Broadbent (MP for Oshawa-Whitby at the time) speaking in the House of Commons in 1974 alongside Tommy Douglas. (Photo: The Canadian Press)
Ed Broadbent, former leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, founder of the Broadbent Institute and enduring presence on the Canadian left, turns eighty-five years old today. In his two decade political career and three decades as an academic and public intellectual, Broadbent has consistently remained one of the most ardent and persuasive advocates of postwar social democracy (eschewing the third way liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s). In the midst of a global pandemic that has claimed the lives of scores of senior citizens (including fellow leftist academic Leo Panitch), Broadbent’s survival is an ember of hope in a world of bleak prospects, both medical and political.
A transcript of Broadbent’s 2013 address at Ryerson University, along with twovideos featuring him, are already part of the social democratic bibliography. Today, I’m posting a recording of said speech as well as adding the link to its entry.
Happy birthday, Ed. Here’s to (hopefully) quite a few more.
In 1960, a producer from Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways) interviewed then leader of the Socialist Party of America and six time presidential candidate Norman Thomas, releasing the interview the following year under the title The Minority Party in America. Beyond the subject of the title, Thomas discusses a range of topics and issues (many of which are still relevant) including campaign finance and the odious role of the public relations industry in politics. Thomas’s forthrightness, pragmatism and commitment to egalitarian democracy shine through. He makes clear that his pragmatism, however, is not just a cover for unprincipled opportunism. “Politics is, in a sense, the art of compromise, but it’s the art of compromise of people who have a sense of direction, who know where they’re going and who don’t compromise too easily without a fight,” he says. The interview is both rich with Thomas’s insights and a snapshot of American cold war politics from a leftist perspective.
In 2013, American Marxist Edmund Berger published excerpts from an abandoned writing project on his blog. The two posts, titled “From Socialism to Neoliberalism: A Story of Capture,” chronicle the downfall of the Socialist Party of America and the ideological drift of seminal figures like Bayard Rustin from democratic socialism to anti-Communist hawkishness. It’s essential reading regarding the downfall of the American left.
Today, the bibliography gets the addition of four Jacobin articles, published in 2018/2019, all addressing the strengths (and weaknesses) of social democracy.
Collectively, the articles offer important insight into the much vaunted social democracies of Scandinavia and, with Day’s second piece, how that form of welfare statism has utterly failed to materialize in the United States.
In the latest update to the bibliography, another great article from FES Connect: Andris Šuvajevs (a tutor at Rīga Stradiņš University and frequent FES collaborator) on the true value of key/essential workers, made clear by the COVID-19 crisis:
It turns out that there are at least two kinds of work: essential and illusory. A good indicator of what yours is depends on the level of comfort you enjoy in the pandemic lockdown. The higher up the material ladder one goes, the less likely it is society would notice the absence of your labour.
The bibliography now includes the seminal works of Ferdinand Lassalle, Eduard Bernstein and Carlo Rosselli (namely, The Working Man’s Programme, Evolutionary Socialism and Liberal Socialism), all foundational to the development of democratic socialism and, subsequently, social democracy. Thanks to the indefatigable Internet Archive, the new entries for Lassalle and Bernstein include links to the full texts of the works in question. As for Rosselli’s Liberal Socialism, I’d highly recommend purchasing the Princeton University Press edition, edited and featuring a lengthy introduction by Nadia Urbinanti.
Recently, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung published an essay by the International Labor Organization‘s Shahra Razavi. She contends that the COVID-19 pandemic has made it inarguably clear why strong social protections (universal health coverage, unemployment insurance, etc.) are necessary to ensure not simply the protection of the population during a crisis, but that as many as possible can live a dignified and stable life, free from the fear of destitution via a health or economic shock. I’ve added Razavi’s piece to the bibliography since it’s a quality defense of some of the most basic tenets of social democracy.
National Women’s Support groups rallying in support of striking UK coal miners, Barnsley town hall, May 1984. (Photo: Martin Jenkinson)
Note: This was written in the Spring of 2019 for a now defunct Facebook group I used to moderate. I resisted posting it anywhere else for a year but finally decided to post it here since I still agree with the central thesis and believe it has a renewed relevance given the class dimension of the COVID-19 crisis.
The stereotype of leftism as some ego-stroking pastime of the wealthy and college-educated wouldn’t be so cringe-inducing if there wasn’t some truth to it. Something that drove me insane when I first became involved in activism in my late 20’s was how many of my peers were exactly like me: privileged people from upper-income backgrounds with college degrees. Few of these people had parents who were the first in their families to attend higher-ed or grew up poor.
Anyone who knows anything about leftism knows how antithetical this is to the cause. Of course, it’s not new either. In his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell excoriates the “book-trained” socialist and his elitist attitudes. “To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about,” writes Orwell. “Sometimes I look at a Socialist–the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation–and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.”
He goes on to observe that this brand of socialist seems motivated by an aversion to the disorder of the proletarian condition, not by their suffering. “The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard….The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ’we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ’them’, the Lower Orders.”
Orwell’s portrait of the didactic “book-trained” socialist is as relevant today as it ever was. The working class and underclass must be able to view the left as their allies. Those of us who come from privileged backgrounds need to quash our petty aesthetic aversions to and stereotypical assumptions about the blue collar worker and the poverty-stricken individual and view them not as infantile creatures we’re saving via our benevolence. We need to view them as our comrades who we’re engaged in a common struggle with for the betterment of humanity.
Of course, I recognize the irony here, being a fuzzy-haired book-trained leftist myself, currently pounding out a tract to be posted on a website run by unprincipled capitalists. Joking aside, my grievance comes from my family history. My working class mother and her siblings, with their father dead and their mother dying, relied on social security to get by. Without that state largess, born of New Deal quasi-social democratic reforms, who knows what would have happened to her and her family. Unfortunately, the cold war red-baiting of the time presented the left to my mother as the enemy. Years later, the failures of the Democratic Party provided the right with an opportunity to seduce the working class.
Attacking the exploitation of labor and the indignity of poverty is at the heart of both social democracy and democratic socialism. Both the worker and indigent must be able to recognize this and not be alienated by elitism and dogmatism. If the “servile masses” are ever to arise from their slumbers and “change henceforth the old tradition,” the left needs to change its tradition of holding the people they claim to represent in contempt.
In the span of half a decade, Bernie Sanders has changed both American politics and the American political landscape. Despite years of public service, first as a mayor, then as a senator, he entered the spotlight unknown to most Americans. Building off of and employing the vocabulary of Occupy, he proceeded to shift the Overton window in regards to the public’s attitude toward egalitarian, social democratic policy. He considerably destigmatized the concept of socialism in a country where the residue of McCarthyism and red-baiting still informed public perceptions of anything left of center.
Sanders created a movement and reinvigorated the American left. He lit a spark in people’s hearts and minds that can’t be extinguished. Millions of people now understand the necessity of an equitable system of government that enshrines the basic needs of healthcare, education and housing as rights. The current COVID-19 crisis is only making this more evident. And now, even though the possibility of a President Sanders is over, he’ll return to the senate and continue to fight as he always has.
Sanders has established a legacy that will likely be one of the defining factors in a further paradigm shift to the left in this country. We’re all indebted to him.
Mike Passarini 