Commentary

The NDP Convention and the Future

of Social Democracy in Canada

The NDP has now held its national leadership convention and elected Jack Layton as its new leader. During the course of the leadership campaign the NDP members were asked to decide which of the leadership hopefuls could revive the fortunes of the party and restore a role for social democracy in the Canadian political landscape. Unfortunately for the NDP, the problems of social democracy in Canada go far deeper than who happens to be the current NDP leader.

Social democracy arose in the early years of the 20^th century at the same time that the major capitalist states were emerging as centres of imperialism. Social democracy served as an alternative to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, as capitalism "with a human face", by advocating a "fair" division of wealth between the exploiters and the exploited. So long as it served this role of diverting the working people away from seeking fundamental solutions to the problems posed by the capitalist system, social democracy was not only tolerated, but, following the Second World War, was actually adopted as the official ideology of most of the capitalist countries in the world.

However, by the late 1970s, with the exception of the Soviet bloc, the vast majority of the world had been fully incorporated into the capitalist world market. As large-scale industry spread to every corner of the world, a global crisis of overproduction emerged and capitalist profits went into a slump. The capitalists could no longer afford to continue sharing their profits through various social democratic schemes and opted to dump social democracy in favour of neo-liberalism, or what was known at the time as "Thatcherism" and "Reaganomics". The neo-liberals also spent enormous amounts of money undermining the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with the aim of bringing those countries fully into the capitalist markets as well, a goal which was achieved in the 1989-91 period.

The universal adoption of neo-liberalism threw every social democratic party in the world into crisis. In countries such as Britain, where the Labour party had long since occupied the political territory of the liberals, this crisis led to the adoption of the politics of the "Third Way", or neo-liberalism "with a human face". In other words, such parties abandoned social democracy in favour of neo-liberalism.

In Canada, the NDP was blocked at the federal level from taking that route by the fact that the Liberal party was already occupying the position of Canada's party of the "Third Way". The federal NDP has, thus, been stuck in the past, unable to move to the "right" and become the party of "left" neo-liberalism, and unable to abandon social democracy for fear of losing its raison d'etre entirely. The only other option would be to become a party of revolutionary socialism, which the CCF/NDP has rejected since at least 1933.

Compounding the problems of the federal NDP is the fact that in those provinces where the Liberal party is weak, such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan (as well as B.C., where the Liberal party is actually an alliance of Conservatives and Reformers), the provincial wings of the party have successfully made the transition to "Third Way" neo-liberalism and have become almost indistinguishable from the Liberals and Conservatives. So even if the federal NDP wanted to "turn to the left", no one would take it seriously.

NDPers are generally perplexed by the fact that poll after poll indicates that the vast majority of Canadians support social democratic policies, but this policy preference fails to translate into votes for the NDP. What they are missing is that in a capitalist liberal democracy it is the capitalists who control the political process and determine which parties succeed in electing members to parliament and which fail. This will remain the case until such time as a revolutionary crisis develops in Canada.

The Canadian capitalist class abandoned social democracy over 20 years ago and there is no indication that it is prepared to embrace it again in the near future. In fact, the whole system of liberal democracy is now going into crisis in Canada, to the extent that Parliament can no longer be trusted to make fundamental decisions, such as whether or not Canada will participate in an American war on Iraq. The American imperialists are complaining about a "surplus of democracy" and are demanding that what little democracy remains in Canada be transferred to American multinational corporations. The political and economic elite of Canada is increasingly abandoning even the pretence of defending sovereignty and democracy in this country. In this context, the question of whether or not a particular political party lives of dies is of little consequence. Of far greater importance is whether or not Canadians can give rise to political organizations capable of representing their interests as a people.

Objectively speaking, there is no current role for a social democratic party in Canada. Such a party does not solve any problem for the capitalist class at the present time. Nor does a political philosophy based on giving capitalism a human face assist the Canadian people to defend their sovereignty and democracy, since capitalism is more and more exposing itself as the greatest threat to sovereignty and democracy.

Politics in Canada is slowly but surely polarizing on the issue of support for or opposition to the status quo. The NDP is stuck trying to make the status quo attractive to those who have opted for change. So, even if a new leader succeeds in attracting a few more vote in the next election, over the long term the NDP is going to get swept away in the backlash against all of the parties of the status quo.

If the NDP were genuinely interested in survival it would look seriously at how it could serve the interests of the growing movement against neo-liberalism, imperialism and capitalism, rather than desperately trying to kill that movement by converting it into an election machine for the NDP. But if the NDP did such a thing it would not only cease to be a social democratic party, it would cease to be the NDP.