to make an aggressive fight against poverty and environmental despoilation, totally submissive to capital on economic issues...why even bother keeping this party alive? Why try to persuade anyone to vote for it? Why imagine the NDP, as it is at the moment, as any real reason to exist at all anymore?
Why not just dissolve it and, in its place, build a different party...
A party that actually REJECTS the austerity consensus and balanced budget fetishism.
A party that fights for working people, which means fighting to revive and GROW the labour movement.
A party that fights for the poor, and utterly rejects the lie that poverty is caused by "bad choices", and points out instead that poverty is caused by capitalism, a system which needs poverty and unemployment to "discipline the workforce".
A party that sees war, in the 21st Century, for what it is...a purely reactionary program of organized slaughter that serves no one anymore but the wealth and which cannot free anyone or improve the lives of anyone anywhere.
A party that recognizes that the way things are is not the way things have to be, that we don't have to accept the limits on possibility imposed by the wealthy, and which realizes that nothing progressive or transformative can be done by working within those limits.
Why not just start over again and start speaking truth again?
The NDP is a party doomed to a slow death. It's hard to imagine that anything could save it, that anything could make it relevant again. It's time to build a party of a LIVING Left, of a left that believes another world IS possible, that we CAN win the argument on the major issues of the day and that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain from actually trying to do so.
What else is there do to, but to try something new?