Jack Layton is a phenomenon. The media is abuzz about him. On the left itseems that everybody loves him. He’s the only straight guy cool enough toget his face on the cover of a queer mag.

But I think the real story is getting lost in all the hype. Because the realstory is this: “Jack” is a political donut. All sugar icing on the outside(or make that maple glaze) and a big hole right in the middle.

What does Layton stand for? He’s for “social activism,” he’s for “socialjustice,” he’s against “corporate power.” All sweet stuff. Above all, “Jack”is for all things “progressive,” as sweet a word as they come. In fact,Layton wants the NDP to become a big tent for all “progressives,” includingthe likes of Sheila Copps, David Orchard and even Joe Clark. Wow! That wouldmake the NDP into quite a pastry shop.

But hold on a second. If an ex-Liberal deputy prime minister is now welcomeinside the NDP, and even — good gosh! — an ex-Tory prime minister, doesn’tthis suggest that maybe the NDP itself has become indistinguishable fromthese parties? After all, implicit in the word “progressive” is a question —progress towards what? Towards the oppressive society that Copps and Clarkhave spent their careers maintaining and defending?

And if you add to that Layton’s recent offer to back a minority Liberalgovernment should that be the outcome of the next election, you’re reallyleft scratching your head. I mean, here is Layton routinely denouncing PaulMartin as a corporate robber baron and then he goes and offers to keep thissame robber baron in power. What sort of “progress” is that?

But if you try to get some answers from Layton on that score, if you try topin him down about where his “progressiveness” is meant to lead, his ideasgo fuzzy like cotton candy. A good example of this comes up in an interview he did a few months back with two fixtures of the Canadian left, Leo Panitchand Sam Gindin.

At one point Panitch says, “We get the feeling that the kind of politicsyou’re engaged in walks around the margins of capital. You’re not talkingabout taking capital away from capital. Is that where we’re condemned to beoperating — only where capital leaves us some space? Is there a visionbeyond that?” Essentially Layton’s answer is yes to the first question andno to the second. Of course he doesn’t come out and say that. Instead hegoes into a spiel about achieving big changes through “a huge number oflocal actions.”

But Gindin presses him on this: assuming the local action strategy works,all that would mean is that eventually the system becomes dysfunctional, andthen “this poses the question of what you will be replacing it with.”Layton’s response is pure donut: “If you’re on a truthful journey you can’tbe sure where you will end up in the long term.” I especially like the touch about the “truthful journey.” Here you have the leader of thecountry’s major left-wing party happily admitting that he has no idea wherehe’s going. No wonder the media loves this guy.

There’s no mystery about what’s missing here, about what should be where thehole in the donut is. It’s an alternative to capitalism, i.e. a vision ofsocialism. But it’s been a very long time since the NDP even pretended thiswas on its agenda. When you think of NDP “stars” like Bob Rae or Roy Romanowor Gary Doer, you don’t exactly think of New Jerusalems. Even the notionthat these guys were trying to “change the system from within” is laughable.They were/are an integral part of the system, as committed to defending itas any Tory or Liberal.

So it’s no surprise that such a party has a donut for a leader, since itdoesn’t have anywhere else to go except wandering aimlessly “around themargins of capital.” But Layton’s appeal is broader than traditional NDPconstituencies. While the media ascribes the party’s rising poll numbers toa left bleed from the Liberals, some of that new support is coming from agood deal further left on the political spectrum, from people who identifythemselves with the movements against globalization and the Iraq war, peoplewho’ve been largely turned off by electoral politics in the past.

What do they see in Layton? “Hope, optimism and energy” — that’s how JudyRebick put it in a report on Layton’s riding nomination meeting. A few yearsback Rebick, along with other well-known activists like No Logo author NaomiKlein, were trying to get the NDP to reinvent itself as a more radicalparty, but they feel that isn’t necessary any more now that Layton’s at thehelm. “Jack” is big on activism and he’s even recruited some activists torun as candidates in the next election. Many of them in turn are aglow abouthim.

But activism is another of those donut words like progressive. Activismtowards what? In her report, Rebick lavishes praise on Layton for “process,”i.e. how he runs the party, but when it comes to the substance of what shecalls his “pretty good politics,” she seems to be bending over backwards tofind something nice to say. Thus at one point she claims that Layton “ismaking a class analysis of the sponsorship scandal,” but all she cites asproof is some banal rhetoric: “The Liberals are lining their corporatefriends’ pockets … It’s time we broke up this corporate club.” Meanwhileshe only mentions the offer to back a minority Liberal government inpassing, though by any measure this sort of horsetrading makes for prettybad politics. But that’s one of the nice things about a donut — you canimagine filling the hole with anything you want.

There is a deeper problem here. It isn’t just the NDP that is wandering“around the margins of capital” without any alternative to capitalism. Thesame is true for most of the left. The major activist movements are definedby what they are against — war, globalization — rather than by any positivevision. There are lots of radical left groups who call themselves socialistand often go by-ultra revolutionary-sounding names, but even here socialismis mostly a bloodless abstraction. You’d be hard-pressed to find in any oftheir material a few pages, even a few paragraphs, spelling out a vision ofsocialism. And what little there is doesn’t get much beyond phrases about “aworld without hunger, poverty or oppression” — rhetoric that isindistinguishable from liberalism.

“Expropriate the expropriators” used to be a rallying cry of the socialistleft. Now you’d almost have to look up nationalization in a dictionary ofantiquarian terms. You’d think we were living in a golden age of capitalism,and not the age of Enron and WorldCom, of Conrad Black and Martha Stewart.Private ownership runs high profile companies like Air Canada and Stelcointo the ground, endangering workers, pensioners and whole communities, andyet nationalization doesn’t even register a blip on the political radarscreen.

Why? Because according to conventional wisdom socialism doesn’t work. Andtherein lies one of the great myths of our time. If the history of the pastcentury — with its two world wars, fascism, holocausts — proves anything,it’s that capitalism doesn’t work.

This isn’t to deny that the first attempt to establish socialism, in arelatively impoverished country like Russia, turned out to be a disaster.But it’s also true that the best of the left resisted the bureaucraticdegeneration of that revolution from the beginning, which is why the firstvictims of Stalinism were Marxists. And most of the left, apart from diehardStalinists, had stopped identifying the Soviet Union with socialism a goodhalf century before it collapsed.

But how convenient for the corporate elite that this one experience shouldbe billed as the litmus test for socialism. By the same logic you might aswell bring back colonialism and write off national independence as a badidea because a lot of ex-colonies have wound up as military dictatorships.The left needs to learn from its mistakes, and the Soviet experience hasmany bitter lessons to teach, but the last thing this should mean isabandoning the socialist project of ending class oppression.

And yet that’s just what has happened. Much of the left has bought into themyth that the world cannot go on living without Microsoft and General Motorsand Exxon and the Royal Bank. Politics becomes reduced to small change, tothe “art of the possible” as the cliché has it, meaning only what’s possiblewithin capitalism. Nowadays the basic way you tell the left and right apartis that we’re for raising taxes and they’re for cutting them. A greatstruggle for human liberation is reduced to a squabble over the actuarialtables on an income tax form.

(Or else the struggle vanishes into an amorphous campaign for democracy.More referendums, proportional representation, people’s power — this isthe sort of politics that Judy Rebick advocated in her book ImagineDemocracy a few years back. This isn’t a new idea. For over a century it’sbeen the basic message of social democracy: expand the democraticinstitutions within capitalism and eventually you’ll end up with socialism.But the “eventually” never happens. So long as a tiny minority owns most ofthe wealth — and that’s truer than ever today — then democracy is largely asham, and no amount of refining it is going to change that. Ironically,that’s what the name “social democracy” was originally meant to signify —that in order to get real democracy you first had to end the social dividebetween rich and poor. If you turn that around, all you end up doing isperpetuating the sham democracy that has served the corporate elite sowell.)

More than a century ago Oscar Wilde wrote an essay called The Soul of ManUnder Socialism. It’s still a fantastic read, and gives you an infinitelygrander vision of socialism than you’ll find anywhere in the contemporaryleft. One of the key things Wilde had to say was this: “A map of the worldthat does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leavesout the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanitylands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progressis the realization of Utopia.”

The left today has forgotten this important truth. On our map of the worldwe’ve replaced utopia with a Tim Hortons.