My Pet Peeve

Ok what really grinds my gears as Peter from Family Guy would say is people who completely misrepresent the political spectrum intentionally or unintentionally. It pisses me off when a blogging Tory calls NDP MPs socialists or even worse Liberal MPs. Hell if the NDP was a socialist party than I might think about rejoining them but the fact remains that the NDP is certainly not a socialist party. This is not to say that there are not democratic socialist, or even Marxist members of the NDP but they have no leadership role. Exceptions being the Fightback entryism tactics of the Alberta Youth NDP.

The debate now is whether the NDP is a liberal party or a social democratic one. The NDP has not necessarily embraced neoliberalism yet like many of their social democratic European sister parties or like the Green parties. But we can be sure that Jack Layton would love to be a Canadian Tony Blair if it meant he could capture government.

Many conservatives and to be fair many well meaning leftists call the NDP socialist but forget that we live in a capitalist system. To paraphrase Marx the government is the executive branch of capitalism. This rises an important question over whether socialism and workers control and ever be achieved through Parliament because the government works for business. Business by and large controls the media so it will always broadcast a right wing economic message. Canadian examples of the federal government clamping down on radical provinical populist governments include not allowing the right wing Social Credit to print their own money in Alberta and not allowing the left wing CCF to do changes to banks and unsuccessfully trying to stop the first North American Farm Security Act in Saskatchewan.

I recently wrote an essay where I basically argue that CCF moved rightwards from their famous 'eradication of capitalism' (last paragraph) manifesto in an effort to gain government thus abandoning the mass movement behind it that was not all that concerned with party politics. No matter how right the CCF got the media was never on it's side. This continues to this day with the NDP. Just read any Sun paper and you will be surprised to learn that NDPers are fervent socialists. Now the journalists are well educated so they probably know they are lying but they use the term as a smear because socialism is never explained. When it is the explanation will be- it is like the USSR or China now. Well the USSR was brutal state capitalist exploitation and China is the most capitalist place on the planet with its huge reserve army of labour.

If socialism was explained as worker's control so instead of every dollar you make your boss makes five, you would get all six dollars; people might have a slightly different opinion than.
Here is a good article that explains how all 5 major parties support capitalism albeit in different ways.