Did you hear? The New Democratic Party has been a main-stream political party in Canada for less than two months and the party is already denying that it is socialist. The party is obviously taking a page from Paul Martin’s Liberal book: Run on the left but rule on the right. At the NDP’s upcoming convention, it intends to remove the word socialist from the party constitution.
What some of us cannot figure out is what is wrong with being socialist? The NDP must have been listening to Stephen Harper. He is the Canadian expert on the Big Lie. Harper says socialism is bad and here we have the NDP agreeing with him.
Harper deliberately confuses socialism with communism as a bogeyman to scare the ignorant. Socialism came about historically to combat people such as Harper who believe in laissez faire economics. In the industrial revolution, the workers were brutalized by the laissez faire doctrine and socialism was conceived as a fair solution to all concerned. While Marx and Engels took this fairness to extremes in their Communist Manifesto, the world now knows that extremes will fail.
The shame of the NDP was that the well-balanced, progressive socialism of Tommy Douglas’ CCF was co-opted by the Canadian Labour Congress when the NDP was created. It gave power over the NDP to rabid unions created by the North American Depression of the 1930s. These were unions built on class struggle and they gave no nod to fairness in their negotiations.
But those unions also built the NDP into the party it is today. They provided the muscle and the organizational manpower that the NDP needed to survive during the years of third and fourth party status. It was these unions that had the hunger for reform.
What these unions did not acknowledge was that they were not alone. There was a strong and growing group of social activists in the Liberal Party who bought into the need for social reform in Canada. They saw control of Canadian business and resources as a tool to build a stronger and more prosperous country for all Canadians. They never called themselves socialists but they were.
At their convention, these NDP thinkers(?) also want to state that there is no way the party will ever merge with the Liberals. That could prove that they are just as myopic as the Liberal leadership in the last federal election.
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