NDP needs more than a fresh face?

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Sept 2017

This is some inside baseball for Canadian readers.  James Laxer was a member of the old Waffle wing of the New Democrat Party, and challenged for the leadership of the party in 1971.  He failed, and found himself a job in academe.  He is an out-and-out socialist.  He had an article published in the Hamilton Spectator of this date, in which he argued that in current NDP (which is in the throes of a leadership campaign) needs to adopt a policy of 1970s socialism in addition to getting a new leader if it seeks to win the government of Canada.

My reply:

In comparison to other academics the Spectator publishes, the work by York University Professor of Political Science James Laxer was a model of clarity.  He did not hide behind specious technical jargon, and the reader could clearly understand where and why he agreed, or disagreed, with the argument being advanced.

That said, it is a wonder that James Laxer is still employed as a professor.  It is as if a university still employed a professor of chemistry who taught the phlogiston theory of heat!  Laxer seems to have learned nothing since before the 1974 recession.

He has failed to reconcile his belief in socialism with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, of the Soviet Union, of the transformation of Communist China into a capitalist giant, or of the causes of the Tiananmen Square massacre.  He has not noticed the failure of socialism in Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.

The economy of North America is no longer dominated by heavy industry and labor unions.  Instead, the largest corporations today are named Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.  None of these success stories of wealth creation would have occurred in a country that did not respect private property – as socialism does not.

What would the nationalization of these companies actually accomplish, except the destruction of wealth?  The pension plans of many workers today are invested in the stocks of these large companies, and the destruction of wealth that nationalization would entail would ruin the retirement prospects of people of humble means.

The ivory tower in which Professor Laxer resides does seem to have windows, and no one has obliged him to reconcile his theory of 1971 to the facts of the 21^st century.  To a researcher trained in the hard sciences, the slackness of academic discipline in the Arts Departments and the soft sciences is a wonder, and a disgrace.  The only justification for keeping an avowed socialist teaching in a university would be as a museum specimen of an extinct species – like an animated dodo bird.

The NDP does face a conundrum.  It embodies the politics of socialism in an age when everyone (except academics) realizes that socialism is a disaster in waiting – as is being played out before our eyes in Venezuela.  The NDP cannot profess outright socialism today and remain serious politically, and yet aspects of socialism is all it really represents.  Until it can find a new left-wing cause, the NDP will remain a parking space for the discontented.  (viz Alberta.)

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