If something’s got a rotten foundation, it won’t collapse until it’s really needed and pressure is put on it. That’s what’s happening to the NDP now. Nobody saw the rot that was happening for decades because the pressure wasn’t on. Now it is, and the party’s coming apart at the seams.
Some of it is sabotage. The powers that be have made a tremendous effort to capture the levers they need to control the two main national parties so they can guarantee their uninterrupted control of our government, and they don’t want a viable third party undoing all their illusion of choice by providing an actual choice, so they have arranged for nasty ideologues with conflicting ideologies to tear the NDP apart from within and make it unsupportable for the vast majority of people. And that’s worked great.
But it’s also a reflection of the wider destruction of labor movements in general. We are all routinely pitted against each other over trivial differences by social media and news organizations and convinced different groups among us are responsible for each other’s ills, when we need to be united and cooperative as a national and global working class with far more goals and interests in common than we have apart. We’ll now have to make tough choices and pick our battles, because we don’t have an army big enough to fight on every hill, and not every hill is worth dying on if the entire army is going to die there.
But at the same time we’re trying to be united and strategically minded, we still need to be able to detect and identify the rogue elements and ideas that are being used to sabotage and divide us. It’s a difficult position to be in, they’ve stacked a lot against us. Have they stacked enough against us? I don’t think so, but it’s still a lot stacked against us. The first step is to get everybody to even acknowledge that it’s happening and work towards consensus on the broad strokes of what we want to achieve. And I think we’re making some progress on that front. People are starting to see what’s going on for what it is, and people are starting to realize just how much the economy is not working for people anymore, and they’re starting to see why. The government’s empty promises ring more hollow, the billionaires’ attempts at manipulation grow stronger. People are simply waking up and opening their eyes, not being “woke”. And once their eyes are open, don’t waste more time showing them what they’re fighting against, they’ve already started to see it. Instead we need to take the opportunity to show them what we’re fighting for, to give them a big picture that makes sense, and be able to articulate the change that people are craving in a way they can relate to.
If something’s got a rotten foundation, it won’t collapse until it’s really needed and pressure is put on it. That’s what’s happening to the NDP now. Nobody saw the rot that was happening for decades because the pressure wasn’t on. Now it is, and the party’s coming apart at the seams.
Some of it is sabotage. The powers that be have made a tremendous effort to capture the levers they need to control the two main national parties so they can guarantee their uninterrupted control of our government, and they don’t want a viable third party undoing all their illusion of choice by providing an actual choice, so they have arranged for nasty ideologues with conflicting ideologies to tear the NDP apart from within and make it unsupportable for the vast majority of people. And that’s worked great.
But it’s also a reflection of the wider destruction of labor movements in general. We are all routinely pitted against each other over trivial differences by social media and news organizations and convinced different groups among us are responsible for each other’s ills, when we need to be united and cooperative as a national and global working class with far more goals and interests in common than we have apart. We’ll now have to make tough choices and pick our battles, because we don’t have an army big enough to fight on every hill, and not every hill is worth dying on if the entire army is going to die there.
But at the same time we’re trying to be united and strategically minded, we still need to be able to detect and identify the rogue elements and ideas that are being used to sabotage and divide us. It’s a difficult position to be in, they’ve stacked a lot against us. Have they stacked enough against us? I don’t think so, but it’s still a lot stacked against us. The first step is to get everybody to even acknowledge that it’s happening and work towards consensus on the broad strokes of what we want to achieve. And I think we’re making some progress on that front. People are starting to see what’s going on for what it is, and people are starting to realize just how much the economy is not working for people anymore, and they’re starting to see why. The government’s empty promises ring more hollow, the billionaires’ attempts at manipulation grow stronger. People are simply waking up and opening their eyes, not being “woke”. And once their eyes are open, don’t waste more time showing them what they’re fighting against, they’ve already started to see it. Instead we need to take the opportunity to show them what we’re fighting for, to give them a big picture that makes sense, and be able to articulate the change that people are craving in a way they can relate to.
Focus, my friend.