Leap Manifesto: Road to Nowhere

When the Trudeau Liberals were elected last fall amid a wave of enthusiasm we warned that this was no harbinger of “progressive” change, but merely a facelift for Canadian capitalism. No amount of cosmetic reforms can alter the fact that the capitalist Canadian state—be it administered by the Liberals, the Tories or, for that matter, the New Democrats—is committed to the system of exploitation of the many by the few.

The working class continues to be hammered by relentless attacks on jobs, wages, pensions, health care and other vital social programs. Poverty and unemployment are supplemented by a steady diet of racism and police violence. There is palpable discontent among working people and the oppressed as they look for a way to fight back against this one-sided class war. Instead, the pro-capitalist union leaders—who have been quiescent in the face of the bosses’ onslaught, overseeing defeat after defeat—actually welcomed the Liberal victory.

This is the context for the present crisis in the New Democratic Party, which came to a head at its Edmonton convention in April. A majority of delegates repudiated leader Tom Mulcair for the disastrous election outcome, which saw the party lose well over half its seats, and voted for a leadership review. They also voted to “recognize and support” the environmentalist Leap Manifesto, declaring it “a statement of principles that is in line with the aspirations, history, and values of the party.” With bourgeois environmentalism, including its so-called ecosocialist variant, now de rigueur, it’s no surprise that the Leap Manifesto has also been embraced by a host of reformist left groups.

The manifesto, largely the brain-child of radical-liberal author Naomi Klein and her filmmaker husband Avi Lewis, is not even rhetorically socialist—indeed both its worldview and many of its specific demands run counter to working-class interests. For the Leapers, the “crime against humanity’s future” is not the depredations of the capitalist profit system, but Canada’s record on climate change. Accordingly, Leap is premised on an explicitly trans-class program that aims to draw together all right-thinking people—exploiter and exploited alike—to pressure capitalist politicians to shift their economies away from fossil fuels.

A glance at some of Leap’s key endorsers underscores this. Roy McMurtry, former Ontario Conservative attorney general and prosecutor of abortion rights crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler, stands shoulder to shoulder with pro-abortion activists, along with movie stars, novelists and a brace of Jesuits. The low-wage LUSH cosmetics corporation is a Leap backer, as is 350.org. The latter has received funds from billionaire George Soros and the Rockefeller and other capitalist foundations, representatives of that section of the ruling class which views the green agenda as a profitable business model. It is a vast understatement to say that Leap offers no way forward for working people. Contrary to its reformist backers, it is in no way a left opposition within the NDP.

New Democrats Destabilized

The NDP’s very right-wing election campaign showed just how determined its recent leaders have been to refashion it from a social-democratic party with ties to the organized labour movement into an outright capitalist party. But when Trudeau outflanked the New Democrats on the left, their grand plan of displacing the Liberals hit a brick wall. Various forces within the now-destabilized NDP are vying for influence, but none of the main political trends that have emerged reflect, even in a flawed or partial way, the interests of the working class.

The NDP was created in 1961 through the joint efforts of the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Canadian Labour Congress union bureaucracy. In the anti-Communist witchhunts of the late 1940s and the ’50s, the CCF and its labour allies campaigned in the unions to drive out the most militant elements. This gravely weakened labour’s fighting strength and shaped the character of the future NDP. Thoroughly pro-capitalist in its leadership and outlook but linked to the labour movement through the top union officialdom, the NDP was from the start what Marxists call a “bourgeois workers party.” Its role has always been to channel working-class discontent into the dead end of parliamentarism and, when possible, to directly administer the capitalist system. Whenever the New Democrats are elected to office, they rule unambiguously for the bosses, breaking strikes, attacking Native militants, implementing capitalist austerity.

From the start, the NDP was among the most right-wing of social-democratic parties internationally. Even so, for more than a decade the NDP’s leaders—notably Jack Layton—pushed to “modernize” the party into a bourgeois formation akin to the U.S. Democratic Party. To this end, they excised most of the social-democratic rhetoric of yore and further weakened the already frayed links to the unions, which have increasingly been viewed as an electoral liability. Under Mulcair, who moved seamlessly from the Quebec Liberal Party cabinet into the NDP’s upper echelons, the process accelerated and deepened.

We Trotskyists have recognized that building a party that genuinely upholds the interests of workers and the oppressed would require breaking the working-class base from the NDP’s pro-capitalist program and leadership in the course of class and other social struggle. Our aim is not to push the NDP to the left but to win the working class, starting with its most advanced elements, away from the wretched politics of social democracy in order to forge a revolutionary workers party on a class-struggle program.

Fossil Fuel and Pressure Politics

Periodically, dissident forces in and around the NDP have been thrown up, typically as a reaction to the party’s more egregious betrayals. In 1969, there was the Waffle and its Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada. In 2001, the New Politics Initiative worked to corral young anti-globalization protesters back into the dead end of social democracy. Aimed at reviving the party’s sagging fortunes, these groups, which were embraced by the reformist left, came to naught.

The Leap Manifesto is a far more rightist development that does not espouse even a deformed version of working-class politics. This environmentalist tract is wholly in the framework of the capitalist order and makes no pretense to the contrary. But don’t take our word for it—listen to its architects. One, Montreal journalist Martin Lukacs, whined in the London Guardian (17 September 2015) that it was a “smear-job” to claim that Leap advocates the “overthrow of capitalism.” For their part, Klein and Lewis have stressed its “non-partisan” character. Indeed, Leap has been endorsed by the bourgeois Green Party and the petty-bourgeois populists of Québec Solidaire. One of its central aims is to “put real pressure on the federal Liberal government.” This should prove easy since the Liberals are already planning to implement various of Leap’s proposals, including higher taxes on the wealthy and investing in “clean energy” projects, infrastructure and public transit.

In Leap’s worldview, fossil fuels are the enemy and environmental degradation, especially that linked to climate change, trumps the exploitation of man by man and all the other ills of class-divided society. Its schemes amount at best to impotent appeals to the rulers to stop degrading the environment. Worse, some are backward-looking and flatly reactionary.

Take, for example, the manifesto’s call for “a far more localized and ecologically-based agricultural system.” So people living north of the tree line should eat lichen? In Canada, with its barren and cold sweeps of land, this is a recipe for malnutrition. And a shift away from large-scale mechanized agriculture would be a huge step backward on a global scale. In the event that Leap’s “localized” model were followed there would, for example, be precious little grain to export. Those who would suffer the consequences are the peoples of poor Asian and African countries who depend upon such imports for survival.

Regarding power generation, Leap says “if you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard,” and concludes that “communities should collectively control these new energy systems.” Taken literally, this would mean, for example, no more urban power transmission lines. This is a dog-eat-dog plan for economic autarky that would necessarily deepen regional inequalities, pitting regions with more resources against those with fewer. At a minimum, all of this implies a reduction in consumption, which happens to dovetail with the capitalist austerity policies that the manifesto elsewhere criticizes as a “fossilized form of thinking.”

To finance their schemes, Leap draws on current bourgeois economic policy. The European Union, an imperialist consortium which we Marxists oppose, has long sought to impose a financial transaction tax and many capitalist countries already use it. The carbon tax that Leap demands is already in place in B.C. and Quebec, is about to become policy in Alberta and is favoured by the likes of Exxon. Such a tax simply punishes working people with higher costs across the board. Workers with “carbon-intensive jobs” who lose them thanks to Leap’s shift to a “clean energy economy” are promised “training and other resources,” but every worker knows that these are code words for “you’re fired!”

When the Leap Manifesto hit the convention floor in Edmonton, it revealed deep fissures within the NDP. Leap has been endorsed by the petty-bourgeois leaderships of several urban public sector unions. But its hostility to anything to do with fossil fuels sparked understandable outrage among, for example, the delegation from Alberta, where workers are reeling from job losses due to the collapse in the price of oil. Responding to the Leap crowd’s indifference to the livelihoods of such industrial workers, Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, railed about how “These downtown Toronto political dilettantes come to Alberta and track their garbage across our front lawn” (cbc.ca, 11 April).

Nowhere does the manifesto even pay lip service to the struggles of the organized working class. Insofar as it raises specific reform demands, such as “paying living wages,” these are premised entirely on pressuring the capitalist rulers for a few more crumbs. Our starting point, in contrast, is the fight to mobilize the social power of the working class, at the head of all the oppressed, in struggle against these rulers.

The gains which working people have in the past wrested from the capitalists were won precisely through such struggle. As Marxists, our goal goes beyond this: we seek to win the working class to the perspective of a socialist revolution which will rip the mines, factories and other means of production from the grip of the exploiters, paving the way for a rationally planned, collectivized economy. This will in turn open the road to a communist society on a global scale in which economic scarcity has been overcome. We fight for a society that will provide more for the toiling and impoverished masses.

The Green Snake Oil of Ecosocialism

There is broad agreement today among scientists that human beings contribute significantly to global warming, especially through the burning of fossil fuels. The organization of industrial production under capitalism necessarily leads to degradation of the environment because capitalist firms are motivated solely by the need to maximize profits. Our fundamental difference with the environmentalist movement is our view that overcoming ecological problems fundamentally hinges on getting rid of the irrational, profit-driven capitalist system.

The ecosocialist types are animated by altogether different goals. The International Socialists, for instance, now centre much of their political activity on building a “climate justice movement.” These reformists are unabashedly campaigning to “join the Leap,” which they tout as a way for the NDP to “reconnect to its base.”

More cynical but no less bankrupt is Socialist Action (SA). Last fall, SA leader Barry Weisleder criticized the Leap Manifesto as “a great ‘Leap’ sideways,” declaring that “to truly Leap forward it will be necessary to make a social revolution.” But as Leap picked up steam, the NDP Socialist Caucus, of which Weisleder is also the leader, smoothly moved to embrace it, saying “We support the Leap Manifesto.” Performing its own sideways leap, SA now claims that the defeat of Mulcair and vote to discuss the Leap Manifesto mark a “golden opportunity to fight for an anti-capitalist agenda and make North America’s only mass, union-based political party a weapon in the fight against austerity and climate catastrophe” (Socialist Action online, 16 May). It is sheer fantasy to think that the NDP can be pressured to become the kind of party needed to take on the capitalist order.

Various leftists as well as media columnists have drawn parallels between Leap and the Waffle movement of the late 1960s. According to the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin, “NDP’s Leap is the Waffle Reborn” (12 April). This obscures far more than it clarifies. The Waffle emerged in a period of significant leftist radicalization and became a sizeable opposition within the NDP. It was a contradictory phenomenon combining Canadian economic nationalism with “socialist” rhetoric.

Light years from the Waffle’s left reformism, the Leap Manifesto is silent on the forcible retention of the oppressed Québécois nation within the Anglo-Canadian state. Nor can it choke out a word against the bloody devastation that the imperialist powers—including Canada—have wrought in the Near East, Central Asia and North Africa. In contrast, the Waffle openly supported Quebec’s right to self-determination against the chauvinist line of the party leadership. It denounced Canada for its part in the “barbarous war in Vietnam.” Many Waffle supporters ultimately broke to the left and joined or helped to found various nominally Marxist groups.

The NDP tops felt threatened by the Waffle and moved to expel it when its leader James Laxer won 37 percent of the vote for party leader in 1971. It was Stephen Lewis, a virulent anti-communist and then leader of the Ontario NDP, who was in the forefront of the purge. Today, indicatively, Lewis has joined his son Avi as an initiating signatory to the Leap Manifesto.

For a Planned Socialist Economy

Leap decries the “violence of Canada’s near past” against Native peoples and calls on the government to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This too is nicely in sync with the Liberals, who have announced their intention to do just that. To get a measure of how hollow this is, Australia, which rivals Canada for its malignant and violent racism against aboriginal peoples, signed the declaration in 2009.

The idea that the horrendous oppression of indigenous people in Canada can be overcome by the environmentalist nostrums of Klein, Lewis et al. is grotesque. In the cities, where most Native people live, they endure intense racism, poverty and unemployment. The reserves are economically unviable hellholes lacking clean water, decent housing and good food. These conditions have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with the subjugation and dispossession of the aboriginal peoples on which this country was founded. The deep oppression of Native peoples is a product of capitalist society that can only be finally defeated with its overthrow.

A defining credo of environmentalism in Canada today is opposition to pipelines. But modern infrastructure, including pipelines as well as hydroelectric projects and the like, is essential to the functioning of an advanced industrial economy. Where indigenous treaty rights and land claims run up against such socially useful developments, we demand that whatever residual rights Native peoples have been able to maintain, whether through treaty agreements or otherwise, be respected. They should receive generous compensation for any deprivation of land or disruption of activity, based on completely consensual agreement. Only a workers government will guarantee these and other Native rights.

In some cases, like the Northern Gateway project, the ruling class has tried to ram through a proposed pipeline over the vehement objections of the Native populations. This being so, we solidarize with their opposition.

The working people need a new leadership that represents their interests independently of and in opposition to the capitalists. Championing the interests of all the oppressed, it would mobilize labour’s social power to defend the rights of aboriginal peoples as well as those of immigrants, women, gays, the Québécois and all the specially oppressed. A revolutionary workers party will be forged in political struggle to win working people away from the politics of social democracy, a precondition for transforming the political consciousness of the working class so it can pursue its historic role of sweeping away capitalist rule.

When production is planned and directed at human needs, decisions can be made about using various technologies based on what is good for all of us. As we wrote three years ago:

“Current climate change may or may not pose a sustained, long-term threat to human society. As long as the capitalist masters call the shots, it truly is a roll of the dice. Environmental degradation is just one of a host of problems, many far more pressing, linked to the workings of the capitalist system: unemployment and extreme poverty, mass starvation, imperialist military adventures and conquest, the reinforcing of social backwardness (interethnic bloodletting, the subjugation of women in the family, etc.), to name a few. Without a doubt, the gravest threat to mankind is the nuclear arsenal in the hands of the U.S. imperialist overlords.”

—“John Bellamy Foster & Co.: ‘Ecosocialism’ Against Marxism” (Part Two), Workers Vanguard No. 1033 (1 November 2013)

To elevate climate change above all else is a convenient excuse for joining hands with the bourgeoisie—the very class behind all these crimes. While the Leapers try to advise these plunderers of the world on how to best generate energy, we look to the proletariat as the motor force for human progress. Under workers rule, capitalist industry will be expropriated and put at the service of society as a whole. To redress the massive inequalities in living standards created by the global imperialist system will require a massive development of the productive forces, which will likely necessitate a temporary but significant expansion of fossil fuel use once the proletariat has conquered power worldwide. Decisions about how to do so and manage the ecological consequences can be made by means of workers democracy and in the service of humanity.

Our manifesto is the one written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, with its clarion call, “Workers of the World, Unite!”