Socialist Renewal And The Next Left

Leaflet circulated at the "Rebuilding the Left" conference in Toronto, Oct. 27-28, 2000


The 20th century saw waves of radicalism rise and fall. At high points of struggle, successive lefts have influenced and learned from mass struggles that have changed the world in crucial ways. At the beginning of the 21st century, the left in the Canadian state is between waves of activism. There are important signs that the next left is beginning to develop.

Elements of the next left are emerging in current struggles, such as the Women's March, the June 15 Queen's Park demonstration organized by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the mobilizations against capitalist globalization from Seattle to Windsor, Melbourne to Montréal, Prague to Québec City next April. These struggles bring new forms of activism together with elements of a new anti-capitalist politics.

The New Socialist Group (NSG) is a small group seeking to contribute to the development of the next left. We think that socialism needs to be renewed as we engage in building the next left. There are important lessons to learn from the experiences of fighting for socialism over the past 150 years. But socialist renewal is an open project, committed to learning as new forms of struggle and analysis emerge.

A central aspect of socialist renewal must be making anti-oppression politics central. This means bluntly acknowledging that socialist theory and practice has not been free from taken-for-granted assumptions of racism, sexism and heterosexism. This burden cannot be overcome if socialists persistently claim that we already have all the answers. Socialist renewal requires learning from the experiences, struggles and theoretical expressions of women, aboriginal people, people of colour, and queers.

Yet socialist renewal does not mean starting from scratch. The NSG’s politics of socialism from below are based on the potential power of the mobilized working class to not only challenge capitalism but to replace it with socialist democracy (a society that has nothing in common with bureaucratic “Communist” dictatorships). The democratic and revolutionary orientation of socialism from below is as relevant to the next left as it has been to previous ones. Marxist analysis provides a crucial basis for understanding capitalist development and the real possibilities for fighting back.

The NSG is committed to participating in a broader project of rebuilding the left. The development of the next left requires new ways of working together. Anti-capitalist people need to unite while recognizing that there are important disagreements among us. We need to build a "structured movement" of the left that can engage in collective struggles, reach out to people who are looking for a real political alternative, and provide a forum to develop our politics through discussion and debate.