Marxists my ass: These people are liberals

Soon after I posted my comments on Alex Grant’s appeal to socialists to “Join the NDP and Fight for Socialism! (which makes about as much sense as, “Join the Nazis and Fight for Jewish Rights” or “Join the US Air Force and Fight Terror Bombing!”) my attention was drawn to a Socialist Voice article said to take a different approach from the one I had sketched out in “If the NDP’s the answer, what’s the question?”

The article, titled “Election Challenge to the NDP: Take the Road of Struggle” by John Riddel and Roger Annis, http://www.socialistvoice.com/Soc-Voice/Soc-Voice-59.htm turns out to be not so very different from my own – at least not in the first 23 of 26 paragraphs.

Only in the final three paragraphs do Riddel and Annis come to a different conclusion – that the NDP should be supported, rather than disassembled and turned into an agency that hires out balloon-o-gram clowns for stag parties and office saturnalia.

Indeed, as I read the article I kept scratching my head, wondering whether I had misheard my correspondent tell me, “There’s a really great article that comes to a different conclusion from your own,” or what he really said was, “Gee, your article was all right, but these guys say it much better.”

By paragraph 15 I was seriously thinking about getting my hearing checked. By paragraph 23 I was flipping through the Yellow Pages looking for a good audiologist.

That’s because with only enough words left to fill out the requisite “And in conclusion” section of the article, Riddel and Annis touch down – or at least, appear to touch down -- at the destination they had been inexorably heading toward in the preceding 22 paragraphs: That the NDP, “as lesser evil, is not worthy of support” – precisely my position, without the “as lesser evil” qualification.

With the plane safely on the tarmac, pilots Riddel and Annis should have called it a day, using the remaining two paragraphs to taxi to the terminal and make their way to the airport bar for a beer and convivial conversation with a couple of flight attendants. Instead, they abort the landing, race down the runway, and try to jump through a logic hole to arrive at a destination precisely at the antipodes of the one they were heading to all along. Big mistake.

Here’s what they did: After taking the NDP to task for acting “as a faithful defender of the capitalist order,” whose parliamentary program hews “close to the Liberal model” and whose leader “opposes or at best abstains from … mass struggles” -- closing with “they are committed defenders of capitalist rule” -- Riddel and Annis decide that “socialists should give critical support to the NDP” anyway.

Huh?

Let’s go over that again: “The NDP, as lesser evil, is not worthy of support.” But “socialists should give critical support to the NDP.”

Oh, hold on, I get it. “Take the road to struggle,” refers not to the NDP’s election challenge, but to the road one must follow to piece the pair’s logic together. For how could the argument that socialists give critical support to a party that is a faithful defender of the capitalist order and not worthy of support, not require some kind of struggle with, at the very least, rising frustration at encountering another “yeah, that’s true, but…” argument.

As in…

Yeah, I agree totally that you can’t lose weight if you consume twice as many calories as you expend, but this fat vanishing cream might really work.

Or…

Yeah, I know it will jeopardize my chances of being appointed church deacon, but wearing this strap-on dildo to Sunday services is something I’ve always wanted to do.

Going from “the NDP is a faithful defender of all I oppose” to chanting “N-D-P, N-D-P” is enough of an abrupt, unexpected shift in direction to make one think the duo have decided that politics ought to be modeled after an Agatha Christie novel. Just when you’re sure all clues point to the butler as culprit, you find out that the murderer is really the comatose quadriplegic mute who has emerged from his coma long enough to hire an assassin, working out the transaction by sign language, to take out the bastard who dared him thirty years ago to use a threshing machine to trim his toe and finger nails simultaneously.

Having no appetite for Agatha Christie plot twists, and an having urgent appointment back on earth for a root canal, I laid Riddel’s and Annis’s article aside, and decided it was, like the NDP, unworthy of further attention. But I did wonder – having spent seven years studying psychology -- about what the glue was Riddel and Annis thought held their tossed salad of an argument together.

As my endodontist plunged an awl into my infected tooth, releasing a sickening stench, which he assured me was the reek of dental infection and not the lingering traces of Riddel’s and Annis’s argument, I thought about it some more.

It turns out the lapsed logicians think that socialists should support the NDP, despite the party’s thorough “commitment to capitalist rule” because “it contains within it the germ of an alternative – the consciousness among hundreds of thousands of its supporters that working people need our own party and our own government.”

Okay, but the same germ is contained within the two mainline parties too, so why single out the NDP?

Since the lion’s share of the people who make up the vote fodder who regularly back the Liberals and Conservatives must sell their labor to live, and since the mass of Liberal and Conservative voters far exceeds that of the NDP, a better claim can be made that the mainline parties are the real mass working class parties; certainly, the most populous ones. Or, if you prefer Riddel’s and Annis’s words, they contain within them the consciousness of hundreds of thousands of supporters that working people need our own party and our own government. Problem is, this greater collection of Canadian working people doesn’t think the party and government they deserve is the one Riddel and Annis have a no termination contract with.

Which really is one of those problems that, if Riddel, Annis and Alex Grant seriously confronted, would result in their disappearing into a puff of logic. For why would the NDP (or Labour or Democrats) move to the left, when their left constituency always moves to the right with them?

In fact, so iron-clad is their commitment, that if the party’s leadership donned jackboots and hung live strong-like rubber wristbands bearing swastikas from their wrists, these mock revolutionaries would still be urging socialists to join the party, drawing nonsense from their armamentarium of stock absurdities to spread a semi-respectable gloss over arrant silliness. “Oh, for sure,” you can imagine them saying, “the NDP has taken a step toward fascism, and we deplore it, but the party contains a germ of an alternative and it is still a mass working class party and therefore should be supported.”

There are two conditions that can pull a party which seeks an electoral majority to the left, neither of which is strengthened by the “back the NDP at all costs” strategy. On the contrary, the strategy does much to seriously undermine them.

The conditions are:

1. Strikes, protests and demonstrations in the streets, especially when organized around a leading idea, which pressure conservative forces to choose to make leftist reforms and concessions to quiet growing militancy as a self-defensive measure (reforms and concessions which are temporary and partial and will be clawed back, when conditions allow.)

2. The existence of a large constituency of leftist voters who sell their votes conditional upon policy and whose votes therefore can only be secured by parties incorporating leftist ideas into their platforms.

Neither of these conditions prevail under current circumstances, and neither can prevail where emphasis is placed on building public opinion for a leftward shift, rather than organizing the disruptive activity of large numbers of people; nor where emphasis is placed on backing nominally leftist parties unconditionally, rather than backing parties conditionally upon policy alone.

Public opinion is easily brushed aside; the disruptive activity of large numbers of people is not. The demands of leftists who unconditionally back parties they deem unworthy of support, and whose allegiance therefore needn’t be secured, are also easily brushed aside; those who are discriminating are not so easily ignored.

None of which is to suggest that militancy as a goad to shift political parties to the left is a strategy anyone should seriously entertain as a workable long-term strategy. On the contrary, it simply amounts to sacrificing long-term goals for immediate gains – kind of like losing 20 pounds by going on all yak liver diet, and gaining it all back afterward, rather than making a fundamental change in lifestyle and eating habits. The goal of militancy oughtn’t to be revocable concessions and reforms, but ultimately the seizure of political power and implementation of fundamental change. Militancy, yes. Packing up your bags and going home to watch the OC because concessions have been granted, no.

What I am suggesting is that Riddel, Annis and Grant don’t even get as far as proposing a workable strategy that will secure even revocable and partial reforms, because they ignore a basic reality: parties seeking electoral majorities can’t be pushed to the left from within; they can only be pulled to the left from without.

The Riddel-Annis argument is hardly new. It’s about a hundred years old. And it has never worked. And it’s exactly the same one their counterparts in Britain and the US use to drum up support for Labour and the Democrats. Indeed, the argument is so widely used (if the conjunction of authentic socialism with thorough commitment to capitalist rule can be said to be widespread in an orderly, law-governed universe), and so hackneyed, that the pair must have used about two percent of their collective cognitive power to produce it – or maybe it was one percent for Riddel and one percent for Annis.

All they had to do was remember what the Marxists for Kerry had said in the last US Presidential election about why backing Kerry was so obviously Marxist that Karl himself would have donned a Kerry’s My Guy button, or what some of the various Communist parties that litter the British political landscape said in the last UK election about why a radical working class perspective absolutely demanded that Marxists vote Labour. In their view, the ghost of Marx had long been hovering with an approving smile at the shoulder of Tony Blair.

With a few alterations to customize the argument for a Canadian audience – something Riddel and Annis could have done without much effort while watching Hockey Night in Canada – you end up with what amounts to, “The Marxists’ Guide to Navigating the Canadian Election” or “Why the NDP Will Always Be The Right Choice – No Matter What.”

The problem with this silly argument – apart from it taking a not a very well-honed scalpel severing neural connections to establish the conditions for it to appear cogent – is that it legitimizes the deception that socialism is obtainable by marshalling enough votes to put people with the right ideas in parliament. If the people Riddel, Annis and Grant are keen to get elected actually bore anything remotely resembling a commitment to socialism, they might be excused for not having thought the matter through as thoroughly as they should, but as their favored candidates have as much commitment to socialism as a turkey does to getting his head chopped off to make someone a delicious Christmas meal, they must either be wholly insincere or monumentally obtuse. I’m not sure which it is, but either way, the options are unattractive.

So, what am I saying -- that parliamentary socialism is out?

Since the NDP (or Labour or the Democrats) have nothing whatever to do with parliamentary socialism – and indeed, since the parties themselves decided long ago that parliamentary socialism was as out of date as Ella Fitzgerald singing “A Tisket, A Tasket” with Chick Webb’s orchestra – the answer is clearly no. What I’ve written has as much to do with parliamentary socialism as Buddhism does with how to stuff a turkey.

Except this: what parliamentary socialism turns a blind eye to – until it’s too late – is the question of how far a party committed to socialism can go within the context of the capitalist state. The answer is about as far as a flea weighed down by a Marine’s full battle dress, which turns out to be not very far at all. But this has nothing to do with the NDP, which isn’t committed to socialism, anyway.

So, let’s deal with the clincher, or what mock revolutionary NDP buffs take to be the final argument they can drag out when all others have failed: That the situation is not revolutionary; therefore, the only option for those with their feet firmly planted on the ground is to get an orange NDP lawn sign, tithe the party, and pass out campaign literature for NDP candidates.

This assumes that revolutionary situations arise spontaneously, and that all you have to do is wait for one to come along, like waiting for the cross-town bus to roll around the corner. While you’re waiting, you can sort through the numerous letters the NDP will send you, asking for another donation to get its star candidate, a former chief economist of RBC Financial, elected to parliament, so the NDP can prove it’s as committed to corporate income tax cuts, slashing capital gains taxes and establishing the right conditions for profitable investment as anyone else. Except revolutionary situations don’t happen spontaneously. They happen because committed people work to make them happen – not by throwing cold water on the idea of revolution and arguing that the best one can do is to vote for a party thoroughly committed to capitalism, even if it is unworthy of our support, in their best “Gosh, I wish it weren’t so, but we all have to deal with life the way it is, not the way we’d like it to be” manner.

What’s more, even if you were to err and accept that revolutionary situations arise ex nihilo, how does it follow that the NDP (or Labour or the Democrats) is the best alternative? In Canada, socialists can vote for the Communist Party or Marxist-Leninist Party (in some ridings.) At the very least, their platforms bear some resemblance to a socialist alternative, and if you make the argument that they have as much of a chance of getting one member elected as I do of traveling to the moon in a 1989 Ford Mustang with a leaky head casket and a fire-hose for propulsion, you’re making the argument that actually having a chance of winning the election matters, in which case the argument for backing the NDP pivots on electability, not policy. And with the argument pivoting on electability, and the NDP hewing to the Liberal model, the best course of action for socialists to take, if we re-arrange all of Riddel’s and Annis’s arguments to form a coherent whole understandable to anyone belonging to the species homo sapiens, is to vote Liberal, since the Liberals have a better chance of getting their members elected to parliament than the NDP does. QED. That’s not where Riddel and Annis wanted to end up, but in this space, basics like 2 + 2 = 4 and not duck soup, apply.

To be clear about this, I haven’t taken you on a roundabout journey littered with references to strap-on dildos and flying Fords to end by calling for a vote for the Liberals. That’s Riddel’s and Annis’s argument, if followed closely enough, though not one they intended. For their argument, reduced to its essentials, so that it can be neatly packed into an armadillo’s scrotum, is this: vote for the lesser liberal.

My own position is that elections and parliamentary activity are tools, to be used where it makes sense, to advance toward a goal, but are not ends in themselves. This does not, however, mean that the NDP (or Democrats or Labour) is a tool that can be used to achieve any goal even remotely connected to socialist advance; on the contrary, it is a tool to do the opposite, no matter what the consciousness of its members is.