The NDP, a Bourgeois Workers' Party

A Socialist Action View

This article inaugurates a new feature in The Red Review. Occasionally, we will publish extended elaborations of the views of Socialist Action on key political issues of confusion or disagreement across the Canadian left. These will be presented under the rubric “a Socialist Action View”.

by Gary Porter - Our current political analysis of, and tactical approach to, the mass labour-based party in Canada—the New Democratic Party—draws heavily on a report presented to the January 1974 Plenum of the Central Committee of the League for Socialist Action/Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière by myself. The report represented the majority view of the Political Committee.  It was adopted by the plenum and published in the LSA/LSO Internal Information Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 4, February 1974. Our work in the NDP and its antecedent, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, began much earlier in the 1940s. This report represented a major clarification of our position, and a further development and elucidation of our line. It remains pertinent today.

Our starting point is the need to build a revolutionary socialist proletarian party to guide the working class to power in Canada and towards a workers’ state. To accomplish this goal, we must be deeply embedded in the working class. We must recruit and educate workers to be revolutionary socialists and demonstrate to the vast majority of the working class that the path of socialism is the only way to meet our needs. Further, we understand that socialism cannot be attained by parliamentary means. Only a massive, independent, workers’ revolutionary upheaval can carry through this historic change.

Socialist work in the trade unions is the starting point. Unions are formed by workers in opposition to the bosses at the point of production. But economic struggles alone cannot win freedom from the capitalist ruling class. The increasing efforts of self-assured trade unions must be made manifest as a political struggle. So, while the revolutionary project does not rely on parliamentary means, it must eventually reckon with the parliament. 

When one turns to politics in Canada, the glaring reality is that only one party is based on workers unions…the NDP. No other party or tendency has any significant following in the working class. That includes SA. We cannot run usefully against the NDP, for example, in elections. We would be unnoticed, as are the Communist Party and other seemingly radical candidates. 

The Communist Party is an isolated sectarian reformist and popular front oriented party that criticizes the NDP from the right. To them, the NDP should be building a popular front of workers and the “progressive” bourgeoisie in Canada. Other leftists in other social movements, confronted with the traitorous petty bourgeois social democratic NDP leadership’s almost trivial reformist program and terrible record in office, see no path forward through the NDP and elect to simply cut themselves off from the layer of most politicized workers in Canada. But the building of working class power must begin by encountering the working class as it exists today.  So we refuse to sit back, choosing instead to wade into the struggle to tackle the social democrats before the eyes of their working class base, within the NDP. What follows is a discussion of how that is done. 

Is the NDP on the road to socialism? NO, it is itself an obstacle on that road. Our policy towards the NDP is a path that can overcome that obstacle.

The original report that I presented to the 1974 CC Plenum was written in the context of clarifying and redefining our NDP policy at a time when the policy was being challenged by the Revolutionary Communist Tendency from an ultra-left and sectarian perspective. The RCT held that the NDP was losing its working-class base, and that we should orient our work inside the NDP towards a smash-and-grab maneuver with the "new revolutionary vanguard”. This was a version of the so-called French Turn.

We also faced at the time the Labour Party Tendency perspective, which entailed an adaptation and subordination of the revolutionary party to reformism. This discussion proved extremely helpful to the majority of the Political Committee and subsequently the Central Committee, helping us clarify and make precise how revolutionary socialists must define the mass Labour Party in Canada, how we must develop a policy toward it, and challenge the reformist leadership before the Canadian working class.  The leading comrade in the Labour Party Tendency was long time leader of the Canadian section of the Fourth International, Ross Dowson. 

In the past few years, we have seen the emergence of various small currents in the NDP attempting to influence the party in a leftward direction. These currents include NDP for LEAP, Momentum, and Courage. These are all social democratic in nature which is why they have been reticent to work with the socialist caucus.

The Socialist Caucus—initiated by Socialist Action—challenges the right wing social democratic leadership with a program of democratic and transitional demands, a revolutionary socialist program, and a slate of socialist and working class candidates. The socialist caucus has expanded to over 1000 adherents and represents by far the biggest organized left current, and the only socialist current, in the party. 

Our Tactical Approach to Reformist Workers’ Parties

If our attitude to both Social Democratic and Stalinist led labour-based parties is one of principled opposition, based on their counter-revolutionary program and practice, our tactical approach towards expressing that opposition is different than with pure and simple bourgeois parties. This flows from a very important fact that although these are petty bourgeois tendencies, they are tendencies within the workers' movement, at least in the imperialist countries. Comrade James P. Cannon, a founder of Trotskyism in America, speaking of parties like the Labour Party in Britain, has this to say:

"But the composition of such parties gives them a certain distinctive character which enables, and even requires, us to make a different tactical approach to them. If they are composed of workers, and even more, if they are based on the trade unions and subject to their control, we offer to make a united front with them for a concrete struggle against the capitalists, or even join them under certain conditions, with the aim of promoting our program 'class against class.'"

Cannon goes on to define what our approach would be to such a party if it developed in the U.S.:

"We would oppose such a 'bourgeois workers' party' as ruthlessly as any other bourgeois party, but our tactical approach would be different. We would most likely join such a party — if we have strength in the unions they couldn't keep us out — and under certain conditions we would give its candidates critical support in the elections. But ‘critical support’ of a reformist labor party must be correctly understood. It does not mean reconciliation with reformism. Critical support means opposition. It does not mean support with criticism in quotation marks, but rather criticism with support in quotation marks."

In these cases, we never cease our public criticism of their leadership and program. We never cease to counterpose our program to theirs. Only under strict conditions, and for very short terms, do we ever give up our own public organization. Normally we pose our party as well.

But the fundamental fact of these parties being in the workers' movement is the necessary precondition of lending them or their candidates critical support. And even then, critical support is a tactic. Our basic attitude is one of opposition.

The NDP in Office — A Bourgeois Government

Why do we call NDP governments "bourgeois?" It is because they are administering sectors of the bourgeois state. They work within the framework of the bourgeois power incorporated in this state. They accept the authority of the bourgeois constitution, courts, legal structure, governmental bureaucracy, and repressive apparatus. They accept the financial limitations imposed on these governments by the bourgeoisie. They accept the bourgeoisie's rules for the parliamentary game.

These governments come into office with the consent of the bourgeoisie, and act as instruments of bourgeois rule. They defend the bourgeois profit system, capitalist property relations.

Do we believe the NDP leadership can be won over to socialism or that the NDP can ever lead a socialist transformation in Canada? Absolutely not. Not now, not ever. That is why we are building an independent revolutionary socialist party on Leninist principles. No other type of organization can succeed. Everything we do, including our NDP policy, is subordinated to building our party.

The class character of these governments is bourgeois. We project the need for a workers and farmers government, one which is independent of the bourgeoisie, independent of its state apparatus, and which can take far-reaching measures against capitalist property, leading to the overthrow of capitalist property relations.

These bourgeois governments have a special weakness which permits us to adopt a special tactical approach to them. The bourgeoisie rules, not through one of its own parties—which might be shaped, led, and directly controlled by the bourgeoisie—but through a government composed of leaders of a party of the labor movement. The NDP ministers are subject to the pressures of the rank-and-file of the party which they lead, and which thrust them into office. The NDP does not accept corporate donations and in B.C. they enacted a law that maximum annual personal donations to a political party be 1200$. The contradiction between the leadership and the rank-and-file of the NDP is becoming more acute, because the leadership is now administering the state of the class enemy. Of course, an NDP government struggles mightily (and up to now with great success) to be free of party influence. They argue that they have to govern in the interests of all the people, not just the party. Of course, the workers and oppressed in the party already accurately reflect all the people. The only sector of society not reflected in the party, indeed in truth the only sector of concern to a bourgeois party, is the capitalist class along with their mandarins and generals. 

What is really going on is the NDP ministers are struggling to be free to represent these very interests, the oil interests in Alberta as Notley's government did, and the self-same interests as those that Eby’s government is serving with Site C and LNG Canada.

Our tactical approach focuses on the big contradiction in the NDP, its labour base.  We seek to rally the ranks of the NDP and labor movement against the pro-capitalist policies of the NDP government. This approach described in the 1973 Political Resolution is as follows:

"Where the NDP is in office, we must seek to mobilize broad campaigns and actions encompassing rank and file forces from the party and the trade unions aimed at the NDP cabinet; initial steps would include campaigns for the new government to implement the more radical aspects of the NDP program which usually comprise some far-reaching demands adopted by the rank and file in convention. Provincial NDP governments should be pressured by mass actions to use their wide constitutional powers to carry out far-reaching social innovations and reforms. Demands to this effect can serve to polarize the ranks of the party in opposition to the reformist misleadership in office, and thereby present important opportunities to the socialist wing to intervene around a class struggle program."

Our Policy in Practice

Our policy is different than those of the left social democratic groups in and around the NDP.

The difference is that we aim, in the future, to lead the workers, while they lack confidence that they ever will. For the most part, they don’t even have the desire to do so.

The reaction of the Social Democrats to our policy and our work

The elected members of the party and its full-time bureaucrats are implacably opposed to our work. They know it is aimed at them. They know we understand their support for capitalism and we understand they are a privileged and authoritarian bureaucracy. They know that we push for demands that go beyond capitalism and point toward its overthrow, that we oppose imperialist predations tooth and nail. 

They have structured the party, in large measure, in opposition to a takeover by a rank and file led by us, deploying highly undemocratic methods. Electoral candidates must be vetted and approved by the leadership; unions are under-represented at all levels in the Party compared to the electoral district associations which have a far higher number of petit bourgeois academics, professors, preachers, and professionals; and a small undemocratic committee chooses which resolutions come to the convention floor. At the 2018 federal convention, a radical resolution supporting Palestinian Rights Against the Apartheid Israeli State was supported by 35 electoral district associations and still never made it to the convention floor. During the debate on Palestinian Rights, the leadership jammed the microphones with right wingers far ahead of the discussion. 

The parliamentary caucus claims not to be bound by party policy. In the past there have been waves of expulsions of Trotskyists from the NDP, and the more we succeed the more they will consider this option again. Hence our focus on building an independent power-base amidst the unions. In turn we organize energetic defence campaigns in support of the right of socialists to be in the labor party, and against the anti-democratic nature of the leadership. It becomes a clear fight between their class treachery and our principled working class program.

In summary

Our NDP policy is based on the continuing fact that the party is a labor-based mass party in English Canada.  We understand the development of a mass independent labour-based party is a major advance for the working class. But the social democratic, class traitor leadership and bourgeois program are unavoidably major obstacles to be overcome.

Our policy, both within and outside the NDP is irreconcilable opposition to its social democratic leadership and bourgeois program. We counterpose the transitional program of revolutionary socialism to the social democratic program, and contest the social democratic leadership with a slate of revolutionary workers and other oppressed groups. We do this in front of the most class-conscious workers in Canada.

We do not practice entry sui generis in the NDP. Nor do we have a “French turn” smash and grab strategy. Ours is fraction work by some of our members while we build an open, active, revolutionary socialist party.

Image: Socialists march with 20,000+ union members in Toronto’s annual Labour Day Parade