In Defense of the Coalition Government, by Michael Laxer

first published on NDP Left: The Ginger Project
http://ndpleft.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

There has been much debate in recent days on the Socialist left as to whether or not the NDP should participate in the proposed coalition government with the Liberal Party in exchange for various policy concessions and six cabinet posts. There are some who feel this is a betrayal of principles and an abandonment of our commitment to working class politics.

While I have some sympathy with this point of view, and while, it being unrelated to our agenda to create a Socialist Platform through the Ginger Project for the Ontario NDP, the NDP Left as a movement has no "official" position on this matter (or on any other parliamentary tactical issue), I personally feel that these arguments are strategically incorrect.

While it has shifted more to the left or to the centre over the decades, the NDP has always been a social democratic party whose purpose is, through parliamentary methods, to achieve the enacting of pro-worker, pro-equality legislation and to attempt to create a better society through what are avowedly reformist methods.

This being its goal, the creation of a genuine coalition government, with NDP members of a federal cabinet for the first time in history, is a striking and forceful victory for both the party and for the left more broadly speaking.

Some element of compromise is a reality of any form of democratic politics. A movement completely unwilling to compromise is by definition totalitarian. The question becomes, is the compromise one that is valid tactically and strategically in the short-term without undermining the long-term interests of the movement. I feel that in this case this is clearly true.

By entering into this coalition the NDP achieves several important objectives. It will push Canadian government policy (in the event that they take power), in a time when real, living Canadian workers face a darkly uncertain economic future, in a direction that will make it significantly more progressive and beneficial to these interests than would otherwise be the case. In far better economic times, and without even a formal coalition, the NDP moved the Martin government to adopt what would have been historic initiatives had they come to pass. The bar will be higher here and we can expect real movement in fundamental areas.

Further, and very significantly, it will legitimize the NDP as a party who is capable of being trusted with economic stewardship, even in times of economic distress. The entire basis of the coalition is to assume control of the economic agenda. It will be very difficult in the future for the Liberal Party to portray the NDP as incapable of governance in this area. In many respects, this coalition's formation will have the same psychological impact as the corporate welfare handouts in the United States. They help to shift the public view away from the dominance of a laissez-faire ideology that has captivated thinking in North America for a quarter century and towards a desire for government intervention in the economy.

Finally, a popular front style coalition, common throughout modern European history, in no way compromises the long-term ideological (such-as-they-are) and tactical interests of the NDP, which remains the sole meaningful representative of the Socialist left in a mass political sense in Canada. I would, indeed, argue that such a coalition would in no way harm the same interests even for a far more left-wing party. The reason, quite simply, is that rejecting such a coalition, given our standing at 18% in the polls, given the lack of other alternatives for us to influence government policy in the immediate future, leads simply to marginalization and irrelevance*. A snap election, right now, caused by a non-confidence vote, followed by an NDP campaign as "pure" as the last one (and that is what we would get) would reshape this as a Liberal-Tory fight and would likely result in a lower NDP vote and seat count, and the winning of a majority by one of Canada's two bourgeois parties (probably the more right-wing one at that).

This would hardly be a victory for the Canadian socialist left or Canadian workers.

Given our standing in the polls, given the threats to workers from both Harper and the economic downturn, and given the need to start to influence the economic debate and to shift it back to a more interventionist model, this coalition is, in my opinion, an accomplishment of real value for the NDP and I support it, I hope that left-wingers across the country will defend it and I hope it takes office in Ottawa.

* As a footnote it should be noted that it is for exactly these reasons that stridently Socialist, Marxist and even Communist parties in Europe have long been willing to enter into broadly bourgeois coalition governments. If you command less than a quarter of the vote (in some cases far less) and if "revolution" (whatever the hell that means) is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, how else can they seek to have an influence on the course of their countries politics?