The Passing of Ed Broadbent
By Barry Weisleder - I knew Ed Broadbent, who passed on January 12 at age 88. He was a plain-spoken fellow, and a decent man. The injunction against speaking ill of the dead is usually a good guide (although exceptions like Margaret Thatcher come to mind), but it does not imply an oath of silence. The establishment does not deserve to have the last say.
Broadbent is being credited by the commercial media with moving the New Democratic Party to the left while he was its federal leader from 1975 to 1989. But as Jerry Seinfeld was wont to say, "I told you a million times not to exaggerate."
If Ed moved the NDP to the left, it was a marginal and purely symbolic shift, following his predecessor David Lewis's election campaign against the Corporate Welfare Bums, the folks who rule the economy and the state.
Broadbent was a founding signatory to the left-nationalist Waffle Manifesto in 1969, but soon after the federal convention in Winnipeg that year, separated himself from the leftist Waffle. In fact, when Stephen Lewis ordered the Waffle to dissolve or quit the Ontario NDP, Broadbent didn't lift a finger to defend the right of the Waffle to remain as a component of the labour-based NDP. By 1975, the Waffle, which exited the NDP and ran a couple of dispirited electoral campaigns, had utterly disappeared from the political landscape.
Before the Waffle, Broadbent authored a paper on "Industrial Democracy". The NDP Youth section circulated it, among other seemingly left wing texts. But the "Industrial Democracy" that Ed had in mind was kindred to the policy of the German SPD, and the German union bureaucracy. It was nothing more than a class collaboration scheme inaugurated at big firms, with unions casting a minority of votes on the executive board of giant capitalist corporations. The shorter work week in Germany did not survive the 20th century.
Broadbent, who gave way to the master party centralizer Jack Layton, never associated himself with the left-reformist New Party Initiative or the Leap Manifesto (led by Avi Lewis, grandson of David, son of Stephen).
The Broadbent Institute, true to the politics of its namesake, promotes a 'sharing and caring' capitalism; it seeks a 'better deal for ordinary people' within the toxic, terminal framework of late capitalism.
Are the loyal-to-the-system reformists surprised to see how little capacity there is in the dominant mode of production to meet the needs of the vast majority? Maybe yes, maybe no. But they are certainly not willing to target the failed system. And neither did Ed. Broadbent received a state funeral as a tribute by the capitalist state which he served during his political lifetime.
BW