On the Shoulders of the Communists: The Reactionary Rise of the NDP
Featured image: Canadian workers rallying for employment insurance in the 1930s. Via People’s Voice
This article was originally published on Cam Scott’s Medium account, in July 2020.
Written by: Cam Scott
The left turn in North American politics is beyond dispute, as hundreds of thousands of people affirm renewed commitment to socialism in some way, shape, or form. This has produced a correspondant surge in communist organizing, at the same time as it has renewed interest in a democratic system that has largely, and constitutively, excluded radical politics as such. In many ways, the novelty of the situation is unprecedented; but this last development is simply too familiar to be celebrated in any straightforward way.
In a recent editorial for Maclean’s magazine, ‘The rise of America’s NDP,’ author and activist Rick Smith argues that the time has come for progressive Democrats in the United States to form a third political party, following the example of Canada’s New Democrats. For too long, Smith explains, Americans have been stymied by the simple oscillation of a two-party system, in which Republicans and Democrats swap power to small palpable change. There can be no doubt as to the truth of this description; nor to the sense of Smith’s broader assertion that America would benefit from a labour party to address the deepening immiseration of its working class. The grassroots and extra-electoral resources culminating in the recently abandoned Sanders campaign are a sign of this obvious necessity, if not its fulfilment in the present.
However, Smith’s argument that such a party may be modelled on Canada’s NDP is far less convincing, and immediately reveals a failure of analysis where the two-party stalemate and its noble outliers are concerned. From its inception, the New Democratic Party has served working people to capital on a plate, albeit with some popular ceremony; though Smith’s contention that progressive Democrats should follow suit is less baffling in a larger context. Smith is director of the Broadbent Institute, a social democratic think tank named for former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who founded the organization himself in 2011. “Of course we want a society where freedom is cherished and a competitive market economy prevails,” Broadbent consoles the reader in a founding statement: “But we also believe in the importance of equality.” One can at least appreciate the honest statement of priorities.
Polling to the Center
Smith’s argument has layers, for as democratic socialists in the United States look to Canada’s NDP for inspiration, many leftists in Canada fantasize about rejuvenating the party after the fashion of the Sanders campaign. The Courage coalition, with members inside and outside the NDP, looks to compel the party leftward from without, as did the short-lived New Politics Initiative in the early twenty-first century. “The NDP has reached a historic juncture,” the NPI asserted in an early discussion paper, citing a growing consensus against capitalism:
It is time to reconstitute this party, time to build on its legacy of progressive achievements and to learn from its past mistakes. It is time to reach out to the legions of social change campaigners who presently see no future in conventional party politics, but also time to harness and reorient the energies of the solid committed people who still work within the NDP.
This conviction fueled the rise of Jack Layton, whose popular appeal bolstered the party before his untimely passing. Immediately thereafter, however, these major gains were used to justify a hard turn to the economic right by his successor, Tom Mulcair. This transformation is narrated by political scientist David McGrane as a process of “moderation and modernization,” using a rubric of market consultancy to chart a thoroughgoing process of rebranding and professionalization.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, notably spanning the service of both Layton and Mulcair, the NDP would reinvent itself once more as a highly changeable emanation of the polls, parting with labour and social movements for a moving base of “stakeholder relations.” Modestly, one might suggest that the outsized reputation of the NDP south of the border has to do with its success at compromise and marketing. It’s somewhat more difficult, however, to account for the persistent optimism of the middle left in Canada, where the rightward drift of the NDP began at its inception.
As more people in the United States, politicized by unacceptable conditions, look to Canada’s NDP as a possible model for democratic socialism — and more people in Canada, accustomed to cultural instruction from American media, look to the United States for their political vernacular — it’s important to factually rehearse the history of communist influence within and outside of the more conciliatory “third parties” of the capitalist system. There’s much to learn from yesterday’s debates, which form the backdrop to the present status of the NDP as a reactionary force within Canadian politics — left of the center and right of its reputation.
From Regina to Winnipeg
At its inception, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation — the NDP’s more strident predecessor — took mercenary advantage of both anti-communism and the persuasive case for socialism, quoting broadly from the further left. For years prior to the founding of the CCF, members of the Communist Party of Canada, including party leader Tim Buck, had been calling for the establishment of a leftist party in place of the Independent Labour candidates that ran throughout the early twentieth century. And although the CCF was convened around many such candidates, including soon-to-be-party leader J.S. Woodsworth, it was far from the organ that Buck and his cohort had in mind. The Communist Party remained illegal at that time, and Woodsworth was no doubt determined to evade its stigma, whilst partaking of the movement’s practical success in shaping public opinion.
As a chiefly agrarian coalition, the CCF’s initial programme was more corporatist than revolutionary, downplaying class conflict in favour of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. But the language of the Regina Manifesto, adopted at the founding convention in July of 1933, remains clear in its aspiration:
We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible.
Calling for central planning, public health services, the socialization of financial institutions, and robust rights for workers, the document is, to be fair, somewhat less compromised than its contemporary critics to the left accused. While certain Communist Party members such as Stewart Smith, writing as “G. Pierce,” attacked the CCF as an organ of social fascism, Buck himself attempted to assuage the mutual antagonism of the two parties upon his release from prison in 1934. (This attempted truce, needless to say, wouldn’t last.) In a book-length polemic written that same year, Smith criticizes the bourgeois nationalism of the CCF, as well as the preponderance of “farm-reformist” organizations driving its policy, concealing the contradiction between the interests of wealthy farmers and those of their debt-ridden neighbours.
Whatever incoherency one might ascribe to its vision, the Regina Manifesto concludes in declarative terms: “No C.C.F. Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Cooperative Commonwealth.” Needless to say, capitalism was not peacefully eradicated on the prairies over the next two decades, and in 1956 the CCF adopted the deeply comprised Winnipeg Declaration in place of their founding manifesto. The later declaration is a moralizing, semi-coherent document, fretting the “threat of communist expansion,” trumpeting British and French jurisprudence, and proudly advocating private enterprise.
In many respects, the Winnipeg Declaration corroborates Smith’s earlier polemic, and by this point the CCF had aged into a foreign policy befitting of homefront conservatism. In early 1949, following Liberal Prime Minister St. Laurent and the Conservative opposition, the CCF voted in favour of membership in NATO, with the weak stipulation that Canada’s contribution be non-nuclear. In February of that year, Buck writes, months prior to the successful Chinese revolution, the CCF denounced appeals by communists to stop the shipment of Canadian arms to Chiang Kai-shek. Splitting unions in order to curb communist influence, the CCF had become far more useful to the ruling class than to the people it would claim to serve. “Right-wing Social-Democracy is the ideological agency of capital inside the labour movement,” historian Stanley B. Ryerson wrote in 1946, and as such can only bring about those reforms that leave the relation between labour and capital intact.
Fabianism of the Plains
However necessary the development may seem today, there’s a world of difference between the Regina Manifesto and the Winnipeg Declaration. But what precisely had changed in the time between these conventions? For one, the CCF had spent the last decade governing in Saskatchewan, as well as forming the official opposition in Ontario. As importantly, the Communist Party of Canada had been outlawed for their opposition to the war in 1940, and many of its prominent figures spent a portion of that decade in jail. This surely exerted a chastening effect on the left wing of the CCF, whilst creating space for opportunists. During this time, Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas ushered in many of the important reforms for which the NDP is widely praised today, including an early bill of rights, enhanced trade union legislation, and government-funded insurance. But as support continued to decline after the war, the CCF would veer rightward to keep power.
Douglas was a socialist politician with a decidedly non-socialist constituency, benefitting in their esteem from a fiscally cautious cabinet as well as a postwar boom. At the recommendation of CCF secretary David Lewis, Douglas sought economic counsel from the Fabian economist George Cadbury, an heir to the Cadbury candy fortune and a student of John Maynard Keynes. As the head of Douglas’ Economic Advisory and Planning Board, Cadbury’s interventions helped to balance the books, steering away from the topic of public ownership. At the time of the Winnipeg Declaration, Cadbury wrote happily to Douglas that the federal party was following his example.
On the strength of his provincial record, Tommy Douglas would become the leader of the newly formed NDP in 1961. The party, formed of the CCF and the Canadian Labour Congress, showed a hint of promise, initially resembling the labour party that the CCF was not. This had as much to do with the changing class composition of the rural west as with a principled support for labour. As novelist and doctor Vincent Lam notes in a glowing biography of Douglas, the proportion of Canadians who lived and worked on farms fell from half of the population at the start of the century to only fourteen percent by the time of the NDP’s creation.
Increased urbanization surely motivated the CLC merger, which many one-time CCF members saw as an infiltration by the union leadership. In the 1940s, communists were reasonably well-represented in the trade union movement. By the early 1960s, when many Canadian locals defied American union leadership to affiliate with the NDP, this influence had been contained, in no small part by CCF opposition to eastern unions as a Trojan horse for communism. In a crowing hit-piece celebrating the retirement of Tim Buck as general secretary of the Communist Party, Maclean’s editor David Lewis Stein observes the marginalization of communist influence within unions:
“In trade unions affiliated with the Canadian Labor Congress there are no Communist leaders — the CLC constitution bars them — and almost no Communist influence among the rank and file. Two B.C. unions with a total membership of 7,600 have Communist leaders and are therefore excluded from the B.C. Federation of Labor, a CLC affiliate. Two large national unions, excluded from the Canadian Labor Congress because they do not bar Communists from their leadership, face troubles that could destroy them.”
Stein published these remarks on July 29, 1961 — two days before the founding convention of the NDP. When the CLC called for a new party at its second congress in 1958, Stein continues, Buck had supported the idea without reservation, evidently vying for inclusion. With the establishment of the NDP, however, the labour party heralded by leaders such as Buck was definitively placed outside of communist influence, where it would remain.
In many respects, the new party was further left than the CCF of the late 1950s. In contrast to the CCF’s appalling foreign policy, for example, the NDP moved for Canada to recognize China’s Communist government, and briefly pushed for withdrawal from NATO. Domestically, the passage of the Medical Care Act in 1966 would have been inconceivable without Saskatchewan as a pilot. But parliamentary outcomes are far less readily attributable than mythmakers prefer to think. As the NDP moved to the center, “Red Tories” accepted tenets of the welfare state in order to shore power in the longer term. During this decade of necessary reform, parties accommodated one another as the ruling class made deep concessions to public health and worker’s rights, such as everyone wishes to see in the United States today.
Actually Existing Social Democracy
More than half a century later, these are the advancements that Rick Smith’s editorial claims for the NDP and their predecessors, not including communists: “Though social democrats have yet to form government at the federal level, the legacy of their longstanding presence in Parliament is immediately felt by every Canadian who needs to see a doctor, every worker who gets laid off, and every pensioner who wants to retire in security.” There are many problems with Smith’s account that are beyond the historical scope of this essay; not least of all, the fact that in western Canada, where the Liberal party holds little political sway, the NDP have governed for many decades at the provincial level. Here they are less a third party than half of an oscillating bloc, presiding with Conservatives over austerity, carceral expansion, a deteriorating healthcare system, and gross violations of Indigenous sovereignty.
Moreover, the social benefits that Smith enumerates originate from considerably left of social democracy, and their implementation has always been a concession from the capitalist class that the NDP, like any bourgeois party, represents. On principle, the success of social democratic parties in brokering reforms shouldn’t constitute a claim to the emancipatory demands from which they derive. Dr. Norman Bethune, the great internationalist from whom Mao Zedong said communists must learn “the spirit of absolute selflessness,” proposed a universal healthcare system for Canada in 1936. Communists such as James Litterick in Manitoba and Fred Rose in Quebec introduced the first motions for universal healthcare at the provincial and federal levels respectively. In February 1922, operating in semi-illegality as the Workers’ Party of Canada, communists became the first party in Canada to demand employment insurance at the average union wage. If social democracy is the conscience of the capitalist system, then what are communists to social democracy?
Bluntly, social democracy has always benefitted from communist organizing whilst repudiating communist organizations. While an authentic labour party in the US would be an encouraging prospect, communists know from history how the third parties of the bourgeois state are used against the working class. In the 1940s, Buck observed “the evolution of the C.C.F. toward the role and policies of a third party standing, politically, between the dominant vested interest in the profit system and the prospect of a fundamental socialist re-organization of society.” With the emergence of the NDP more than a decade later, there could be little doubt as to the proper fulfilment of this role.
Beyond the Waffle State
While a short-lived tendency internal to the NDP, known as The Waffle, tried to pull the party toward a New Left agenda in the early seventies, issuing a call to “go beyond the welfare state,” its influence was largely shut out by trade union leaders and the party establishment. Consumed with anxieties regarding the status of Canada as an economic colony of the United States, the 1969 Waffle Manifesto calls for a renewed Canadian nationalism, “to the extent that it is anti-imperialist,” recalling Stewart Smith’s earlier criticism of the Regina Manifesto as a document of “state capitalism.” Anti-continentalism pervades that decade’s communist rhetoric, too; but as Buck explains, while the Communist Party proposed “measures directed primarily against the U.S.-Canadian monopoly-capitalist oligarchy … the left wing in the New Democratic Party convention equated the winning of Canadian independence with socialism.”
Within the NDP, ‘socialism’ was already equated with whatever benefits the working class can bargain from capitalism. Thus, in a cynical milieu, the Waffle’s influence was largely aspirational, impelling entryists from left of the party to cast their lot into the lap of capital and hope for a modicum of influence. Today one sees a related mistake in the rhetoric of social democrats in the United States, who have already moved the target with reference to Canada’s standard. Socialism, many seem to believe, is “what goes on in Canada,” to quote Senator Bernie Sanders — if only they knew.
In his editorial, Rick Smith quotes Dan Cantor, a founder of the Working Families Party in the United States. Revealing that WFP representatives had consulted with the NDP on how to build a social democratic party in the nineties, Cantor seems determined to repeat their most glaring mistakes: “Our goal isn’t to kick the corporate wing out of the Democratic Party, but rather to make them junior partners like we were for so long. After many years of building, we’re finally pulling the Democratic Party to the left.” This description of a business arrangement, in which the left lacks equity, is barely metaphorical — rather, it is an apt assessment of how politics transpires in bourgeois democratic terms.
Leaving Mouseland
Tommy Douglas’ public speeches often included the political fable of Mouseland. Every four years in Mouseland, Douglas would explain, a society of mice would vote on a government of cats. One cycle they would vote for the black cats, and after four years of being hunted they would vote for the white cats, and after four years of being hunted they would vote for the black cats, and so on; until one mouse proposed to form a separate, murine party in order to govern for themselves. In most versions of the story, this mouse is accused of Bolshevism and locked up; a sign of the extent to which the CCF were faced with red-baiting opprobrium in spite of their own anti-communism.
Evidently, Douglas intended his audience to infer the lesson that his was a party of the people, less predatory than either Liberals or Conservatives. But this allegory, essentializing the contradictory interests of two classes, ends in suppression. Douglas never stages the grislier sequel: for how fares the mouse willing to serve in feline government?
In a related fable, Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno describes the relation of the worker to the capitalist as a “leonine contract … for when the lion makes a contract with a mouse, the mouse will generally be at a disadvantage to the incredibly powerful lion and will have to guarantee whatever it demands.” This storybook asymmetry corresponds to the situation of labour in a capitalist society, Adorno explains, and illustrates the impossibility of real agreement between its unequal halves.
Where the third parties of social democracy are concerned, one must reserve a special condemnation for the mouse who serves the lion’s contract to their own kind. As to the cat in mouse’s clothing, it’s important that the rodent smell them first.
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Cam Scott is a poet and essayist from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 territory. He is a member of the Communist Party of Canada.
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