Three years ago this June, the New Politics Initiative(NPI) was launched. Its founders, including Judy Rebick, Jim Stanford, Svend Robinson, and Libby Davies, proposed that the NDP lead the process of forming a new left party of a different kind. At the time, there seemed to be a propitious conjuncture of forces: a weak NDP and an ascendant anti-globalization movement with young people leading its most militant elements. Central to the NPI’s political project was the inchoate notion of a left political party "working with" the social movements.
In part, this responded to Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of social democratic approaches to the state: "Social democrats," she observed, "don’t know the difference between being in office, and being in power."
The NPI recognized that a left party with an agenda antagonistic to patriarchy and globalized capitalism needs the power of counter-hegemonic movements – pushing on the party from outside the party, and outside the state – if it is to have the power to meaningfully transform the state in accordance with economic and political democracy. At the same time, this notion of a movement "in and against the state" was a critique of movement activists who implicitly believed that developing anti-hegemonic models within the movement, or launching frontal attacks against a well-buttressed state, were strategically sufficient.
Not that the NPI disagreed with the importance of "being the change": another stream of NPI ideas, focused on "doing politics differently", and posed as a necessary complement the building of a different kind of political culture that aimed at anti-hegemonic, anti-patriarchal, diverse forms of practice. At the level of the state, this was reflected in the third key piece of the NPI’s political agenda: participatory democracy, which served as a strategy for transforming the state towards economic as well as political democracy. It may seem ironic that the NPI, with its emphasis on the need for a "war of position" that would transform left political culture by promoting anti-hegemonic organizing styles, focused the bulk of its actual organizing effort on an old-style manoeuvre against the NDP: in this, its most identifiable political objective, it failed. Less ironically, the ideas it introduced, and its "war of position", seem to be bearing fruit within the NDP and outside.
Enter Jack Layton, now starting his second year as leader of the NDP. During his leadership campaign, Layton adopted the NPI’s vague language of "working with the social movements". This piece fit well with Layton’s view of the dialectic of politics, namely, that radicals articulate the space in which political "solutions" can emerge. But like the NPI, Layton hasn’t yet grounded this approach in a theory of the state, and so has been unable to use its widespread appeal as an educational opportunity that would deepen the party’s approach to political strategy – an understanding that could encompass a critique of, and evaluation of, the NDP’s past experiences in government.
Nonetheless, Layton’s leadership represents the best opportunity for the left in a long time. Layton’s support base within the party leans heavily to the NPI’s constituency. He has proposed a permanent organizing office to work between elections, supporting movements in their work, and he has been very supportive of a cross-country initiative to form an activist school that would do mass political education. He has also begun cross-sectoral work, albeit at an elite level, through the caucus’ five advocacy teams. The NDP’s work in supporting the anti-war movement, and other campaigns, like the effort to bring home Maher Arar, show the potential of a more constructiverelationship with movement groups that is not founded on quid pro quo arrangements.
Layton’s weaknesses are also weaknesses of the party, the same fundamental weaknesses that made the NPI’s frontal manoeuvre unlikely ever to succeed. In retrospect, the NPI’s analysis of the opportunities of 2001 was overly optimistic, even before 9/11 blew a hole in the anti-globalization movement. There is now no mass counter-hegemonic social movement. In part, this is because neither the anti-globalization, nor anti-war movements, nor the party, were sustained by political theories with clear long-term goals that reflected new historical realities. This absence of a coherent new theoretical framework or frameworks for left activism, encompassing long-term goals and critiques of traditional political theories, remains a key weakness. Because the NDP’s practice is not informed by a strong theory of the state, the party is in no shape to assume government? Neither is there a plan, nor are there the people in place to advance a strategic agenda of state transformation.
The work of building a movement with long-term strategic capacity is still a deep task that will entail education, reflection, and dialogue. It is too much to expect it to happen quickly. If the task for the NDP is to learn from historical experience not to be overly optimistic about the possibilities inherent in government, the task for critics from the left is not to be too pessimistic. Layton is undoubtedly competent at electoral politics, and he is open to new ways of party-building and organizing. The challenge for critics on the left is to recognize and use this opportunity, rather than succumb to self-defeating pessimism.