The NDP’s untapped radical potential 

The race for a new leader of the New Democratic Party officially kicked off this week.

After suffering a crushing defeat at the polls in April, the NDP lost party status and were reduced to just seven MPs, with leader Jagmeet Singh resigning immediately.

Where to next for the party? What lessons does its history offer? Is its centrist slide in recent decades irreversible? Or does it have, as historian Ian McKay argues, an unrealized “radical possibility”?

By the end of March 2026, when the leadership race concludes, we may have some sense of the answers.

McKay, a professor emeritus at McMaster University, is one of Canada’s most incisive left-wing historians. He’s the author of several books, including Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History, Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto, and Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety.

Martin Lukacs spoke to McKay for The Breach Show, and the interview was supplemented by some email correspondence. 

The Breach Show is our podcast featuring sharp analysis on politics and social movements in Canada. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Iheartradio, Youtube Music or your favourite service.

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The Breach: Give us a sense in broad strokes of the Canadian political terrain that a party like the NDP confronts, which you have long analyzed as the country’s resilient “liberal order.” 

Ian McKay: My position is that Canada is a liberal order. By that I don’t just mean liberal parties have been, since the 1840s, our only federal ruling parties (although that in itself surely tells us something). Rather, I mean that liberal ideology, penetrated by capitalist values, is something that shapes many of the details of our lives. “Liberal” is of course a contested word. In the US since the 1930s it has been confusingly applied to anyone seeking a more humane version of capitalism. In Europe, it retains more of its original meaning as a political philosophy in which the individual is the be-all and end-all. Canada historically has had an approach much closer to this second sense. In both versions, though, the connections between capitalism and liberalism are patent. 

We Canadians are typically raised with an ideal of “possessive individualism,” a term coined by the political economist C.B. Macpherson. Our sense of self-worth is tied up with how much property we accumulate and the social prestige that comes along with it. This is an ideological complex that shapes the small details of our lives as well as the big picture of our politics. We’re very materialistic in a crass sense of trying to get more and more. We regard property—our own property, especially—as sacred. We tell ourselves it’s our just reward for all our hard work. And we typically disregard all the ways the state and the social order have made it possible for some of us to become such “free-standing individuals” and all the structural reasons (such as colonialism) why others can’t do so.  

So any suggestion that we interfere with the “rights of property”—and here the quotation marks do serious work—will incur heavy resistance, even if on some level we realize that, in an age of corporate capitalism, the idea that hard work pays off in security and prosperity is outdated. We live in a day and age in which you can work hard all your life and still not make as much as a plutocrat in an afternoon. And that plutocrat often had a head-start through inheritance and going to the right schools and making the right connections.  

Or, as Antonio Gramsci would say, possessive individualism is hegemonic. Our relations with each other and the natural world come to seem unalterable. Even if on some level you disagree with this acquisitive individualism, perhaps for religious or philosophical reasons, you really have no choice but to conform to it in your daily life. 

But here’s the problem. This matrix of social assumptions, this worship of propertied acquisition, this system of prestige and power, and the capitalist social relations they epitomize, are leading humankind into a civilizational collapse. So, as Macpherson said tentatively, and Gramsci emphatically, our notions of property, freedom and individualism have to be rethought, right down to our most basic assumptions about the social world. The task of any serious left, and any serious left-wing party, is not to assent to the status quo, to capitalism and the liberal order, but to critique, challenge, and supplant it. 

The stormy future of Canadian liberalism

In the introduction to a very good anthology about the CCF-NDP called Party of Conscience, you describe the NDP as representing, at best, “a partially-realized radical possibility” that has mitigated that untrammeled individualism you speak of. It has also often succumbed, though, to a liberal passive revolution whereby all genuinely democratic and radical currents are reduced to lowest common electoral denominators and absorbed by an ever-adaptive Liberal Party. Can you talk about the ways that it has mitigated that untrammeled individualism and then what are the ways it has succumbed to it?

The great signature achievements of the twentieth-century left—which I take to include social democrats, communists, and equality-seeking social movements in general, united in their commitment to transcending capitalist social relations—have been industrial trade unions, public health, public education, Medicare, some measures of social security, recognition and defence of the rights of oppressed nations, socialist environmentalism, and gender and sexual equality. All these are achievements that should not be derided or minimized. 

Because of the enduring power of possessive individualism and capitalism, in each case such movements were, over time, incorporated and rendered relatively harmless by a prevailing liberal order. Take the case of the labour movement.  People—including a legion of grassroots communists and radical socialists—fought, and some died, for trade unions in Canada. As a labour historian, I think here of the coal miners, but there are many others. These movements made a huge difference. Eight-year-olds are no longer descending into the mines, a measure of industrial safety has been achieved, workers picked on by the boss can call upon a union rep to defend them. Over time, as liberals—who were fiercely and logically anti-union, for unions infringe directly on the “rights of property”—came to see that they had to accept trade unionism, on pain of having the capitalist social order descend into chaos. Labour unions became, more and more, legally respectable entities. We no longer expect machine guns to be aimed at strikers—at least not in Canada, and not as of 2025. 

The liberal order, though, extracted a price for these achievements. Unions also became intensely legalistic. Nowadays, you need a lawyer to get through the intricacies of the average collective agreement. Strikes still happen, but unlike the huge system-challenging moments of our working-class past—the great Nova Scotia strikes of 1909-1911 and 1921-25, the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the CIO struggles from 1937 to 1946, the Common Front struggles in Québec in the 1970s—they are apt to be more localized and limited. Rarely do they incorporate system-challenging demands. Unions have more and more tended towards the defence of their narrow corporate interests under a regime of “industrial legality.” 

Another example of passive revolution is the achievement of Canada’s public health system, thanks largely to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Saskatchewan, which laid the foundation for the Canada-wide system we have today. This was a massive challenge to possessive individualism. It meant free-standing individuals could no longer gouge profits from the sick, frail and elderly. It had a universal thrust. Today, compared to the US, in Canada a heart attack or cancer diagnosis will (usually) not bankrupt you. Had socialists not fought bitterly hard for this achievement from 1944 to 1962, derided all the way as deluded fanatics keen to deprive individuals of their rights and freedoms, with Liberals leading the attack, none of these elements of Canadian life would be with us. 

But look at how universal public health has been wormed from within by corporate interests and self-seeking individualism. Drug companies, lavishly-remunerated doctors and administrators, hospitals functioning like corporations—what seemed to many socialists as the achievement of a basic human right has been progressively undermined by liberals preaching competition and practicing austerity. The recent pandemic revealed, for example, how catastrophically acquisitive right-wingers, including a bumper crop of Ontario Conservative bigwigs, have reshaped the life chances of the elderly, who suffered and died in droves in Canada because egalitarian concepts of universal health care and eldercare never really became a reality. 

In these ways, and many more, the liberal order absorbs, in homeopathic doses, elements of socialist egalitarianism. By the time it’s done with them, though, you can’t really recognize what was once their radical challenge to possessive individualism.  They have basically been modified beyond recognition. That, to me, is the logic of a liberal passive revolution. And it is the logic of Canada’s two great liberal parties—the Conservatives (who were the Liberal Conservatives a century ago) and the Liberals (yesterday’s Reformers)—the only parties that have governed federally in Canada. 

Look at our recent federal election in 2025. The NDP experienced a historic loss—down to 6.3 per cent of the popular vote and losing its official party status, its worst showing in living memory. Why did that happen? Well, largely because party supporters deserted the NDP en masse and went to the Liberal Party as a safeguard against Poilievre and the far-right. So, we wind up with a business-oriented Liberal Party headed by a central banker elected to office on the basis of millions of left-leaning voters. It’s as though the old quip of Prime Minister Mackenzie King (that Liberal master of the arts of passive revolution) that CCF-NDPers were just “liberals in a hurry” and not committed to the construction of a new social order with a basis in reality. It was hard to spot, in the NDP’s recent electoral campaign, anything that seemed to challenge the ruling order. I see both the campaign and its result as a demonstration that the upper echelons of the NDP have become themselves supporters of the established liberal order—and the democratic socialists still remaining in the party paid a savage price for it.

Liberalism in a broad sense enshrines possessive individualism as our secular religion.  We live within a society where, in big ways and small, possessive individualism is pervasive. This is one of the most enduring patterns in Canadian political history. The cost of ignoring this reality, or implicitly playing along with it, is to lose the fundamental reason why the NDP actually exists. That is the lesson of 2025. 

It seems to me that this question about how the liberal order, broadly defined, should be contested is something that dates back to the very founding of the CCF. It’s usually held, I think, in mainstream history that the CCF were always social democrats guided mainly by mild-mannered middle-class intellectuals who shied away from radicalism. But there’s been some recent historical work that has recast that origin story to include working-class socialist activists of a Marxist persuasion who tried to create a movement that would be anchored in socialist principles but also had wide appeal. Can you talk about that?

James Naylor, in his book, The Fate of Labour Socialism, has really done a brilliant job, in my view, of showing how limited that mainstream view of the CCF is. Of course that view does capture something of the history of the party—the middle-class university professors, some of the moderate partisans of the Christian Social Gospel, the wide spectrum of earnest middle-class reformers. But what it misses, Naylor shows, is the enduring power of a labour socialism defending a post-capitalist alternative. As Naylor points out, the Regina Manifesto, the CCF’s founding statement of 1933, is for the most part an indication of how much middle-class reformists influenced the party. 

Now, I have a soft spot for the Manifesto—there aren’t many other socialist manifestos in the entire world I can think of that highlight the need for level railway crossings—and its down-to-earthness and practicality speak of people who really did want to tackle immediate problems. We want to get our harvests to market, dammit! But notice the Manifesto’s conclusion, which declares we shall not rest until capitalism has been eradicated. It seems out of character with the rest of the text. As Naylor explains so well, this really revealed the tension within the party. The labour socialists were weak enough in Regina—it cost a lot for many of them to travel there, for one thing—that they could not really set the terms of the entire Manifesto. But they were strong enough to insist upon that kicker at its conclusion. It spoke of their (and my) conviction that capitalism as a system is cruel, irrational, and calls out to be transcended. There is—and continued to be—a core of radicalism in the CCF that mainstream treatments tend to sweep under the carpet, or treat as the product of maladjusted eccentrics.  

How would you analyze the party shift into the 1940s and 1950s?

The 1940s were a seminal decade. The Communists, a powerful force through the 1920s and 1930s, who were far more democratic and grassroots in many places than is generally remembered, lost the struggle for hegemony on the left—in part, ironically, because the CCF had learned from them many things about building a party and outflanked them on the left. Overall, I think that the CCF was taken over by a very middle-class leadership in the 1940s. Thanks to a fine book by J.F. Conway, The Prairie Populist: George Hara Williams and the Untold Story of the CCF, we have a much better grasp of how a cadre of CCFers who had imagined a party that challenged capitalist property relations on the land were shunted aside by a more centrist leadership. Under M.J. Coldwell, and then Tommy Douglas, the party gravitated more and more to left-liberal positions and the recruitment of middle-class people. It bought heavily into the Cold War, including support for the Korean War, partly as a way of routing the Communists. 

In the ashes of a labour landmark

But even outside those defeated labour socialist lineages, there were still glimmers of that fuller throated socialism. Make This Your Canada, published in 1943 by Frank Scott and David Lewis—a figure who uncomfortably straddled the worlds of labour socialism as well as the well-heeled League for Social Reconstruction and who provided intellectual leadership for that middle-class takeover—imagined a Canada governed by socialist planning. Incredibly, it was not Occupy Wall Street who coined the term the 99% vs the 1%, but Scott and Lewis. The book sold tens of thousands of copies and was a bestseller in its day, studied by CCF activists across the country.

Yeah, Make This Your Canada is a really startling book for people who have bought the line that the CCF was basically a mainstream movement that was not interested in challenging capitalism because the default assumption throughout Make This Your Canada is that basically the state should run industry.

You can have exceptional cases where the state doesn’t take it over, but essentially Make This Your Canada is all about an effective parliamentary socialist state. The authors paid tribute to the “mountainous labours” of Marx, can still be found arguing for a socialist Canada in which public ownership was the default assumption. It was on the basis of this programmatic declaration that the CCF did so well in the middle of the 1940s. The message resonated well, especially with soldiers—with one poll showing the CCF ahead of both the Liberals and Tories. It’s a startling book for people who have absorbed the mainstream line about the CCF .

Ten years later, that socialist message had been largely silenced within the party. 

Why? For one thing, a massive fear campaign after World War Two by both the liberal parties, backed up by a slew of prominent capitalists, who convinced many voters that a vote for socialism was a vote for “Social Suicide,” to reference the title of one of their most notorious and widely-circulated pamphlets. If you vote for the CCF, they claimed, everything will be changed. You won’t be allowed to worship at your churches, families will be destroyed, women will be mistreated by public health practitioners, the Red Army will be on the streets of Ottawa—and so on. This propaganda campaign succeeded, and throughout the right today, you can still hear echoes of it. The Cold War reduced a once influential Communist movement to a pro-Soviet rump. And too, living standards rose for many people in the 1950s and early 1960s.

In many ways the CCF and its successor, the NDP, became a kind of Keynesian left liberal party in the 1950s down even into the 1960s. The common sense of the day was that Keynesian demand management had solved the contradictions of a capitalist economy. All the talk about socialism and the working class and public ownership—all notions of a systemic replacement of capitalism—came to be regarded as antiques from the past. 

In this context, the success of Saskatchewan’s CCF government in pursuing Medicare, for all that regime’s many faults—especially on Indigenous and environmental issues—was exceptional, the product of certain leaders who made equal access to health care a point of principle. A struggling federal Liberal Party borrowed this socialist idea, watered it down, and claimed it as their own. Over time, of course, they have betrayed it again and again, with the contemporary Liberal Party having enacted the most ruthless attack on it in the mid-1990s. 

Overall, there was a marked drift in the party to managing capitalism, not upending it. The Winnipeg Declaration of Principles says almost nothing about class or class conflict. The first moves towards the New Democratic Party set out the welcome mat for all “liberally-minded Canadians.”   

So I think that the NDP, by the time of the late-1960s, was a fairly moderate party. Ed Schreyer came to power in Manitoba as the first premier elected under the NDP banner. His regime did bring in public auto insurance, which remained a staple NDP demand from the 1960s to the 1990s (it was a symptom of the deep liberalism of Bob Rae’s NDP that, having campaigned in election after election with that plank, it abandoned even that core principle). Overall, though, the Schreyer regime was very moderate and Schreyer himself went on to receive his great reward from the Liberals—the governor generalship. 

I think this brings us into the 1960s, a period of turbulence and brutal imperial wars, bubbling new left currents, and the best known challenge to the NDP’s direction, the Waffle. Talk about how you view that in light of several decades now of hindsight.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that as a high school student, I was a minor member of the Waffle, went to the 1971 convention and agitated for Jim Laxer, the Waffle leadership candidate who took David Lewis down to the fourth ballot. I still regard the movement with sympathy. I admired Mel Watkins, the other prominent Waffle leader, and came to regard John Smart, a key Ontario figure and (oddly enough) my graduate student, as a friend. I am not a neutral commentator. An “independent socialist Canada,” the core Waffle slogan, is one I would still defend. I played no important role in the movement, but I did, and still do, see it positively. 

As an historian of the left, though, I also think it’s important to evaluate left movements, including—maybe, especially, the ones we favour—both sympathetically and realistically. In this case, I’m sympathetic to the Waffle’s capturing of some of the radical thrust of the New Left, which Peter Graham and I in our book, Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto, argue was centred on such precepts as self-management, national liberation, and community—and how for a time, it made an independent socialist Canada an idea that broke through the Canadian liberal media’s blockade against radical ideas.  

But I’m also critical. Take the Waffle Manifesto, debated in Winnipeg in the late-1960s. Check it out online, and you’ll see that it’s woodenly written, sloganistic, with a shallow anti-Americanism substituting for an analysis of global capitalism. When I re-read it recently, I thought: Really? That was the best we could come up with? There’s nothing there about Indigenous peoples, anti-racism, women, LGBTQ+ struggles. Even on Québec, where the Waffle would later do some important work, the Manifesto seems caught in a “two-nations” model inherited from the Liberals and the Conservatives. 

What’s easily missed is that the Manifesto itself was part of a process—and not the most important part, in my view. The CBC had a fascinating documentary about the founding meeting of the Waffle, which introduces us to some of its most important figures. It revealed to me how much the document was a rushed job designed to make an impact at an NDP convention. Yet it also helps to skew our overall sense of the movement, because it leaves the impression of an all-male crowd of academics plotting in Gerald Caplan’s Toronto living-room. In fact, the Waffle turned out to be much more ambitious, inclusive and impressive than the Manifesto and that documentary suggest. There were many “Waffle movements” across the country. 

For example, you might get the impression—watching the documentary and reading some of the literature—that the Waffle was an all-male affair. But Waffle women were a force to contend with. They mounted many campaigns, around abortion rights and equal pay. They challenged backward labour movements and provincial NDPs on women’s rights. They propelled the ideal of gender parity on leading party committees, which was a hugely contested Waffle proposal in 1971 and then became an accepted party practice by the next decade. Socialist feminism attained greater strength in Canada than in many other parts of the world, with lasting results. 

Similarly, the Waffle Manifesto’s silence on Indigenous issues should not be seen as definitive of the movement. In Saskatchewan, Wafflers emphasized Indigenous rights, and Mel Watkins played a key role in helping to publicize Indigenous resistance to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. 

The sense you get from some writing on the movement is that it was a largely Ontario-based nine-day wonder that didn’t really make much of a difference. New historiography suggests otherwise (and here I’d like to give a shout-out to a thesis by David Blocker at Western University and work by Roberta Lexier at Mount Royal University, both great contributions to the scholarship). It suggests that Waffle experiences varied from region to region. In Ontario, the Wafflers were purged in 1972 at the behest of the party top brass, alarmed by threats from “international” (i.e., American-headquartered) unions upon which the party had become financially dependent. The Waffle had started to make inroads into working-class movements in particular places—Hamilton, Toronto, Sudbury, even my hometown Sarnia—and that seemingly aggravated a number of powerful labour figures.

But Blocker especially shows that across the country, there were many different experiences. If Ontario Wafflers wanted to remain part of the party and resisted their expulsion from it, in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Wafflers distanced themselves from the mainstream NDP and did not really see themselves as organically tied to it. In BC, according to Blocker, basically the Wafflers just flowed into the party and weren’t purged. In New Brunswick, the provincial party came under the control of a Waffle-aligned leadership, alarming the federal NDP so much that it unconstitutionally reconstituted the provincial party from the top down. In Québec, the Wafflers’ insistence on autodetermination (self-determination) created connections with the left-wing of the Parti Québécois, and it is no great stretch to say that the party’s present position on Québec’s autonomous right to chart its own path through (or out of) Confederation builds on Waffle positions from the 1970s.  

In short, the established narrative—that the purging of the Waffle in Ontario in 1972 was the end of its story—has come to seem unconvincing. The movement was more complicated and more lastingly significant than we had earlier imagined. 

And some of the issues at the time, such as growing left nationalist fervor in response to American imperialism, feel like they’re having a comeback moment now.

Yes, and I think that tells us something about the importance of grasping this history accurately and in detail. And secondly, about how much the NDP changed from the 1990s on. The NDP before this was very much about Canadian independence, struggling for especially a new kind of energy policy. One thing that Blocker points out that I was amazed to find out was that the Ontario NDP officially endorsed at its convention the nationalization of Imperial Oil, a demand of the Waffle. 

I did not know that!

I didn’t know it either, before I encountered it in his work. The evaporation of this fundamental left precept—that we challenge corporate property and the politics that go with it—helps explain today’s travesty of a Conservative premier in Ontario and the former head of the Bank of England in Ottawa posing as “Captain Canada.” Their respective parties have championed continental capitalist economic integration for decades. We are now reaping the rewards of their policies. The NDP should be crafting a movement of popular resistance against the takeover of Canada and pointing out the rank hypocrisy of the liberal parties whose policies have led us into our present position of abject dependency on the American Empire.

You’ve already referred to one of the provincial NDP governments of the 70s. But it really feels like by the 90s, the NDP was confronting a decline in the fiscal capacity of the state, a severing of ties to the working-class, and began what would later accelerate into a fuller-blown capitulation to neoliberalism. The consequences were many, but by the 2000s, Brad Lavigne, one of the top consultants for Jack Layton and then briefly for Mulcair, described the party as abandoning “the big, big projects for small, doable things.”

Here the classic example is the Bob Rae government. It came into office with a majority in 1990 (although with just around 37 per cent of the vote). They won office on a traditional NDP program—public auto insurance, etc. They brought in some good things, like anti-scab legislation. But almost from the very beginning, they confronted an economic disaster—one out of ten Ontarians out of work, the collapse of major industries, and a provincial debt load raising eyebrows on Wall Street. After experimenting with left-Keynesian approaches, which the major Toronto media lambasted, the government turned to austerity. It was unable to maintain its alliance with the labour movement and even trampled on collective bargaining rights. 

In essence, it went from social democracy to neoliberalism. Steven High’s The Left in Power, just out from Between the Lines, offers a subtle and powerful interpretation of this moment. He goes way beyond Rae-bashing to explore the structural dilemmas of his government, which contained some honest socialists in addition to the usual crowd of opportunists and turncoats.

This débâcle was a sign of the times. Across Canada, New Democrats, even those officially opposed to the new neoliberal orthodoxies, came to adopt them themselves. In Saskatchewan, the regime even dispensed with many rural hospitals, which went a long way to undermine its support in rural areas. In Alberta, the NDP government adjusted to, rather than radically challenged, a fossil fuel economy complicit in global climate change. NDP provincial governments in Manitoba and Saskatchewan brought in neoliberal austerity packages similar to those imposed by Conservative and Liberal regimes elsewhere. Darryl Dexter’s one-term deficit-obsessed NDP regime in Nova Scotia conformed essentially to this pattern. 

To a continuing advocate of an independent socialist Canada, these compromises were disheartening. They suggested the limitations of a parliamentary socialism dependent on capitalism. In so many cases, NDP governments were embroiled in one emergency after another—and there was, and is, no overall analysis of how the ongoing crises of capitalism could be met in ways that went beyond mitigating their consequences. Steven High has a good line about the “mist of pragmatism.” And once the mist has cleared, the same propertied classes are still running things as they always have. No wonder so many young people, consigned to lives of permanent precarity, have so little faith in the party. They sense that all the nice words won’t really change the realities of their lives.

I’d also point to the beginnings of the emergence of a new breed of NDP operative in that same decade. A highly professionalized political operative who, sometimes working within private for-profit firms like those forged in Manitoba in the mid-90s, became a larger coterie of consultants, communications specialists, and ad agencies that served as something of a conveyor belt for third-way Blairite neoliberal politics. Their paradigm gets recycled over and over again through all of the subsequent provincial and federal campaigns of the NDP.

That’s a really good point. From ‘Tommy Douglas to telemarketing,’ we might say. I think once the NDP starts to see itself as a party that’s just playing the same game as everybody else, it naturally wants to win the game. How do you do that? Well, you hire experts that will do focus groups and tailor your advertisements and craft persuasive strategies on social media—and so on. At the end of the day, the party doesn’t look any different than other parties. 

Rae and Mulcair are both symptoms of this turn away from a serious left alternative. I sort of enjoyed Mulcair’s turn as a Perry Mason tribute act in the House of Commons, but does anyone now recall the scandals he exposed so obsessively? Can you point to a system-challenging speech from Jagmeet Singh? These figures have been painlessly absorbed by the system—a reflection of the enduring pattern of liberal passive revolution. There’s a long list of such figures in CCF-NDP history,  individual examples of passive revolution in operation. 

Lobbyists run today’s NDP—and they’re warping the party’s politics

I’d add that those to the left of this neoliberal consensus share a certain responsibility for this dire situation. Academic leftists since the 1980s—in fields like political economy, history, sociology, cultural studies, feminist theory—have done important work (since I’m one of them, I guess I’m bound to think that). But, thanks in part to the demise of the Waffle, in part to their own often obscure ways of talking, they are generally not reaching masses of working people. 

Today’s attack on “cultural Marxism” is advanced by people who have invented a bogeyman on the basis of zero understanding of the tradition they are traducing. But their toxic message is resonating because, to a large extent, Marxists have spent the last four decades talking to themselves. They often speak a language that basically says, “We’re not like you.”

The left has lost its capacity to talk to ordinary people. It has to regain that. And I’m not meaning that in this kind of dumbed-down way of NDP propaganda—”people matter more, standing up for you,” etc. I would call them all brain-dead formulations. I mean, actually understanding where working people are these days, really grasping it and not talking down to them. 

The upshot of an NDP soft on neoliberalism and an ineffective left is a pervasive sense that nobody in federal politics can really make any kind of difference. Having abandoned the core principles underlying the CCF and revived by the Waffle, mainstream NDPers have a hard time explaining just why people should vote for them and not the Liberals.  Why dally with people who are confused about who they are and at the end of the day seem to be quite happy to go over to the Liberals whenever it’s convenient for them? The tragedy is that such conformism does not help us change the dynamics of a system that are pushing us all into a multidimensional catastrophe—an “organic crisis” of the established order, to cite Gramsci. It takes us away from doing the work of understanding and mastering that crisis. 

Talk a bit about what the legacy is, even in the history of the CCF and NDP, to do that kind of intellectual and cultural work. Because I think you yourself have pointed out that at various times, with the labour socialism of the 30s, with the oppositional thinking in the 60s that led to the Waffle, the socialist feminists of the 80s, there were moments of intellectual ferment. What became of that?

One of the great virtues of grasping left history in a serious, non-polemical, realistic way is that it shows that, faced with their own wrenching crises of capitalism, Canadian leftists have often created powerful counter-capitalist movements. In the depths of the Great Depression and Cold War, they persevered. They deserve to be respected as our collective ancestors.  

Generation after generation of leftists in Canada have left us precious resources of thought and struggle. It is easy to underestimate the first generation of the 1890s-1920s, many of whom worked with the idea of socialism as an evolutionary science of transformation and considered themselves revolutionaries. They founded journals, produced books, and helped organize massive strikes. The second formation of socialists was strongly influenced by the Russian Revolution—and by no means all of them were in the Communist Party. The third, epitomized by the CCF, was taken up with the transformation of the existing Canadian states and developing them as instruments to reorganize society. The fourth and fifth—the New Left and the new social movements—have worked with the ideas of social and personal liberation from the constrictions of capitalist society. 

And then neoliberalism happened. And neoliberalism is not just a technique of political economy, it’s actually a far-ranging totalizing philosophy of life—possessive individualism on steroids. Once it started to take off in Canada, largely at the behest of the Liberal and Conservative parties, but ironically with the assistance of NDP provincial governments, it then became difficult to imagine a coherent, theoretically ambitious left. We aren’t starting from scratch—all these past generations of leftists have important things to teach us—but we do need to imagine a new formation of the left in Canada geared to challenging neoliberalism both nationally and globally.  

It’s difficult, given the power of neoliberalism—in essence, a consistent, coherent program of demobilizing and then destroying the labour movement and the left—to do this. The system has a way of normalizing what is not normal—a dying planet, a gorged plutocracy alongside working people reduced to hardscrabble lives, even an ongoing genocide defended in the name of ‘the West.’ You don’t need to be a Marxist—though it helps—to see that these closely interrelated phenomena are all posing a direct threat, not just to workers everywhere, but to human civilization as a whole. The next left formation will need to place that threat at the centre of its politics. 

On the other hand, it feels like today, certainly more than ever in my own lifetime, there is a countervailing cultural tendency and an appetite for bold and radical anti-corporate, anti-neoliberal thinking. But it feels like the party, the NDP, in its current state, has had no inclination whatsoever to engage with that, to feed it, to educate around it.

Right. In its current state, the NDP does almost no serious work to analyze the social system nor to change the outlook of people within it. In contrast to the days when the CCF had study groups poring over socioeconomic analyses, when Communists were expected to study and study some more, or when Make This Your Canada made a sophisticated case for a very different form of politics, today’s NDP passively responds to the crises of a neoliberal order. 

Sure, the rhetoric is sometimes still there—people before profits, putting community first, standing up for working families, etc. etc. But if the rhetoric isn’t followed by the hard work of analysis and action, it doesn’t resonate. The party does precious little educational work. I can’t think of the last time I had the sense I was presented with a coherent message from the NDP that went beyond simplistic propaganda.  

The party really doesn’t engage in much educational work between elections (there are some telling exceptions, as in the inspired provincial NDP campaigns in Nova Scotia on the housing crisis). It has no intellectual presence in civil society—not one daily newspaper reflecting a counterhegemonic perspective. So, not only do they lack a coherent socialist vision, but they also lack the sense of having to change civil society in order to achieve any lasting political change at all. 

None of this is a council of pessimism or fatalism. All of these tendencies can be opposed. Past formations of the left did so. That’s an encouraging thing that you find in left history.

In the depths of the Depression, when people were getting shot for being unemployed, people actually created an effective working socialist opposition. Same thing in the 60s, up against Vietnam, against all of the enormities of a liberal capitalist order, people responded massively and made a significant difference. There’s no reason why that can’t happen again. We just have to learn again, once again, how to do it, paying careful and realistic context to our specific context and how it can be changed, in an exercise Gramsci called “reconnaissance.” 

Something that you said before we recorded struck me about how much more leeway there actually was for debate and dissent, even in, for instance, a period when the Waffle was active, and then being purged, in the 70s.

That’s right. There was a lot going on in that moment of the Waffle that suggests that party leaders were willing to listen to, and take seriously, the Waffle’s critique. For example, Stephen Lewis was a somewhat sympathetic reader of the Waffle Manifesto before he turned into the Waffle’s nemesis. Ed Broadbent was close to the movement before distancing himself from it (and as I reminded him in an interview with him not long before he died, Macpherson, his teacher at U of T, had sternly told him to recover his anti-capitalism). There was a sense that honest debate in the party about fundamentals could be a good thing. 

I’m just not picking up that vibe anymore. What I pick up from the party is a rather authoritarian tendency of shutting down people who might be dissidents. One thinks of Sarah Jama in Hamilton, booted out because she was, on the Gaza question, a premature anti-fascist. Or the various NDP candidates selected by their constituency associations who are vetoed by the top brass. There is a distressing authoritarianism in the party that allows leaders to repress dissidents rather than listen to them. In a genuinely democratic party, you allow people to disagree with the party line and you fight it out. You have honest, clear debates. To homogenize the party, to impose a kind of top-down rule upon it, is the opposite of democracy. 

What do you attribute this to? Because I’ve long pointed out how parties on the right, like the Conservative Party, often have a more healthy relationship with their own right flank, using them as stalking horses to change the range of permissible debate. Whereas on the left, we find a very different orientation. Is this a kind of leftover of a Cold War complex of the NDP? 

Yes, in part. And another driver of left anti-intellectualism has been the disinterest of many left theorists in engaging with people on issues that matter directly to them in a language they can understand. The rise of neoliberalism has had an enormously fragmenting impact on an already heterogeneous left. 

I think it’s also partly, and this is a bit more self-critical, I think it’s more also an enduring aspect of left-wing culture really since the 19th century, where if I’m in conversation with you and we disagree, I basically declare you an enemy, a persona non grata, you should be kicked out of the movement, your name should be dragged through the mud. You see this all the way through Marx’s own polemics against people, you know, anti-Dühring. Well, who is Dühring for heaven’s sake? Nobody can remember Dühring, but we can all remember the manifesto, you know, which is 400 pages. Now, the left inherited this tendency, it accentuated through a lot of the new social movements in the 70s. I think it’s very counterproductive. 

Leftists often, in my experience, think that people should think just the way they do. Or they imagine that if they put up a hammer and sickle poster in the university cafeteria or they use certain declarations like ‘we the people,’ really they are speaking on behalf of the people. Now, this was the classic tragic dilemma of vanguard parties in the 1970s.

They declare themselves workers’ revolutionary parties, or some variant of that name, but really there were very few workers in those parties. And working class people basically tuned them out. They didn’t understand their language. They couldn’t understand their historical references. It was all just basically strange and foreign to them.

So yes, the Cold War’s essentially a big part of it. So is a certain element of left authoritarianism, this kind of left culture of anathematizing your opponents. And I think in both ways we have to get beyond it. We have to develop new ways of talking to each other that are not like that. Not just because it’s rude to each other, but also because people find it a major turnoff.

It does seem to me like at its best moments, perhaps not organizationally, but in certain campaigns, CCF/NDP formations have managed to mount very effective critiques of the economic system and to campaign very effectively. I think of David Lewis’s 1972 campaign in which he famously targeted the “corporate welfare bums.”

Good point. David Lewis, nurtured in Jewish Marxist traditions, never lost his sense that a core message of the left must be to expose and to resist the irrationalities of capitalism. Although a resolute warrior in Cold War campaigns against Communists, I think he never lost an underlying sense that capitalism has to be resisted and transcended. His 1972 campaign undertook to educate people about how corrupt the system had become, with corporations guzzling at the public trough. Every day there would be a new exposé of the state’s corporate gravy train. The media gave his radical message a lot of play. The campaign wasn’t flawless. Even the core slogan drew on the idea of “welfare bums,” a leftover of traditional liberalism. But it was still so much better than many of the campaigns that came afterwards, with their sweet, empty words about fairness and equality.

So with your historian’s hat on, what is the advice that you would give an emerging formation that imagines that the NDP could realize some of that never-realized radical possibility?

First, I’d recommend developing a strong sense of what, for over a century, the Canadian left has accomplished against enormous odds. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by today’s organic crisis of a capitalist order and to forget that it has been ongoing for a long time. Depression-era leftists, both communists and socialists, faced with trigger-happy rightists and bleaker conditions than most of us will ever confront, pulled off amazing feats of resistance and cultural renewal, from the On-to-Ottawa Trek to agitprop theatre to the first stirrings of socialist feminism. New Leftists, confronting the obscenity of the War in Vietnam and authorities complicit in it, were just as impressive in their own way. The socialist feminism and gay liberationism that developed within the New Left transformed gender relations in Canada. These successive left formations made a big difference. The next left can do so as well. 

Second, I’d take a close look at how experiments in contexts similar to Canada have played out. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise, Jeremy Corbyn’s rise and fall, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in the US, the socialist experiments in Colombia, Brazil and Chile: all are worthy of close study. We can’t just plug in models from elsewhere into a Canadian context, but we can learn a lot from them. They can offer cautionary tales as well as inspiring examples.

Third, I’d work on developing social and cultural movements that “surround” the party with activists seriously committed to the analysis and replacement of capitalism. This is one lesson I’d draw from socialist feminism and radical environmentalism—both of which have attained significant influence outside the party to which it has had to respond. Socialist feminists offer us an example of how to combine extra-parliamentary activism with work within the party—a favourite theme, by the way, of the Waffle, which was never just an NDP-focused movement and often pressed for a party that would take on community-level struggles.

Fourth, I’d develop and sharpen the critique of property and the cultural complex of “possessive individualism.” This would entail exposing in CCF-like down-to-earth language how disastrous it has been to treat property rights as absolutes. Of course, liberals will, as they did in their past crusades against trade union rights, Medicare, an independent foreign policy, etc., raise the cry that socialists are intent on robbing ordinary people of their dwellings and their vehicles. As true believers in the established order, that is their ideological job. But ours is to point out how self-destructive, irrational and cruel is the society that they so stalwartly defend. The point is the eradication of capitalist property and the social relations that accompany it, not the commandeering of the small claims to property that shield ordinary people from the ravages of the marketplace. Between liberals and socialists there is a river of fire. There is no such thing as a “progressive bloc” that unites the two.

And fifth, and to return to where our conversation began, it means having an analysis of, and alternative to, the liberal order. Since at least the 1920s, processes of liberal passive revolution have sucked many leftists into imagining that liberals (and in many cases, Liberals) are our friends. For a century, this confusion has been disastrous for the left—as the recent election demonstrated so painfully. Both our mainstream parties, and their pseudo-populist counterparts, need to be challenged radically—both with respect to their underlying precepts and their practices. Cozying up to liberals is death for the left. They are not our friends. 

Many of the new social movements that arose since the 1970s have been admirable examples of such effective critiques. They built on new left ideas of the 60s and 70s in terms of communities empowering themselves, oppressed groups rising up and demanding something better. But I think what many of the new leftists of the 60s and many of today’s leftists are missing is the need for some sort of coordinating mechanism, some general body to put these various social movements in conversation with each other so that they create something bigger than themselves. Only such a coherent body can learn lessons from past experiences and seek to impart those lessons to a wider population. You still do need something like a party, for all its inevitable problems. A party in which people can actually hammer out their differences with each other and come up with a program. Perhaps that party could even be a fundamentally changed NDP. 

Thanks for finding a glimmer of practical hope and possibility in what has not always been a hopeful history. Appreciate your time, Ian.

My pleasure.