The rapid rise and fall of the New Politics Initiative (NPI) is rich with lessons for the radical Left. On the one hand, the NPI was able to attract broad support for a strategy aimed at building a new activist Left party. On the other hand, the NPI’s dramatic collapse highlighted the weakness of its priority orientation to the NDP.

The wave of protest and radicalization associated with Seattle, Quebec City and Genoa came to an end some time ago — in the US and Canada at least. The “chilling effect” of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the US response to them played a big role in this, but there were other important factors at play.

The radical Left correctly identified the significance of the first youth radicalization in a quarter century, the growing street protests and the broader discrediting of neoliberalism. But, like the NPI, we overlooked the ongoing weakness and growing accommodation to neoliberalism of the major social and mass movements – chief among them labour. We didn’t fully grasp that a long period of rebuilding and rethinking lay before us.

One result is that the radical Left has entered the new political phase as the essentially same small, divided and marginal force that we were going into the post-Seattle radicalization. Looking at the NPI’s failures can help us identify our own mistakes and fashion a more constructive orientation in the new and more difficult period we have entered.

NPI: a short chronology

The NPI was launched in June 2001, shortly after the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City and with a view to the November 2001 federal NDP convention in Winnipeg, which many predicted would be a turning point for the party.

The NPI’s stated objective was a new Left party with stronger ties to the social movements, a more activist practice, and a more democratic and dynamic internal life. Its strategy was to convince the NDP to initiate the new-party process itself. If that failed, the NPI would break away from the party and pursue the new-party project on its own.

At the Winnipeg convention, the NPI received just under 40 percent support for its new-party resolution. Though the motion was defeated, NPI supporters were generally pleased with this strong result.

Soon after the convention, however, the project stalled. With Alexa McDonough poised to announce her resignation as leader, debates in and around the NDP were focused on the imminent leadership race. This paralyzed the NPI leadership and prevented the project from defining its own agenda. When the leadership race began in June 2002, and with no discussion among NPI supporters, the two NDP MPs in the NPI leadership announced their support for Jack Layton. They were soon joined by most NDP members within the NPI. This effectively marked the end of the NPI as a viable project, although it only officially disbanded some two years later at a small meeting in Toronto

NPI’s strategic gambles

While the NPI’s formal statements provide some guidance, it is difficult to account for the motivations and expectations of all those inside and outside the NDP who supported the initiative. Two things nonetheless stand out.

One strong sentiment shared by most NPI supporters was that it was both necessary and possible to defeat the NDP’s right-ward drift towards “Third Way” politics. Leadership efforts in a “Blairite” direction had previously been partially stymied, notably at the 1999 federal convention, creating an impasse within the party. This impasse became an open crisis after the party’s poor showing in the 2000 federal elections.

Traditional social democrats within the party remained relatively strong and the leadership was having a difficult time defining a viable “centrist” strategy in a political landscape dominated by the centre-right Liberals and the hard-right Alliance. The neoliberal project appeared increasingly vulnerable, thanks to the post-Seattle wave of protest, the bursting of the “new economy” bubble and related corporate scandals. It appeared that it wouldn’t be too difficult to defeat Blairism within the NDP.

Realizing, however, that merely defeating the Third Way within the NDP wouldn’t be enough to restore the broad Left’s electoral prospects let alone to fulfil its aspirations for real and lasting change, the NPI set itself a second objective. This was its second strategic gamble: launching a movement towards a new Left party by combining the energy and participatory methods of the new protest movements with the social weight and accumulated political experience of the NDP and its base in the unions. Success would also depend on the readiness of various social movements and campaigns to lend their support. Finally, the NPI expected to draw strength from its relationship to the World Social Forum process.

In short, the NPI’s analysis had two pillars. One, that the NDP was strategically weak and therefore open to the kind of change the NPI was proposing. Two, that bringing the existing social movements closer to a new NDP-centred party (or to the NDP itself) would fundamentally change that party and improve its prospects.

Weak NDP, strong social movements?

Here we come to the crux of the matter. For one thing, it is now quite clear that the NDP was not weak in the way described by the NPI. It does not appear to be true, as many on the radical Left have argued, that the harshness of neoliberalism has condemned social democracy in Canada or elsewhere to “turn left or perish.”

Under the Layton leadership, the NDP has doubled its membership and is poised to make a strong showing in the coming elections. Indeed, it has secured the kind of hegemony over the broad Left that it has not enjoyed since before the Bob Rae debacle in Ontario.

The reasons for this are complex, but it is not credible to say that it is due to a turn to the left or a clear break with neoliberalism and the “old politics”. One important factor is the renewed commitment by the union officials and left-liberal professionals who dominate party life to building an independent electoral force – after some years of hesitation and agonizing in certain sectors. In a context in which neoliberalism has lost some of its gloss, the NDP has benefited almost automatically from the Liberals’ pronounced shift to the right. Beyond this, Layton in particular has had some success in filling the void created by the Liberals around questions such as the “modernization” of political life and the “urban agenda.”

With regard to the other component of the NPI’s analysis, if defeating the neoliberal drift of the NDP is the objective, it is very difficult to argue that the social movements or trade unions per se can or will lead the charge. Local struggles continue to take place, but even the height of the anti-corporate street protests took place during a period of relative social passivity in the broader society. Movements have been on the defensive themselves, partly as a result of the impact of the corporate offensive, partly in keeping with a conservative desire among sections of their leaderships and social base to carve out a niche within the new neoliberal dispensation. The fight for a genuine Left alternative has to be waged in both the social and political arena.

Today, we see a fundamentally unchanged NDP rising in the polls and positioning itself to face (or even join) a minority or reduced-majority Liberal government, and we have weak and largely demobilized social movements. In this context, it is difficult to see how the NPI’s original call to “bring the political Left and the social movements together” can achieve much beyond locking the social movements even more tightly into a moderate and top-heavy electoralist strategy.