The End of History

With Jack Layton dead and a leadership race getting under way, The Globe and Mail reports here about the NDP tying itself in knots over the importance of trade unions in the party, with some potential leadership candidates wanting to keep the party's historic ties to organised labour, and others wanting to curtail labour's privilege in the party to give more space to other "progressive elements" such as environmentalists.  Though the article doesn't mention them, I would expect anti-war organisations to be included here as well. That this is an issue shouldn't be at all surprising to anybody following the trajectory of the NDP: it's impossible to give a single reason for the party's meteoric rise in the last federal election, but there's no doubt that the way the party openly courted middle-class voters had an important effect.

Strategically, this makes a lot of sense.  Membership in unions is decreasing while self-identification as being part of the nebulously-defined "middle classes" remains high.  Never mind for a moment that there are plenty of studies showing how the middle-class, as defined by income, is actually contracting and polarising with more people ending up on the shit end of the pile.

The NDP distancing itself from the unions isn't going to help this.  The way that the Tories crushed the Air Canada strike and the Canada Post lockout under the pretext that collective action harms the economic recovery is a prediction of things to come and is again going to result in more people traditionally in the middle-income bracket ending up worse off.  And since one of the first things the Tories did once forming the government was to introduce a budget measure to abolish the per vote subsidy for political parties, the NDP would be unwise to alienate the unions.  The party's ability to fund itself may depend on this.

There are more important issues at hand here, though.  The first and most important one is about what it means to be a "progressive" (left-wing/social democratic/whatever) party right now.  The NDP is potentially taking a massive misstep if it choses to move away from organised labour: issues like environmentalism are extremely important, but at the same time, they don't necessarily challenge the status quo.  It's challenging--in Canada, especially with Alberta's tar sands--to reconcile more stringent environmental standards and continued economic growth, but it certainly isn't impossible.  And with that economic growth--or even without it, as we've seen in recent years--we're going to see a consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.  Indeed, this was the lesson of the economic crisis: the economy is irreparably fucked and isn't in the long term going to get better and while we're told by our bosses that there won't be pay raises this year because the economy is bad, they're taking home larger bonuses and pay packets than ever before.  And this in a country that fared better than most through the crisis.  This is precisely what needs to be opposed, and should be the primary task of any left-wing or progressive party worthy of the name.  This strategy of meek damage control that the NDP is currently pursuing doesn't hack it.