11 September 1999
We have to understand that social democracy in 1999 and the year 2000 is undergoing tremendous change . . . We're trying to define the Third Way, which embraces values of caring, sharing redistribution of wealth, making sure equality of opportunity for people to be the very, very best they can be.
- Saskatchewan NDP leader Roy Romanow on the provincial campaign trail (Windsor Star, September 7, 1999)
The very, very best people can be! The very best capitalists. The very, very best workers churning out their work to support the system.
Gone is even the minimal rhetoric in Canada's New Democratic Party that somehow they were tinged with "socialism". The word itself has been jettisoned over the years. Socialists can be thankful for that.
Even the term "social democracy" has been changed as the NDP buys into fiscal neo-conservatism making it indistinguishable from the Conservative and Liberal parties.
The party supposedly represents redistribution of wealth even though successive NDP governments have never managed to attain this and the share of wealth between capitalist and worker has stayed the same, if not worsened.
So-called "equal of opportunity" is the catchphrase employed. It is a formalism that has no substance to it since there can be no equality between the small minority that owns the means of production and the vast majority of the working class has nothing to own but their ability to labour for another class.
No longer does the NDP even consider capturing the "commanding heights of the economy" as its CCF predecessor once preached, advocating a mild Keynesian state capitalism and welfare statism.
Canada's "social democratic" movement has opted into a programme advocated by all "social democratic" parties worldwide. At the end of the last century and the turn of the 20th century their reformist practices were given theoretical justification by leaders such as Eduard Bernstein. But even Bernstein maintained (wrongly) that the final goal was what he called socialism, a co-operative commonwealth.
That's all gone. In the words of former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent, "we all accept the free market now". Former Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae openly states that socialism is dead (not recognising that it was the sham "socialism" of his political mentors).
Can things be more clear than that?
The NDP presents no alternative to working people other than more capitalism. They just want a "better" and "fairer" capitalism - an impossibility when the very nature of the capital system - the production of wealth for the few, the impoverishment of the working class on a worldwide scale continues, the subsuming of every living moment to the dictates of production for profit - will always overrule and quash any notion of "justice".
The NDP leadership has openly revealed itself for what it is - another
capitalist party. And they are revelling in it.